Can I have a large fries with that, officer?
HOW strange the police of a nation which doesn’t play baseball have adopted the baseball cap as official headgear. To me, it’s as odd as if New York cops started patrolling Fifth Avenue in cricket whites.
The only person who looked good in a baseball cap was the late Princess Diana, but she would have looked wonderful in dungarees and steel-toecapped boots. Everyone else who dons one instantly looks stupider than he or she did before. Quite recently the Royal Navy adopted these garments for official wear, though, since we have hardly any ships capable of putting to sea, I’ve seen no sign it has actually caught on. Imagine Horatio Nelson, lying dying in HMS Victory, in a baseball cap. Now Northamptonshire Police are abandoning traditional helmets and wearing what they call ‘bump caps’ – lightly armoured baseball headgear which make them look as if they are working in a hamburger drive-thru.
The official excuse is a hope that the new hat ‘will remove a barrier to the non-binary transgender community joining the police service’. No doubt it will do this.
But I can’t imagine it will increase their already diminished authority, as they go out among the Friday-night drunks and dopesmokers doing whatever it is the modern police actually do (you tell me). I think we can expect cries of ‘Can I have fries with that?!’ as they sidle, embarrassed, through the seething streets.
Old-fashioned plain, severe uniforms existed for a reason. They conveyed authority. The new ones communicate an ingratiating matiness, which – when it fails to please – is forced to turn instead to the use of Tasers and clubs.