On Being A True Friend Of The Police

Based on comments in response to a previous post, I have had emails either praising or excoriating me for being “anti-Police”. Not a bit of it, say I. I’d be all for the Police if they actually policed, which many of them sincerely wish to do, but which their superiors refuse to countenance.

If they did, the no one would see the slightest need for such nasty measures as identity cards, control orders, erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, reversal of the burden of proof, the provision for majority verdicts (which, by definition, provide for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), the Police confiscation of assets without a conviction, or the routine use of tasers, among so many other things.

I stand by my statements with regard to envy and spite on the part of the Police towards the professional classes, who have never regarded sheer wealth as sufficient to admit anyone socially. The Police need to get over this and move on, because it is never going to change. Likewise, I stand by my observation that the Police leave alone those of whom they are physically afraid, and who often possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of human rights law despite having few or no qualifications of even the most basic kind.

The enormity of the Police Force needs to pointed out as often as possible, since much of the public continues to assume that there is a “manpower shortage” preventing street patrols on foot, whereas in fact these have been abandoned as a matter of policy, with unmitigatedly disastrous consequences.

And I am afraid that there is an undoubted culture in sections of that Force that so long as they nick anyone, they can rely on Magistrates’ Courts, or on juries required to deliver nothing more than majority verdicts, to convict regardless of the evidence, if any, produced.

These matters urgently require to be addressed, and to say so is to be a true friend of the Police.