Woke police chiefs whinge about underfunding when the real problem is their warped priorities

Telegraph

2 days ago

Readers of this newspaper will, throughout its long history, have been among the most ardent supporters of the police. We are traditionally pro law and order and take a dim view of rotters. It feels like that time is well and truly over.
Monday's main Telegraph story, in advance of Wednesday's spending review by Rachel Reeves, which reported the concerns of senior officers that the police service is 'broken' and that underpaid and overworked personnel are leaving in droves because of funding cuts, attracted well over two thousand comments. They ranged from 'Diddums' to 'It's all your own stupid fault' with a good deal of colourful hostility in between. Honestly, you would struggle to find more derogatory remarks among the police's long-running foes at The Guardian.
I noticed a similarly unsympathetic reaction a week ago when Met chief Sir Mark Rowley protested that police would have to choose which crimes to investigate if they didn't get more cash. As if the public, until now, had enjoyed a superb and rapid response to its burglaries, muggings, car, bike and phone thefts and our town centres positively thrummed with the purposeful presence of bobbies on the beat.
'Yes, Sir Mark, times must really be hard if you can only send six officers to arrest a retired police volunteer over a single tweet,' sneered one disgruntled taxpayer, perfectly capturing the mood of seething resentment.
This collapse in trust is as precipitous as it is shocking. A widespread feeling has clearly taken hold that police are no longer doing the job we expect them to do, while interfering in things that are none of their damn business.
The story of the London couple who were obliged last week to 'steal back' their own car after being told by police they did not know when they would be able to investigate thieves who took the Jaguar away on a flat-bed truck (but do call 101 if you find it, they were told) presents a snapshot of a frustrated public having to take the law into their own hands like a group of extremely polite, Emma Bridgewater-owning vigilantes.
While many physical crimes go largely ignored, activist constabularies are doing a roaring trade in online offences. The preposterous yet sinister non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), an Orwellian development of the College of Policing back in 2014, are frequently cited by police critics, as is the clampdown on free speech which is increasingly used to suppress popular discontent about things like the annual £4.7 billion bill to keep migrants in hotels and look after them.
Those of us who, for some strange reason, think it's outrageous to spend the equivalent of every single penny in tax paid by the population of Manchester on accommodating tens of thousands of young males who broke into our country, used to be called 'racists'. But I see we have got a promotion, ladies and gentlemen. According to Prevent [a counter-terrorism programme], we are no longer racists, we are 'terrorists'! If we dare to express doubts about uncontrolled immigration and lack of integration, that is.
That's the same Prevent which failed to prevent Axel Rudakubana slaughtering a dance class of little girls. And which, according to a 2023 report by Sir William Shawcross, concentrates too much on the largely mythical 'far Right' and not enough on Islamist terror.
The College of Policing, I am reliably informed, encourages the same delusional appeasement of the group which poses by far the biggest threat to our national security. The criminalising of the white indigenous population, running in parallel to the woke appeasement of actual criminals, goes some way to explaining this new cordial loathing of the police, I think. Unbelievably, over 60 of our fellow citizens are slapped with an NCHI every single day for 'hateful' thoughts or conduct, many of them Monty Pythonesque in their absurdity.
While senior police moan about Home Secretary Yvette Cooper not winning them a big enough payout in the spending review, there seem to be adequate funds to arrest and stigmatise law-abiding people. Only this week, I got a very worried email from a reader, Carolyn, who had complained to the police about a man who has been camping for several weeks in the park where her children play. The surrounding area stinks of urine and faeces and there are scattered remnants of drug use. When Carolyn and other mums walk past they have seen the man put his hand down his trousers to play with himself. The camper's appearance suggested to her that he was an African migrant. 'Using the term 'migrant' therefore did not strike me as anything other than a fair assumption,' says Carolyn.
Uh-oh. Obviously, in the bonkers world of PC policing it will now be the anxious lady who complained about a threat to her community who is warned about causing trouble. 'It would seem that any offence caused to me is secondary to the offence of Hate Crime,' Carolyn says. Correct.
An officer emailed Carolyn to say that police did not have the powers to remove the tent from the park. 'With regard to the hand down the trousers,' he said, 'Many people from all different backgrounds do this as a cultural/social trend and have done for a while, we often see members of the public doing this all around the city. We will speak with him about this though and advise him of the perception this could cause. I also suggest you reframe (sic) from referring to him as a 'migrant' and making comments about 'Are we paying him to take the proverbial out of us all?'… These can be seen as derogative (sic) terms and possibly a hate crime, especially when you probably know nothing about him.'
If you seek a perfect illustration of why the police service is 'broken' and officers are deserting in droves, look no further than this jaw-dropping inversion of good and bad guys. Intimidating man from alien culture seemingly exposing himself in public and peeing, crapping and doing drugs where your kids play? Completely fine, culturally appropriate, nothing to be done about it. Englishwoman suggests the man is a 'migrant' who is taking advantage of our absurdly generous system? Oh dear, oh dear – your hurty words will be taken down, Madam, and used in evidence against you.
Now, it's a fair bet that many of the public-spirited young people who aspire to become police officers still think it is Carolyn's side they should be on. A rookie error, I'm afraid. 'Recruits who join the force don't realise the police are so captured,' a senior source tells me.
Officers now lack maturity and experience
Police retention has been a problem for a long time. It's got much worse since the higher echelons subscribed to the anti-white Critical Race Theory and adopted a witless, Leftist ideology that would have been abhorrent to their predecessors. The number of resignations in the police started to exceed the number of retirements nationally around 2023.
What this means in practice, as I was told after Essex Police came to my own door on Remembrance Sunday, is that many officers now lack the experience and maturity to make common-sense decisions and bin spurious allegations of racial hatred that flatter the identity-politics obsessions of their superiors.
'It's not uncommon for uniform shifts to be about 50 per cent probationers, and they might be running with an acting sergeant barely out of his probationary period (two years) in some cases,' warns my source. The Conservatives' decision, in 2020, to lower the application age to 17 (to join at 18) as part of their training means that a lot of young people without much life experience, who don't know what they're letting themselves in for, find policing a nasty shock to the system. Once they're in, probationers have to cope with complicated, badly-designed computer systems that add hours to already heavy workloads. They have very little time to conduct inquiries and pick up more and more stressful cases, meanwhile having to deal with the aggressive, ever-more-volubly-entitled, human-rights-aware dregs of our society.
After all that, if you can still muster the courage to be a first-class constable who fiercely defends the public against wrong 'uns but swears a bit and leaves violent offenders feeling they weren't treated with enough dignity then expect your Pontius Pilate of a chief constable to throw you under the Hurty Feelings bus. That is exactly what happened to Lorne Castle, a Dorset officer who has twice won a national bravery award, including one for rescuing an elderly woman from a swollen river in 2023.
A shameful betrayal
The 46-year-old father of three was dismissed without notice for gross misconduct after bodycam footage captured him trying to arrest a teenager who was believed to have assaulted an elderly man (the boy, who later turned out to be carrying a knife). If you watch the footage, you can experience the frightening, febrile atmosphere in which Lorne Castle was trying to carry out his thankless task. He shouted and swore, telling the lad: 'Stop resisting or I'm going to smash you.'
A veteran officer tells me that 'it looked like a good arrest'. But a panel found PC Castle did not treat the teenager with 'courtesy' or 'respect', and Dorset Police said 'his shouting, swearing, finger pointing, taking hold of the boy's face and throat and suggested use of leg restraints was not necessary, reasonable or proportionate'. The force said no further action was taken against the teenager – of course it wasn't! – but he was issued with an out of court disposal for possessing the knife.
I ask you, why would anybody risk phone seizures, suspensions and months of stress over complaints that usually turn out to be baseless but which see them treated like criminals? While clueless top brass in their woke ivory towers put saving their career before protecting their officers. In my book, a man of the calibre of Lorne Castle is worth more to the people of this country than every chief constable put together.
So let us hear no more whingeing about underfunding leading to reduced services and driving officers away. Blame a warped sense of priorities promoted by activist police chiefs, a shameful betrayal of the British bobby and the demonisation of ordinary people for expressing legitimate fears. If the police have lost the support of Telegraph readers, then they are lost indeed.