Community Policing

I am all in favour of the enforcement of the drugs laws. But I would not have started on Benefits Street.

Speaking of the Midlands, if Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary is aware of a murder, then no one has more means, motive or opportunity to report it to Her Majesty's Constabulary.

But why the Midlands? If he means who he seems to mean when he talks about communities that police themselves, then why not London? Or the belt stretching almost, but not quite, from Hull almost, but not quite, to Liverpool?

In any case, what he seems to be describing is the kind of thing that always unnerves middle-class people a bit, because we do not really quite have it, but which has always been normal among both upper-class people and working-class people.

Doctors, headteachers, vicars and so on played that kind of role to some extent among the middle classes, and to a very limited extent they still do.

But never to anything like the extent that they did among the working classes, which also always had their own internal authority figures: trade union officials, local councillors in wards where many or most people were council-housed, Methodist ministers, Catholic priests, the committees of the workingmen's clubs.

So the Police were barely called to certain areas. But (and there is a very genuine problem to be addressed here) in an era when domestic violence against women, and all violence that was purely among working-class men, were not treated witth the seriousness that they deserved, there was almost nothing to which to call the Police.

However, the economic basis of the unions and of the clubs has been eviscerated, as have the powers of local government.

Catholicism has declined considerably, and Methodism has declined dramatically. The embourgeoisement of both has made their clergy, and also other figures within their structures as such, more hands-off in the style of the Church of England, rather than bringing their old ways into bourgeois society along with many people who had come of age in and through those ways.

The same may be said of trade union activity: it has conformed itself to what are now the middle-class manners of most of its members and, almost by definition, nearly all of its functionaries, rather than changing those manners to what were once its own.

The communities that Tom Winsor, who has no background in policing, now suggests are scarcely making contact with the Police are doubtless manifesting the same features as of old. The bad ones. But also the good ones.

Well done to them, that they can still manage to do so.