What Is A Front Line Police Officer?

Peter Hitchens writes:

Here we go again. I have just watched a BBC report on the alleged threat to 'Front Line' police officers. We were shown a policewoman driving a car and speaking urgently into her radio, perhaps about to race at speed to an incident the police had failed to prevent, and could do little about when they got there. And we were told some stuff about 'Bobbies on the Beat'. Look, for the nine millionth time, there are no 'Bobbies' and there is no 'Beat'. The 'Beat' was abolished by the Home Office in 1966. Despite immense increases in their numbers (only on show at demonstrations or football matches) the police have never been so absent from our midst.

The police officers we have today are not 'Bobbies' but sedentary bureaucrats who react to crime and disorder after it has happened. The occasional concessionary foot patrol (almost invariably in pairs, chatting to each other and oblivious to what is going on ten feet away) is exactly that, a temporary concession to public demand, viewed by Chief Constables as a diversion away from the real work of political correctness and managing crime. The use of the words 'Front Line' is pretentious and grandiose.

And wasn't the performance of the police during last Saturday's TUC demonstration rather feeble, given their macho self-description as a 'Front Line' and their dismissal of the rest of us as 'Civilians'? Some 'Front Line'. They certainly appeared to be backing away from demonstrators outside the Ritz Hotel. Several other rather obvious (and in some cases predicted) targets for exhibitionist vandals and show-offs (sorry, 'anti-capitalist protestors') seem to have been poorly and unintelligently defended.

And how did the plinth of the Achilles statue, in Hyde Park, where the peaceful demonstrators were congregated, come to be daubed with moronic spray-paint scribblings (which I saw being washed off on my way to an appointment in London on Monday morning)? Could neither the march stewards, nor the police, have prevented this expensive, moronic dirtying of one of the pleasanter parts of the capital? Judging by how much of it there was, it must have taken a long time to accomplish the damage. And it is a monument to the Duke Of Wellington's military victories, nothing whatever to do with the subject of the march. Not that these people will ever have heard of the Duke of Wellington. They just recognised it as a traditional work of art, and so instinctively identified it as a thing to be damaged and diminished.