The end of Peel’s police?

As part of her police reform White Paper, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood summoned the spirit of the BBC’s kindly bobby, Sergeant George Dixon.

Dixon of Dock Green, which aired between 1955 and 1976, is pure Boomer-fodder. Unsurprisingly, his name was seized upon by journalists looking for an easy headline. Mahmood, born in 1980, is unlikely to have ever followed Sgt. Dixon’s adventures. The Dixon—influenced voting demographic might imagine policing still involves administering clips around ears, or combating scamps scrumping apples. By invoking the good sergeant’s name, Mahmood’s speechwriters applied a coat of tweeslop gloss to the Home Office’s reforms. It’s an agenda offering less potential for Dixonian policing than it does The Wire’s corruption-riven Baltimore PD. 

Mahmood’s reforms give Home Office mandarins covert power over policing, but without responsibility for any screw-ups. Such control has been an enduring Home Office goal, first outlined in a masterplan in 1974. Then, it carved up over a hundred constabularies, with reputations for corruption and ineffectiveness, into the current 43-force model. Their new plan? Cunningly, it involves a divide-and-conquer sleight of hand, again creating dozens of pre-1974-sized local policing units. During her Dixon speech, Mahmood “declared the “bedrock” of her reforms will be scores of new “mini-police forces” with officers focused on “tackling neighbourhood crime.”

In short, the Home Office desires a three-tier police service, loosely modelled on the continental system

What then, is the Home Office seeking to deliver? And why are the reforms especially attractive to a Labour government? In short, the Home Office desires a three-tier police service, loosely modelled on the continental system. This involves establishing municipal, regional and national police forces, including a gendarmerie-style public order capability. The appeal, to the Home Office, is twofold. Firstly, it squares the aforementioned circle of political control. British policing is a typically English common law compromise, one of local independence versus direction from the centre. Robert Peel, mindful of events in revolutionary France, established our police in 1829 to be as uncontinental as possible. This ethos is now viewed as sclerotic and, of course, too expensive.

The second reason? Decision-making would originate inside the Home Office. It would be fed into the proposed national police, much as it currently does via its institutional puppet, the College of Policing. There, diktat would percolate down to Mahmood’s new “Local Police Areas.” Operational delivery, crucially, would also be influenced by local authorities — the White Paper specifically aligns the new micro-forces with council jurisdictions. Jurisdictions such as London, where Mayor Sadiq Khan is the de facto police authority. And this, I would suggest, is the detail inside which devils lurk. Ever since 1997, Britain’s political and administrative elites advocated a left-coded “conflict resolution” and “harm reduction” policing model. Something warm and cuddly and consensual. A system where a copper handcuffs a dying kid because he was accused of racism… oh, wait! 

Labour is instinctively drawn to bringing police into local authority orbit — in which they traditionally have considerable power. In fact, Mahmood’s policing reforms remind me of Labour’s devolution experiment. Given their dominance of big-city local government, as they once enjoyed parliamentary seats in the Celtic fringe, Labour once gambled on devolution delivering a cunning form of eternal control. How did that work out? The SNP’s legacy of censoriousness, cancelled ferries, men in prisons and dodgy camper vans speaks for itself. 

During the Nineties, the line between social work and policing became increasingly blurred. For a generation of office-dwelling but ambitious coppers, this offered a refreshing change from stop and search and fighting with drunks. “Multiagency Working” became normalised. Mental health patients? Incalcitrant teenagers absconding from care homes? Taxi services for vulnerable “clients”? Sex offenders requiring 24/7 monitoring? The police can do that, right? A cat’s cradle of Human Rights law, litigation, public inquiries and risk aversion tied up the police in knots. Whatever the council demanded, the police would obey. I remember the following joke, told to me by a colleague working in sexual offences;

Q. How many social workers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. None. They wait until 4pm, then ask the police to do it.

As evidence of working inside local government became a sure-fire route to promotion, did officers develop the same Guardianista groupthink as their town hall colleagues? Of course they did. Now, a cohort of senior coppers possesses identikit progressive views. At this point, Robert Conquest’s second law of politics seems apposite. The apogee of such systems failure was the rape gangs scandal and the West Midlands Police / Maccabi Tel Aviv affair. Both represent police forces effectively colluding with rotten boroughs, either ordered or influenced by local councillors. Imagine, under Mahmood’s new policing model, micro-police forces in bed with Green or “Gaza Independent” led authorities? 

This is the model Mahmood, knowingly or not, is proposing. Mandarins and spads, wedded a social work policing model, seem ignorant of the second-order effects their plans will create. Then again, so what? Responsibility is, as ever, diffused. As for the lowly coppers tasked with delivering the impossible, such as delivering quality neighbourhood policing on shoestring budgets? They’re out of mind and sight, many miles from Marsham Street. And as for George Dixon? I doubt the Eighties-born Shabana Mahmood is aware of his fate. In The Blue Lamp, the film in which Pc Dixon originally appeared, the wise old copper was shot dead by a petty criminal. Even the BBC series, like the Home Office White Paper, is based on a ghostly policeman-who-never-was.