Policing the response to crime

A good litmus test of a functioning democracy is the efficacy and neutrality of its law enforcement. These are sentiments echoed in the police oath: ‘I will execute the powers and duties of my office honestly, faithfully and diligently without fear of or favour to any person and with malice or ill-will toward none.’ Sadly, these values are no longer being upheld by the British police.

The latest in a long line of protests plaguing the streets of London is ‘Just Stop Oil’, whose principle demand is ‘That the UK government makes a statement that it will immediately halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.’ Presumably it never occurred to the group to begin their protests with USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia, possibly because the authorities in those regions are less likely to treat them with kid gloves.

Just Stop Oil (in-line with its predecessors Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain) has vowed to disrupt London roads every day in October as part of its campaign against fossil fuels, thereby pouring salt into the wound of a long-suffering public – who are not only dying from lack of access to the NHS, but also unable to heat their homes. What difference therefore does doubling the oil price make?

Where are the police in all this, you may ask? As far as one can ascertain, the police are doing what they do best – standing idly by, turning a blind eye to the criminality, and supplying the protestors with water and coffee. This is nothing new.

In response to public anger, the new Chief of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has claimed Just Stop Oil are not passing the legal test of causing ‘serious disruption’, despite fire engines and ambulances with blue lights being detained, and hundreds of protestors being arrested. He went on to say: ‘While (the group) is committing some offences in terms of obstruction of the highway, those aren’t prosecutable as it’s a lawful protest as long as it does not exceed reasonable bounds.’ Rowley added that he was ‘annoyed’ and ‘frustrated’ that the 200 officers deployed daily to police the protests were being diverted from tackling knife crime, violence against women and girls and other offending (none of which police bother with either).

It is astonishing to me that the MET Chief is failing to enforce the law (offences have been committed, after all), because prosecutions are unlikely – which is surely a matter for the courts? Even if you agree with the police non-intervention however, it is noteworthy that A) continental police forces are markedly less sentimental when it comes to climate activists gluing themselves to things they shouldn’t, and B) our own police are more than willing to use roughhouse tactics against protestors, should the wrong political viewpoint be on display.

The fact is, British constabularies have long-since given up policing real crime; something they admit freely. The war on drugs was never fought, burglary, car crime and assault are now considered ‘lower level’ offences (hardly worth getting out of the rainbow cars for), and shoplifters careful to take less than £200 worth of goods will not be pursued. The result is, UK police are now solving the lowest proportion of crimes ever – less than six percent. Fewer than one in a hundred thefts are resolved, resulting in a public so disillusioned, they no longer bother to report crime in the first place; perhaps that’s the aim?

With time on their hands, and thanks to the wokery seemingly infecting every public institution, police are now discovering ‘crimes’ they actually have a taste for. ‘Hate crime’ is the favoured excuse for not doing their job, which is defined thus:

The term ‘hate crime’ can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

A topical example is the failure to accept that a man pretending to be a woman is in fact a woman. But it gets worse – if the police cannot convict you of a hate crime, they might opt for the only thing stupider – a ‘hate incident’:

Any incident which may or may not constitute a criminal offence that is perceived by the victim, or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

You’ve got that, right? The police are too busy to investigate genuine crime, but they’ve got all the time in the world for non-crimes, that someone might be offended by. Examples of this war on common sense are the questioning of Harry Miller, a man of such unspeakable wickedness, he dared to like and retweet an offensive limerick. For so heinous a crime, Mr Miller was subjected to a 34-minute interrogation by Humberside Police, who wanted to ‘check his thinking’. Then there’s the 900-strong Twitter gestapo championed by Sadiq Khan, which has managed to bring six ‘trolls’ to justice, at the cost of a measly £1.7M.

Not forgetting Deputy Chief of Cheshire Police, Julie Cooke, who took to social media to proudly proclaim the police were turning their attention to pronoun abuse:

Today is International Pronouns Day, which is a day particularly important to people who identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming. Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody, and their personal well-being. It also can be used as a form of abuse for somebody, and that just isn’t right. Today is about raising awareness, getting people to have conversations, and understanding why it is so important to understand the pronouns that somebody wishes to be used for them.

To all intents and purposes, British police have given up on crime – deciding to focus on the response to crime instead. Their logic appears to be that in criminalising the discussion of crime, the crimes themselves will effectively disappear.

The consequences of such a policy are not only terrifying, but also ubiquitous. UK police forces took the breath-taking decision to warn officers to kneel for Black Lives Matter, or risk being targeted by protestors. Andy Marsh, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset police, failed to intervene when Black Lives Matter toppled the Colston statue, because it would have resulted in ‘a very violent confrontation’. But naturally, when the public turned up to defend the monuments themselves, the police had no aversion to arresting them, labelling them ‘far-right thugs’.

UK authorities are extremely lackadaisical with illegal Channel migrants, hundreds of whom immediately abscond upon arrival, but when members of the public think it newsworthy to film such events, they are swiftly disabused of the notion by being arrested for ‘breach of the peace’. Kid gloves are routinely shown to eco protestors. Police are content to stand guard, engaging only to arrest and charge members of the public when they inevitably take the law into their own hands.

Worst of all is the fact that UK police are still failing the victims of industrial scale Muslim gang rape in Britain, but have no qualms arresting the victims themselves, or their parents if they dare complain.

Defunding the police is of course a non-starter, but an openly political constabulary is a serious danger to democracy. If you doubt that, try ‘peacefully’ blocking the roads in a ‘White Lives Matter’ or ‘anti-vaccination’ T-shirt, and see how you get on. The public are currently rolling up their sleeves and doing the police’s job for them, but one wonders how long that will be allowed to continue.

Britain is in desperate need of a root and branch cull of woke police chiefs, and a return to old-fashioned coppers who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. But for that, you would need a genuinely conservative Party, and we haven’t had one of those for over three decades.

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Frank Haviland,

Editor