History has an annoying habit of repeating itself, leaving a lingering and not always pleasant taste, along with that annoying mantra, ‘I told you so’.  As I write this the British police continues to be dragged through what I consider to be one of the most traumatic periods of sustained criticism since the formation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. There have always been criticisms of the police; a local Labour politician once proudly announced, after the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985, that the police got a ‘bloody good hiding’, presumably referring to the murder and virtual decapitation of PC Keith Blakelock who was going to the assistance of firefighters who had come under attack from the mob.  A woman standing next to him, cheering his words was, until fairly recently, the shadow Home Secretary. That quote caused quite a stir in the press at the time but it seems to have died the death over the last 36 years and its certainly missing from the pages of the “Black History Month” site, so at least someone seems to be letting that bygone be a bygone.  In 1829 half of Parliament never wanted ‘Peel’s Police’  and it wasn’t that long ago that I read of a motion at a debate during a Labour Party annual conference where there was a vote on ‘law and order’ - apparently a majority voted in favour of it; but maybe that was some journalistic joke that I took as gospel?

Don’t get me wrong, the ability to hold its police to public account is a sign of a healthy, liberal democracy.  I’m all for open and honest scrutiny of what is probably the only agency in our society that is authorised by law to use physical force on the populace, providing it is ‘reasonable’ and ‘justified’ - the use of force, that is. The populace frequently uses force against itself, rarely reasonable or justifiable in law, and it is usually the police that end up bringing individuals to justice. What, dear reader, you might consider as justice may well be wide of what the majority actually desire, which may disappoint you; in fact it probably already has, just as much as it has me over those thirty six years I mentioned back there.

The current crisis of confidence didn’t happen by accident and many of the causation factors came from outside, rather than within the police because, believe it or not, 99.9% of police officers that I know never came to work with the intention of doing anyone harm or doing a bad job. The fingerprints of many politicians should be found all over this problem; I say ‘should’ because we are talking about specialists in the art of smoke, mirrors and the avoidance of blame. Many within police governance need to look long and hard at what they too have presided over, ‘fiddling while Rome burned’. I know a few police officers to whom the nickname “Teflon” was applied, because nothing seemed to stick to them as they fiddled with the tried and tested.

So how did the only police service in practically the entire world, whose officers are not required to routinely carry a firearm as a condition of their employment, come to face daily vilification across the news media? What kind of ‘evil regime’ was it that churned out these police officers, who are being collectively portrayed as dictatorial, criminal oppressors, perverts or “dumbkopf’s”? In some individual cases there is much justification for such damning epithets, cases that leave the overwhelming majority of officers feeling as any ordinary, reasonable person would feel, but all too often such cases are spun by the media into something endemic. Harold Shipman, was a family doctor who turned out to be one of Britains most prolific serial killers with an estimated 250 victims, yet the medical profession did not seem to suffer headlines approaching blanket condemnation of this ‘one bad apple’.