Following a spate of riots that swept the country last week, all eyes are on the sorry state of law and order here in Britain. Once heralded as one of the world’s great orderly, high-trust societies, we are now a country of two-tier policing, free speech restrictionists, and persistent low-level disorder. 

Indeed, last Thursday, the Police Inspectorate published its latest report into the Metropolitan Police, raising “serious concerns” about how the Met ‘investigates crime’ and ‘manages offenders’. Across seven out of eight categories of assessment, the Met’s performance was described as ‘inadequate’ or ‘requiring improvement’ – only one category saw the Met’s performance graded as ‘adequate’. 

What we have now in Britain is not law and order, but anarcho-tyranny

This is shocking, but not surprising. For a number of years now, Britain has been in the midst of a law enforcement crisis. Alongside light-touch law reform, soft sentences and poor reporting of crime statistics, police forces up and down the country are simply choosing not to investigate certain types of crime.

According to the police’s own data, 90 percent of crime across England and Wales now goes unsolved, up from 75 percent in 2015. In 2023, that figure includes more than 30,000 sex offences, 330,000 violent crimes, 320,000 cases of criminal damage, and 1.5 million thefts.

Last year, the Met Police attended just 44 percent of shoplifting reports, and just 60 percent of violent shoplifting cases. Across the whole country, 82 percent of burglaries go unsolved, as well as 89 percent of bike thefts. In half of neighbourhoods across the country, police forces haven’t solved a single burglary in the past three years – despite an October 2022 promise from all 43 police chiefs across England and Wales to “attend every-break in”. 

And it’s getting worse. In London, 250 phones a day are stolen – one every six minutes. Many are snatched directly out of the hands of unsuspecting pedestrians. As of May 2024, the Met will no longer be policing fare evasion on London buses, after an officer was convicted of assault for apprehending a suspect fare evader.

Don’t worry though. Despite all of this, our brave boys in blue (or should that be fluorescent yellow?) still find time to jail people for sharing off-colour memes on Facebook. 

Pulling together all of these individual strands of data, we can see that the police in Britain are no longer consistently enforcing the law – particularly in cases of property crime, but increasingly in cases of low-level violent crime too. This leaves ordinary people subject to the tyranny of criminality – criminal disorder is, in its impact on the individual, just as tyrannical as any overbearing state. Far too many people in Britain today no longer feel confident that they can walk the streets safely.

As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’ve seen a rise in private security over the past few years. According to the latest figures, the UK will need 62,000 new security officers over the next 12 months to keep up with growing demand – a total of 450,000 licensed security professionals could be in operation by the end of 2024. 

In parts of London, private security firms are now a fact of life. My Local Bobby, a security firm established by two former police officers, serves 12 residential areas in West London and operates across four “public realm beats”. Households pay between £100 and £200 per month for this service – in return, their streets are patrolled, and they have direct access to “officers” in the event of a crime. 

And according to recent polling, while 6 in 10 UK adults trust private security professionals, with 7 in 10 regarding them as a necessity, just 4 in 10 Britons trust the police force. In the absence of a capable police force, individuals and businesses alike are turning to private provision of law enforcement.

At the risk of sounding dramatic, the expanding role of private security is a sign of withering state capacity. In countries where disorder is common but where the state is weak, private security is a fact of life. This is particularly true in states, such as South Africa or Brazil, with a small but rich contingent of upper-class professionals. Here, the stratification is most apparent – private security and gated communities for those who can afford it, Hobbesian brutality and declining state capacity for those who can’t. The result is the breakdown of any unified sense of ‘public order’, 

While Britain’s situation is not nearly as severe as either of those examples, it’s difficult to ignore the early signs of decline. The growth in private security firms has also been accompanied by an increase in gated or quasi-gated communities, and the ubiquity of low-level security infrastructure, such as doorbell cameras and high-security locks. Like it or not, ordinary Britons are now thinking far more about the security of their households than they were just a few decades ago. 

What we have now in Britain is not law and order, but anarcho-tyranny. While public provision of law enforcement grows weaker, the state becomes more and more heavy-handed in its treatment of dissident voices. Law abiding citizens are subject to finger-wagging, cumbersome bureaucracy, and strict sanctions, while common criminals run wild. Those who can pay their way out of the disorder do so – those who can’t afford the luxury suffer what they must.

If we really want to fix Britain’s downward trajectory, we must start by restoring law and order. It is this simple, foundational idea which gives businesses the confidence to grow, enables the enjoyment of private property, and gives ordinary citizens the confidence to walk the streets safely. In the immortal words of America’s greatest 20th century president, Richard M. Nixon, “there is no quarrel between progress and order, because neither can exist without the other.”