If moaning caught crooks we’d have the best police in world
ACTUALLY I am sick of hearing how tough it is being a police officer. It is nothing like so tough as it is for vulnerable, law- abiding, gentle people in modern Britain, where the police are absent and uninterested. Once again I have spent much of my week fending off and replying to attacks on me from people on social media claiming to be police officers. They say I am not an expert on the subject.
Well, if they are all such experts, why is the British police force such a failure, openly admitting it is a flop on its own terms? It cannot even investigate huge numbers of the crimes it has allowed to happen by being so feeble in the first place.
It’s quite simple. The police are supposed to deliver safety, peace, justice and order. They visibly don’t.
Perhaps it is because their baseball caps are all too tight, but the police have this delusion that this debate is all about them, their numbers and conditions. It is not. It is about the people they have failed.
I will cite some well-known examples, which cannot be blamed on the mild spending cuts which have slightly reduced police numbers from their historic peak around ten years ago.
The first is that of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie, who had severe learning difficulties and became a target for a gang of louts in their Leicestershire village. Horribly, Fiona and Frankie were not safe in their own home, where they endured jeering sieges in which their house was pelted with eggs and flour.
Their neighbours, understandably terrified that these feral persecutors would turn on them, knew all too well that law and authority were far away, and stayed out of it.
Fiona and her daughter endured this hell on earth for ten years, during which they appealed at least 27 times for police help. None came. So one day Fiona sank into a despair so complete that she went out and burned herself and her daughter to death in their small car.
Then there was Garry Newlove, who foolishly assumed that this was still an orderly, peaceful country. He challenged a group of youths outside his Warrington house. He thought one of them had vandalised his wife’s car. The youths promptly kicked him to death, laughing as they did so.
More recently there was Richard Osborn-Brooks, who was immediately arrested after he killed one of two burglars while defending his home and his wife from a latenight break-in. The police eventually let him go, but it is their rotten instincts I am interested in.
Several things emerge from these cases. One is that the police are very bad at responding to appeals for help from the weak. The second i s that their growing absence from the streets has made wrongdoers confident and also made the law-abiding fearful. There simply should not be gangs of louts hanging around anywhere in the streets of a country with 120,000 police officers.
The third is that the police are increasingly neutral between the criminal and his victim. Marinated for years in a sauce of Left-wing rubbish about crime being caused by poverty and suffering, not to mention the other rubbish about hate crimes, they simply do not – as we would do – side with the man who has had his home violated and tried to defend it. They treat such a man as if he were a criminal. We know about their reluctance to investigate burglaries, not surprising when this crime is now out of control. But even worse is their fashionable, inexcusable, lazy and stupid decision to ignore the law against marijuana possession.
I suspect that a very high proportion of the violence they then struggle to deal with is committed by young men who have destroyed their mental health by smoking marijuana. If the drug laws were properly enforced, there would be far less violence.
Any minute now some police apologist will tell me that I don’t sympa-
Wthise with them enough, and should go on what is laughingly called a ‘patrol’ with them. Look, I have been on such patrols. That is exactly why I know they are useless. HAT the police do is to wait for crime to happen, and then rush noisily to the scene. I will say it again and again until it sinks in. A police officer is very little use after a crime has been committed.
He cannot unburgle you, unmug or unstab you. That is why I am completely unimpressed by the National Police Chiefs Council boss Sara Thornton trying to curry favour with the public by saying it is better to investigate burglaries than hate crimes.
A burglary is a horror and a misery which can ruin a person’s l i fe. Investigation won’t make that better. What we want is to see burglaries and disorder prevented by proper, regular police foot patrols, which worked just fine until the liberals abolished them.