Cast your mind back just a few weeks to a time when the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was trumpeting her plans to merge the current 43 police forces of England and Wales into twelve ‘Super Forces’.
Well, it has all gone very quiet on that front recently, I can’t imagine what else has been occupying her mind of late!
Let’s work on the theory that this lamentable government isn’t entirely gripped by leadership-issues paralysis, and that Mahmood’s plans remain on her ‘to do’ list.
Should that be the case, then I believe there are many benefits to be had from such a merger of our constabularies. One of these might be consistency of policies and consequently, the delivery of policing, and by crikey do we need it.
Big Brother Watch is an organisation that I have locked horns with on many an occasion, but this week I must give credit where credit is due, because they’ve carried out some important research into the number of arrests made by police for speech-related crimes.
They discovered that around 22 people a day have their collars felt for things they have said, and that there are rampant inconsistencies in terms of how often forces use their powers relating to these crimes.
Cumbria police appear to arrest people for hurty words with fervent relish, whereas Surrey Police clearly have other priorities.
Speech crimes can sometimes be serious, especially when an offender is using language as part of a concerted campaign to harass or coercively control someone, or when protestors are calling for the extermination of people of a particular faith.
But you don’t have to search social media too deeply to find footage of police officers arresting citizens for rightfully expressing their views.
Voicing an opinion on politicians, headteachers, doctors and others can get you into the cross-hairs, and several chief constables have had to dig very deeply into their publicly funded budgets to compensate innocent members of the public whose officers have unlawfully arrested and incarcerated.
Where are you tweeting from? I'd start sweating if you're living in this postcodeIn the highly unlikely event that I should ever rule the policing world, then I would mandate that all new recruits have to learn, discuss and debate a famous quote from George Orwell: ‘If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
As part of this training, newbies to policing, their supervising officers, and police senior bosses would all be taught that saying something that offends someone is not of itself a crime, and that in a healthy, free, flagship democracy, the police should protect free and lawful speech when required, even if such language offends them and others.
I would also point out to officers of all ranks that the public would rather they focus their efforts on keeping the streets safe, but given how modern policing has largely abandoned patrolling the streets, that might be quite a lengthy conversation.
It is also a sad and shameful fact of contemporary policing that officers no longer routinely investigate burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting offences, and much, much more.
Such repeated and unforgivable failures to service the needs and hopes of millions of victims of crime have led to an increasing gulf being created between the public and their police.
Couple this with the often over-zealous approach towards people simply expressing their lawful views, and we arrive at the current position in this island where the police are the strangers, because we rarely see, meet or engage with them, and on those occasions that we do, we find that they don’t think or speak like us. Something has to change, and quickly.
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