The PR Blog

There is something increasingly sad about watching the police in Britain and Australia become involved in stuff that once would not have been considered police business.

People being arrested, investigated or otherwise subjected to police attention for words such as “muppet” may sound almost comic. It isn't.

It matters because policing depends upon something more important than the power to arrest. It depends upon public confidence that the person wearing the uniform understands the difference between crime and annoyance, danger and offence, disorder and mere disagreement.

I was a cop for over 30 years. I ended up resigning because I couldn't cope with the way things were going.

Most of my time was served in the Aussie Outback. I loved it. I lived in places many only dream about and I met people who made me proud to be part of their lives. And I like to think that they felt the same about me. We were on the same side. If some old bugger got drunk, we locked him up for the night to sober up and my missus cooked him brekkie the next morning and we sent him off with his tail between his legs and a hangover. But with a full belly.

He had been a nuisance. He had not been an enemy of the state. We all knew the difference.

Yeah, it is fair to say that perhaps I look at this differently from someone who has only ever encountered the police when something has gone badly wrong.

There was a time when the policeman was quite simply one of the people you went to when you were in trouble.

The policeman on the beat was a familiar figure. Children knew him. Shopkeepers knew him. Old people knew him. He was part of the neighbourhood, and his authority came partly from that familiarity. In my postings, I was in the four-wheel drive, or on horseback. My beat was pretty big.

If a child was frightened or lost, the policeman was the bloke to find. If there was trouble, you went looking for the local cop.

He was, in a very real sense, one of the good guys.

That doesn't mean every policeman was perfect. Of course they weren't. They never have been. Police officers are human beings, and human beings bring their own weaknesses to whatever uniform they wear.

But the underlying relationship was different.

The uniform was supposed to mean help before it meant power.

That is what saddens me now.

The policeman on the beat -  the man or woman whom children could approach without fear, and whom ordinary people regarded as part of their community - seems increasingly to be becoming a figure from another age.

And that should concern us all.

Because the history of modern policing begins with precisely this problem: how do you give the police enough authority to protect the public without turning that authority into something the public comes to fear?

The bargain of 1829

In 1829 the Metropolitan Police Act created a salaried, uniformed, hierarchical police force for London under the direction of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel.

Street crime and disorder were real.

So was the fear that any standing body of officers would become an instrument of government.

The Peterloo massacre was only a decade old. France already had a political police. Radicals expected the new force to break strikes and protests; many conservatives disliked the idea of a permanent official presence in civilian life.

Peel's project therefore had to do something rather more difficult than create a police force.

It had to make the police acceptable to the people they were going to police.

Officers carried a wooden truncheon and a rattle, later a whistle, rather than firearms as standard equipment. They were individually identifiable. Military ranks were avoided.

The instructions issued to the new force in 1829, written mostly by the first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, told officers that their first object was the prevention of crime, and that success would be shown by the absence of crime and disorder, not by the number of people they arrested.

They were to secure public cooperation, use force only when persuasion failed, and act without regard to the status of the person in front of them.

That was a crucial idea.

The police were not supposed to become an occupying force in civilian clothes.

They were supposed to be part of the community they served.

Policing by consent

The famous “nine principles” associated with Peel are actually a later summary of that settlement, distilled in the mid-twentieth century, chiefly by the historian Charles Reith, from the 1829 instructions and from Peel's arguments in Parliament.

Peel did not publish them as a list.

The line most often quoted -  “the police are the public and the public are the police” -  belongs to that later ideal.

But the idea it compresses was present at the beginning.

Officers were citizens paid to do, full time, what any citizen might be called upon to do. Their authority depended upon approval rather than fear. Londoners were expected to assist them.

Early hostility was genuine. The nicknames “Peeler” and “raw lobster” were not compliments.

Acceptance followed partly because the new force demonstrated that it could reduce street crime and disorder, and partly because it remained mostly unarmed and outside party politics.

The important word here is consent.

Policing by consent was not a slogan about popularity.

It was a constraint.

The power of the police was supposed to rest upon public approval of their actions and their behaviour.

Cooperation was meant to reduce the need for compulsion.

Impartial service to the law was meant to prevent the force becoming the property of a faction.

Efficiency was defined by quiet streets, not busy charge sheets. I was often told off for not having enough arrests. I suggested that was probably because I was doing my job.

What has changed?

This is where I find the modern situation so troubling.

The drunk in the lock-up was police business because he was incapable, and because someone might get hurt. A rude word is not. Once the police start treating annoyance, offence and disagreement as if they were disorder, the old distinction collapses. The person in the uniform no longer looks like the bloke you go to. He looks like someone who might come for you.

That is how a comic arrest becomes a serious loss. If the public cannot trust the police to leave alone what used to be left alone, they will not trust them with the things that still matter.

Much of contemporary policing appears to have forgotten that if the community and the police work together, life is better for everyone except the people who need locking up. Today there is a divide. The local copper is too often seen as the problem.

Is the law being applied impartially?

A police force that applies the law according to the political allegiance of the offender, or that declines to apply it for the same reason, has moved a very long way from the 1829 vision.

It no longer asks for cooperation on equal terms.

It risks asking one part of the public to accept a discretion exercised in favour of another. That is dangerous territory for any police force or service.

And it is dangerous precisely because the police possess powers that ordinary citizens do not.

The policeman I remember

I don't want to return to some imaginary golden age in which every policeman was a saint and every citizen behaved. That never existed.

Crime has changed. Society has changed. The demands placed upon police have changed enormously. But there is something worth preserving.

I remember the idea of the policeman who was there because the community needed him. The policeman a kid could approach. The policeman an old lady could ask for help, even if it was to get something off the top shelf at the supermarket.

The policeman who knew the streets and the people living in the towns and in their communities.

The policeman whose presence was reassuring precisely because he was one of us, not because he represented an institution looming above us.

The strongest authority is not necessarily the authority that frightens people most. It is the authority people trust enough to call when they are frightened themselves.

What needs restoring

The remedy is not nostalgia.

It is to get back to what we used to be, not what modern policing has become.

Officers who are corrupt have to go, because every one of them makes the rest of us look bad.

Laws have to be enforced without regard to the politics of the offender or the complainant.

And the job has to be kept to crime and disorder. A force that investigates words, records annoyance and treats disagreement as an incident has already forgotten the difference the uniform was meant to guarantee. Nobody rings that force when a child is lost. They keep their head down.

The measure of good policing should still be whether crime and disorder are absent, not whether the institution looks busy. Police officers need to remember that the uniform does not belong to them. It belongs, in a sense, to all of us.

The authority comes from the public. The responsibility is to the public. And the trust can be lost much more quickly than it was earned.

I don't want the policeman on the beat to become merely a character in an old photograph in my photo album.

I want children to look at a cop and still know what generations of children once knew:

If I am in trouble, I can go to him.

That only works if the same child can grow up and say something sharp without wondering whether the bloke in the uniform will be back for the word. Help before power was never just a kindness. It was the bargain. A police force that cannot tell a drunk from a dissenter, or a muppet from a menace, has already spent it.

Bushie

My thanks to Monty for adding the historical bits and also making this look and read better than I thought it would.