The police must do better, not more
Writing in The Telegraph on Monday, two prominent officers lamented the current state of policing in Britain. Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents' Association, and Tiff Lynch, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said morale had been crushed by a broken system.
'The service is in crisis,' they wrote. Pay was too low, work was too hard and the police are facing further real terms cuts in spending when the Chancellor makes her dispositions known today.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was reportedly battling with the Treasury until the 11th hour trying to get more money for policing but failed. She has been under pressure from senior officers for weeks to get a better deal.
They said there may have been more money and more officers but these trends had not kept pace with the rise in the population. Yet overall per-capita police numbers are now close to record levels. We used to have far fewer police officers and yet they were far more visible.
Their presence on the streets was designed to fulfil Robert Peel's first principle of policing, which is to keep order and prevent crime.
Police chiefs maintain that they direct scarce resources where they are most needed and yet this is impossible to square with stories of half a dozen officers being sent to arrest someone for sending an injudicious tweet to a school website.
A news report just this week is emblematic of the problem: the couple who went to reclaim their own stolen car because the police refused to do anything about it. There have been many cases of bikes put up for sale by thieves and owners having to recover their property because the police were not interested.
Our politicians must share the blame for loading the police with tasks they never used to have by passing laws that require any complaint of hurt feelings, however minor or vindictively made, to be investigated. But the police seem content to prioritise these non-crimes over real ones like burglary, thefts of mobile phones or shoplifting.
The problem the police have when demanding more money is that the public no longer feels they make the right choices with the resources they have. Nowadays, they are less a force for law and order than a glorified community service, expected to deal with society's ills rather than crime. As a matter of urgency, they need to forge a new social contract with the people they serve.
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