The broken blue line: STEPHEN GLOVER on how the once proud police force is being led by a 'politically correct sect' who are turning a blind eye to 'low level' crime including drugs and burglaries.
Sergeant Leanne Carr of the Lincolnshire Police has recently been off work for seven months because of stress. So some colleagues were astonished when she began posting photos of herself on social media enjoying holidays abroad.
Last month, she uploaded a picture of herself topless on a South African beach. Only two pineapples preserved her modesty. She had already displayed alluring photos of herself taken in Cyprus, Austria and Thailand.
The good news is that Sgt Carr — evidently something of a poster girl for Lincolnshire Police — is back at work. Let’s hope her international excursions to exotic climes at taxpayers’ expense have cured her of her stress.
We could regard this as just another daft story involving the police, who have been reporting soaring levels of sick leave because of alleged psychological problems. But I fear it is far more than that. It is symptomatic of an endemic stupidity that has seized hold of the police.
Most of us are aware that the police often don’t bother to investigate burglaries, that they are turning a blind eye to drug abuse and squander millions of pounds on fatuous inquiries.
Like almost everyone, I was brought up to respect the police. They were basically honest and generally competent — and instinctively on the side of ordinary people.
If a police officer is murdered in the line of duty, it is always a particular shock. Such sacrifices remain especially upsetting. They remind us of the bravery of police officers, and of how they constitute our final defence against anarchy.
But, do I, as a reasonably law-abiding person, automatically assume the police are on my side? I don’t think they are. Do I believe they can be relied on to protect me, and millions like me, as we go about our daily business? I am afraid I no longer do.
In the past few weeks there has been yet more evidence that our modern police force is wretchedly flawed; that it isn’t only sometimes silly but also achingly political correct, less competent than we have a right to expect and, at least in its upper echelons, disgracefully out of touch with public opinion.
I fear the police increasingly resemble a sect whose beliefs, practices and values are divergent from those of the society they are meant to serve. I don’t say this with any satisfaction. I would love to be wrong. I just don’t believe I am. There are, of course, thousands of ordinary officers diligently going about their daily business, solving crimes, trying to keep us safe, and often bravely taking risks on our behalf.
It is their politically correct, hidebound, box-ticking and sometimes slightly weird leaders who worry me. They seem to operate in a world of their own, detached from the fears and concerns of ordinary people, and fundamentally more interested in managing crime than in bringing dangerous criminals to justice.
The reaction of police to the burglary in Hither Green, London — when 78-year-old Richard Osborn-Brooks killed an intruder who was armed with a screwdriver — is the latest example of the boys in blue being appallingly ham-fisted.
That he should have been arrested by officers as though he was the felon, and held for two nights, was bad enough.
I don’t imagine Mr Osborn-Brooks intended to kill 37-year-old Henry Vincent, a violent serial criminal. But he was defending himself, his elderly wife (who suffers from dementia, and was upstairs in bed) and his property. Officers obviously had to find out what happened. But why hold him for two nights? It suggests a very lop-sided — but wearingly familiar — set of priorities.
What followed was perhaps even worse. Vincent’s friends and family created a shrine of flowers and tributes near Mr Osborn-Brooks’s home, which seemed a calculated act of intimidation. Every time outraged local residents tore down the shrine, it was re-instated by Vincent’s supporters.
And the response of the police (present in large numbers in a street where they had previously not been much in evidence)? They rashly elected to take sides.
Having treated Mr Osborn-Brooks as a potential criminal, they now identified with the dead burglar’s provocative cheerleaders. Indeed, Craig Mackey, deputy commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, warned residents that if they caused disorder or were guilty of a breach of the peace, they would be arrested. Chief Superintendent Simon Dobinson urged the public to ‘respect the wishes of those who chose to place flowers and other tributes in the area’.
Of course, Vincent’s family have every right to mourn him. They can do so anywhere in the world — anywhere, that is, except close to Mr Osborn-Brooks’s house. He’ll never return there, and the aggressive demonstration (for that was what it was) may well have influenced his decision.
At the very least, the police displayed a lack of imagination and feeling — for Mr Osborn-Brooks and his wife, and for the local residents who understandably felt threatened by the presence of Vincent’s wider family, which includes several convicted criminals. And also, I suggest, for the public.
Is there any common crime which people fear more than burglary? Hearing about events in Hither Green, and the extraordinary behaviour of the police, people will have asked: do they care? Do they even begin to understand what it’s like to have your home invaded by armed robbers in the middle of the night?
I regret the answer to these questions is ‘no’. In this case, police ruled by political correctness — or at any rate the senior officers who set the tone — showed little consideration for two victims who had suffered a terrifying ordeal, while they exhibited oodles of sympathy for Vincent and his family.
Why should we be surprised? Police figures released last autumn reveal 89.7 per cent of burglary cases in England and Wales between April and October 2017 ended without a suspect being identified. Worst of all was Hertfordshire, where an incredible 96.2 per cent of such cases remained unsolved.
The reason, of course, is that the police don’t take burglary seriously. Last October, it emerged that the Metropolitan Police — the country’s largest force — have stopped investigating ‘low-level’ crimes. These are defined as burglaries which don’t involve violence, forced entry or trickery; thefts of less than £50 unless a suspect is quickly identified; lesser incidents of grievous bodily harm; and most car crime.
According to Ken Marsh, chairman of the rank-and-file Metropolitan Police Federation, it is not just police in the capital who no longer investigate many burglaries and ‘low-level’ crime. He says: ‘It is the whole country doing this.’
Interestingly, data produced by the respected Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests the number of burglaries has declined by about 70 per cent over the past 20 years. This is attributed to factors such as nearly full employment and fewer heroin addicts. The police can’t take any credit since it is a crime they largely ignore.
Whatever the statistics, many people still live in fear of burglary. And unless something very serious happens, they are for all practical purposes on their own. I discovered this, in my own small way, when our garden shed was recently broken into. Fortunately, nothing appeared to have been stolen.
Nevertheless, in case robbers were still operating in the area, I telephoned the local police. Eventually, I was put through to a woman who asked me about lots of things, including my ethnicity. Finally, she wondered if I wanted ‘counselling’.
Some days later I received an email, which also offered counselling. Needless to say, the police never showed the slightest interest in my garden shed, and I am certain they will be similarly unconcerned if the thieves should return and break into our house.
A system which offers the services of a counsellor (while one’s ethnicity is logged) yet renounces any interest in solving a crime — well, such a system is not merely deeply silly. It is utterly dysfunctional.
Some claim the police ignore ‘low-level’ crime because they don’t have enough resources, having lost about 14 per cent of their total strength in England and Wales since the Tory-led Coalition came to power in 2010, when numbers stood at an all-time high.
But is this true? For all the complaints about cutbacks — usually most volubly expressed by disgruntled chief constables — one can’t help noticing that the police are perfectly capable of finding resources for pretty questionable causes when they want to.
I’m not just talking about stunts such as male officers dressing up in bear masks and high heels or wearing nail varnish as part of awareness campaigns.
Much more egregiously, there was Operation Elveden, which looked into alleged payments by journalists to police and other public officials. After a witch-hunt lasting five years and costing £20 million, including almost £1 million in police overtime, Scotland Yard failed to secure a single conviction against any of the 34 journalists and editors arrested.
Police managed to find more than £1.5 million to investigate threadbare sex abuse allegations against the former Prime Minister Ted Heath. A 24-strong team of officers racked up hotel bills of nearly £33,000 and transport costs of over £34,000. At the end of it all, they concluded that Heath, if alive, might have had a case to answer.
Nor has belt-tightening prevented police from devoting thousands of hours to investigating ‘hate crimes’, of which a record 80,393 were reported in 2016/17. Most were spurious or frivolous, and only 16 per cent of cases were passed to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Meanwhile, just as they turn a blind eye to many burglaries, police are increasingly ignoring cannabis consumption, though it is a Class B drug which in its most potent form can induce psychosis.
Yet at least five out of 43 forces in England and Wales don’t prosecute people using cannabis for personal consumption, while police in Durham and Devon and Cornwall routinely let off small-scale producers of the drug. This does not merely make a nonsense of the law. It is also downright stupid.
No one would dispute, I think, that police budgets are pinched as a result of cutbacks. Yet it seems inconvertible that wherever the police want to concentrate their energies, they can find the resources they need.
A friend recently spent more than an hour lying in a ditch by a country road after a serious car accident before a sole policeman turned up, justifying his delay by saying that the local station had been closed because of cuts. Yet the other day I counted five police vehicles and a fire engine portentously attending to a minor shunt on the M40.
The issue of resources is, of course, central to the controversy over rising knife crime in London. There has been an alarming spate of murders — four in the past week alone — with the police’s failure to get on top of the problem being blamed by senior officers, Labour and the media on government cuts.
Indeed, one report showed the number of murders in London so far this year (more than 50) exceeds the rate of homicides in New York, which has a roughly equal population.
The reality is that New York’s crime rate is much worse than London’s in most categories including homicide. This suggests that New York police, with a total of 40,000 officers, are more stretched than their London counterparts whose headcount is 32,000.
So I take with a pinch of salt the bleating about the supposedly deleterious effect of Government cuts. Despite the decline in police numbers, there has been a reduction in violent crime of 32 per cent since 2011/12, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which reflects what has been happening in most Western countries.
A larger pinch of salt is necessary to deal with the oft-repeated contention that cuts have made it impossible to maintain an adequate presence on the capital’s streets. I can scarcely recall encountering a bobby on the beat when numbers stood at a record high.
Doubtless there are myriad explanations for the spike in knife crime in the capital, but the cut in police numbers is near the bottom of the pile. A much bigger factor is the reduced use of stop-and-search, urged by Theresa May as Home Secretary out of consideration for the black community, some of whose members felt they were being picked on.
Front-line officers resented the new restrictions but were forced by superiors to accept them. That may change. Met Commissioner Cressida Dick — undoubtedly an improvement on her ponderous predecessor, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe — has defended the use of stop-and-search.
One can understand the feelings of the black community. But isn’t it a matter of common sense that a young man with evil intent is less likely to carry a dangerous knife if he fears he might be searched, and, if arrested, might face a jail term?
Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply in the upper reaches of the police, as well as in the Home Office, which, as we learned this week, treated British citizens who have lived here for 40 or 50 years as though they were illegal immigrants who had just sneaked in on the back of a lorry.
That the police sometimes display a basic lack of competence and decency can scarcely be doubted. Scotland Yard is having to review hundreds of rape, child and sexual assault cases after it emerged that police and the Crown Prosecution Service failed to disclose evidence in a drive to increase the number of convictions.
The sad truth is our police are no longer fit for purpose. But with a dysfunctional Home Office, and over-cautious politicians with their eyes elsewhere, I don’t expect anyone is going to do anything about it. And we are less safe as a result. Mail.
