The GOS has had this excellent Daily Mail article (crumbs, "excellent" and "Daily Mail" in the same sentence?) by Stephen Glover sitting in his in-tray since the end of April, and it's high time he did something with it, so …
A father of two is hauled from his bed by police at three o'clock in the morning, wrongly suspected of stealing a plasma television. Simon Brasch is then dumped in a cell for 11 hours because officers are too busy to deal with him. He is therefore unable to suggest to them that they have made a mistake. Which, as it transpires, they most egregiously have.
Four police cars containing seven officers screech to a bowling green with sirens wailing. They have come to question 50 mostly elderly club members who are quietly playing bowls, allegedly after refusing to pay a 25 per cent rent increase applied by the local council.
Aberrations? In one sense, perhaps. Police do not behave like this all the time. Yet these two incidents from different parts of the country have been reported within the past 24 hours (this was last April, remember - GOS). Every week, sometimes every day, there are similar reports of police greatly overreacting to very minor incidents.
Occasionally they are disturbing ones. Last week this paper wrote about the appalling case of Jamie Bauly, an 18-year-old young man who has Down's syndrome and a mental age of a five-year- old. He had been charged by police in Scotland with racism and assault after an altercation with a young Asian girl at his special needs school. Jamie, who cannot tie his own shoe laces, was so put through the mill by the police that he was terrified he would be sent to prison.
I could provide innumerable other examples. There was the case of a Somerset pub landlady investigated by police for inciting racial hatred after she had encouraged children to throw darts at a Welsh flag during a St George's Day celebration. Or remember how a couple of years ago 78 police officers arrived in Parliament Square in the middle of the night to remove the lone antiwar protester Brian Haw, and his cardboard display.
One of my favourite stories concerns a student in my home town of Oxford who was thrown in jail after asking a mounted policeman: "Do you know that your horse is gay?". He then added "I hope you are comfortable riding a gay horse." A police spokesman later said that his remarks had been "offensive to the police and his horse".
And so on. I could fill a book with such incidents - perhaps one day I will. Whether they are funny or serious, they tend to contain the same elements. Police respond to a minor incident in a ham-fisted and heavy-handed way, deploying many more resources than are necessary for them to do the job. Often they are taking on an easy target in the cause of political correctness.
How, and why, has this happened? There was a time not so long ago when the police were recognised by most British citizens for their approachability, reasonableness, moderation and good sense. We were grateful that we lived in a country in which the police did not bear arms, and were not viewed as representatives of a distant, forbidding State. Unlike many of their continental neighbours, the British did not fear authority. We were not wary of the police, and mostly felt that we were on the same side. Innocent people knew that their houses would not be invaded in the early hours of the morning, and they took it for granted that a backward child would not be charged with a crime that he could not conceivably understand.
The transformation has taken no more than 20 or 30 years - and it seems to have gathered force recently. Perhaps, in the police's defence, it could be said that they have become more aggressive and detached as society has grown more violent. Maybe some sort of retreat has been forced on them. But this hardly explains their habit of bearing down on soft targets with such disproportionate force.
It is easier, of course, to intimidate a group of blameless bowls players than it is to chase real criminals. That must be part of the explanation. Then there is the scourge of political correctness, which sets up lots of soft targets that can be easily picked off by over-zealous police officers.
Fewer of these things would happen if the calibre of senior policemen, and in particular chief constables, was higher. Doubtless some of them are intelligent and thoughtful people. But it is one of the paradoxes of modern policing that as senior officers have supposedly become better educated - with their degrees in sociology and criminology from sometimes not very distinguished universities - so they have become more detached from the communities they are supposed to serve.
They, rather than the policemen on the beat, should primarily be held accountable. If ordinary policemen sometimes use a hammer to crack a nut, it is ultimately the responsibility of their bosses, who have not established and communicated the right priorities.
I accept that many policemen on the ground do a splendid job, and are brave and long-suffering and often polite, and I understand that in the end it is they who preserve us from anarchy and lawlessness.
Not all officers seem to realise, though, that most citizens are instinctively on their side, and are their natural allies. The police force has become a self-enclosed cadre distrustful of, and often distrusted by, ordinary people. It is sometimes afflicted by a kind of institutional stupidity that takes the form of bullying, and is also increasingly found in other organs of the State.
Local councils are sometimes just as heavy-handed - witness the officials in Poole who recently spied on a couple they suspected of trying to sneak their daughter into an infant school, or the council in Cumbria which took a man to court for having overfilled his wheelie-bin by four inches, for which heinous crime he was fined £210.
This is nothing less than a new form of State oppression that until quite recently was foreign to this country, and something we associated with far less blessed realms. Does the Government care? No, it is covertly encouraging such behaviour.
It would be ludicrous to imagine that Jacqui Smith, the unimpressive Home Secretary, has the remotest desire to reform the police, or that she would be capable of doing so even if she wanted to. Do the Tories have any better ideas? Lack of compassion, self-righteousness and a kind of dogged officiousness: these are increasingly the hallmarks of the British State as it touches our everyday lives.
Even a few years ago no one could have guessed that of all our institutions the once cherished British police would ever put themselves at odds with ordinary law-abiding citizens, and that we would be so distrustful of them.
Needless to say, most of the Daily Mail readers who responded to this article agreed with it …
"I am a retired middle ranking police officer and this change in the police happened in the late 80s early 90s when the 'clever' 'fast track' guys came in. With no real beat experience they leapt on, always following the correct political agenda to senior rank with no real feel for what the people really wanted - law and order - then came the statistics required and it all went down the pan."- Grandad, Edinburgh
"My daughter and her friends were recently asked to leave a park, in broad daylight. Their crime? Playing football. It was annoying residents. My daughter protested, she said "But this is a park". The policeman threatened to arrest them, so they left. She has also been accused of sitting on a "dealer's" bench near our home. She was eating sweets with a friend whilst waiting for a bus. I have also been reprimanded for smoking in a traffic jam!" - Carrie, London
"What a good article and so close to the truth. New Labour and its barmy left wing ideology have done a job here. The police are corrupted by correctness and targets effectively rendering real policing out of the window. When you get posters in the local supermarket from my local force, stating and I quote: "Homophobia - see it - hear it - report it!" you know the game is up!" - Gary, Dorset
"Excellent article. More voices are needed to raise this important issue. Over the last 30 years bullying of all kinds has become an epidemic. As the article says police, councils, all kinds of petty authorities increasingly treat us all as criminals. The bullying epidemic grew out of government addressing too many problems with punishment. It's a lazy remedy that bullies, instead of looking for causes of problems and remedying them." - Shan Morgain, Newport Gwent
"I was a policeman for 30 years from the 1960s and I can confirm your observations on the fitness for purpose of most present day senior officers. Most have never been working police officers and have never mixed with criminals so have no idea of how to deal with them. Do nothing or take the easy option is the trouble free answer." - Callan, Liverpool
The GOS says: Stephen Glover is quite right. There was indeed a time, not so long ago, when we were justly proud of our police and regarded them as the best in the world. We were also quite pleased with many other facets of our society - our education system, particularly our universities, our legal system which we believed to be fair and just, our armed forces …
And I suspect that in most essentials our police still do an excellent job despite the CPS. It is certainly remarkable to read of some of the difficult cases they solve - look how, in my own neck of the woods, Suffolk police appeared to deal smoothly and relatively quickly with their first-ever serial killer, Steve Wright.
Nor are all Chief Constables tarred with the same brush - a few of them do appear to have enough brain cells to fill a tea-cup, and one or two actually use them, like Essex's Roger Baker with his bold stand against hoodies and Paul Garvin in Durham who refuses to install speed cameras because they don't work. But even these worthies can't make up for the antics of the Mad Mullah, Richard Brunstrom …
And there are many, many sensible coppers in the ranks too. Occasionally (mostly when Mrs.GOS is out of the way) I watch those real-life programmes on Telly, following ordinary policemen as they go about their jobs. They display patience, humour, fairness (far too much, sometimes), intelligence … but if you read between the lines you can tell that all the time they have in the backs of their minds that even though they know they've got some young villain bang to rights, they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting a conviction, and even if they did the little prick'd be back on the streets in a week or two.
Which reminds me - what the hell is it with magistrates? When the local council nazis in Cumbria took the man to court for overfilling his wheelie-bin, what possessed the magistrate to fine him? Are magistrates as loony and vicious as the rest of our petty officials? I know one who isn't - his name is Alan Williams, he's a teachers' union official and a magistrate in Cambridgeshire, he resigned from the bench in protest against the immoral £15 "victim surcharge" he was being required to levy, and he's a hero. A few other magistrates followed his example, but not enough. Odd how the nation that stood shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and told Margaret Thatcher where she could stick her Poll Tax no longer has the stomach to stand up and be counted …
Of course the ultimate blame must lie with the government, which has brought in literally thousands of new laws creating hundreds of new offences. No matter how stupid a law is, sooner or later some jobsworth will insist on enforcing it. But ridiculous laws don't have to be enforced. "Just following orders" as a defence went out of fashion during the Nuremberg war trials sixty years ago. Whether you're a magistrate, a policeman, a local government officer, a teacher, a registrar or whatever, you can always say no. It's just a matter of how much importance you attach to your own comfort.
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