Lamenting lost Bobbies

I have lamented elsewhere the woeful state of our police in the United Kingdom, in which I reflected on the almost total lack of Bobbies or Robertas on the beat (and no, I don’t mean a la David Lammy). Instead they have been replaced by obese and ill dressed ‘community officers’, usually swigging cans of Fanta to sustain them on the brief stroll between newsagents. The only time you come close to a proper copper is when you hear a police siren. This is especially helpful if you are in the process of breaking and entering; essentially it means ‘the police are coming…run!’. Since writing that piece absolutely nothing has changed. The only police officers I have seen outside of their patrol cars are the ones on duty at the local football stadium when I have attended another grief-stricken match by our local team.

It seems your best chance of coming face to face with a police officer these days is to make an inappropriate comment about transgenderism on social media. Do that and you’ll have a concerned copper at the door in no time to ‘check your thinking’. But report a burglary or a mugging and you will receive some words of sympathy over the phone, an incident number and never hear from them again.

However, I did see a real live policeman on the street in my hometown of Kingston upon Hull this week. Was he arresting a criminal, keeping a wary eye out for ne’er-do-wells or helping an old lady? No, none of these things and, to be frank, I was very unsure what he was doing. Positioned at a stand with various police oriented paraphernalia, he was either trying to recruit people to the police force or reassure the local community that they were in safe hands. But he was black, and before I have Mr Plod at the door to check my thinking, let me explain. He was not even a local policeman as, in all my born days, I have never seen a black police officer in this city. Hull is traditionally very white, and, for example, I only know two black people: one is the architect who designed the extension to our house and the other is a colleague and co-author at my former place of employment at the University of Hull. The fact that these two black people, both Malawians, are married to one another probably tells you all you need to know. Any other black people in Hull (with very few exceptions) will invariably be students.

Regarding the policeman I spotted at his stand in the centre of Hull, he was in front of a banner that proclaimed ‘Strong, Safer, Resilient Communities’ with a pile of leaflets he was distributing to people. But what was most notable was that he was flanked by two dummies (real dummies, this is not a reference to the Community Officers). One, of course, was a female dummy and the other, which was what first alerted me to the stand, was a large dummy dressed in full riot gear: helmet, visor, baton, and shield. And on the stand, there was a variety of other police riot gear accoutrements for people to handle. A couple of riot helmets for the kids to put on and batons to wave.

Is this really what the police have become and is this the image they wish to project? I must say that the sight of police in riot gear puts the fear of God up me as it is, undoubtedly, designed to. It not only puts me in fear for myself, even if I have done nothing wrong, it puts me in fear that the police will soon become more like their European counterparts whose job seems less to be about keeping the population safe than suppressing it and usually for politically motivated reasons. The British police probably do need riot gear from time to time. You can’t take any chances when a bunch of elderly ladies and assorted members of outlandish fringe groups turn up on Trafalgar Square to protest about being banged up in their own homes for months. If you must have riot gear lads, or guns on occasions for that matter, keep them locked away and out of sight until they are absolutely necessary.

What I saw this week was as far removed from my image of real policing as I can imagine. In my youth, in the small village where I was brought up, either one of the two local policemen would be on the street and not averse to giving a young lad like me a clip round the ear if they thought I was doing wrong. There was not a helmet or a shield in sight. Check my thinking if you like, but I know which style of policing was more effective.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.