Make the Police, Police Again.
The Police are having an identity crisis in our country’s ‘culture war’. They seem to show a greater penchant for abysmally dancing at ‘extinction revolution’ or pride marches than for fighting crime. Our police chiefs and commissioners are desperate to garner the admiration of that same leftist establishment which is perennially shocked when the Tories succeed at the polling booth, and in doing so they alienate the general British public. The more the Police push this quixotic attempt at rebranding themselves as a hippy collective, the further they stray from the expectations of the public and their original purpose. That purpose is simple: to prevent crime.
The great Robert Peel established the Police force in 1829. The sharply growing population of Great Britain’s recently industrialised cities meant the city watch and the yeomanry were no longer able to uphold law and order. So, the Police were created to be the executors of justice on the streets of our cities. After an initial period of unpopularity, the affectionately nicknamed ‘bobbies’ became pillars in the local community. Their purpose was to be ubiquitous on the highways and byways of Britain, always available, helpful, affable and most importantly visible: ‘bobbies on the beat’. There is no beat now for the modern-day police officer, they have vanished from our streets. Today’s police are content to show up after the crime. In England and Wales, currently 97% of burglaries go unresolved.
If our police are not patrolling our streets, then, where are they? Are they all crowded into the Police Stations of our country practicing those gyrations some call dancing to bust out at future street protests? Not quite. But the truth is almost as ludicrous. A significant amount of Police time and resources are spent on trawling the online world for punishable ‘hate speech’ offences, tweeting their support for asexual people, and posting pictures of butter knives whilst gloating over their actions taken to suppress the capitols’ knife crime epidemic. Really one of the only things sure to be stringently policed in modern Britain, is our language. It is high time for Police to log off twitter and reengage with our nations’ communities.
This was all the case before the tragic death of George Floyd 4,000 miles away in Minneapolis. This blood curdling act of police brutality has caused a paroxysm of public unrest in London. The internationalisation of American politics and current affairs has caused a one size fits all approach to protesting which is quite often woefully inappropriate. For example, it seemed perfectly appropriate to BLM protestors outside Westminster to chant ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ to a group of confused, unarmed police officers. Current affairs across the Atlantic do not always synchronise with our own. A fomentation of violence has occurred nonetheless.
Around 140 police officers have been injured in our country in the past few weeks; and 27 in only one night in Brixton last week. Radical and revolutionary sentiment, previously only taken seriously by dodgy online forums for aspiring anarchists, like ‘defund the police’ have now reverberated across the UK. The Corbynite faction conveniently forgot their condemnation of Theresa May for cutting police funding and took up the radical call to completely defund the Police. However, the mainstream political establishment seems to have woken up to the dangers of the wider ideology of the Black Lives Matter organisation. Keir Starmer, previously a director of public prosecutions, said ‘nobody should be saying anything about defunding the police’ and referred to the idea as ‘nonsense’. These are the nonsensical ideas that Police are bowing down to and endorsing when they kneel before protesters.
WATCH: Police have come under attack from protesters and revellers in recent weeks
We owe a debt of gratitude to those heroes who serve the police force on the front line, those who are the first to charge into danger for the sake of our safety. However, much of the executive and administrative branch of the Police are being ‘wokeified’. The Police must resist this politicisation. It has a responsibility first and foremost for the maintenance of law and order on our streets. It is not a political body, but a civil service. It must think less about how it is perceived by the liberal elite of London and more about how to best serve its communities. Fewer gestures of solidarity, and a greater execution of justice. A good start is to log off twitter, stop dancing, stop kneeling to protesters, and start patrolling our streets again.
Robert Peel created the police in the UK after creating them in Ireland with the express purpose repressing the local population though ‘baked into indigenous enforcers. They have always been a political tool of the state, the failure and brutality of red coats in popular uprisings in Ireland and events like Peterloo led to there creation.
The disenfranchisement of the poor moving to industrial jobs and cities was and remains the root cause of Urban unrest. Your criticisms of protesters tactics and chants seems to be no less than an attempt to undermine its just grievances. The consequences of systemic police racism are undoubtedly more minor than in the USA but that does not mean systemic police racism does not…