The thin blue line must be thicker

Police officers often live in an alternative reality from the public they notionally serve. Responses to the recent “Battle of Clapham”, with its M&S food hall carnage, was instructive. As hordes of largely Afro-Caribbean youths gleefully liberated “picky bits”, commentators and politicians asked: Why are the police so hopeless? How can such lawlessness occur? And, of course, what is to be done? None of these questions are unreasonable. Yet, to police officers, the answers are blindingly obvious. The causes are routinely discussed online by rank-and-file coppers, many risking their livelihoods for telling the truth. The much-vaunted principle of “Policing by Consent”, is on life support. 

Police officers know the system isn’t merely close to breaking, but is broken

Britain seethes in a sort of pre-Velvet Revolution funk. Police officers know the system isn’t merely close to breaking, but is broken. In our multiracial inner-cities, there’s no line to be held. Policymakers and police leaders aggravate the problem, like politburo members sticking to a five-year plan: the progressives who captured policing exist in an ideological matrix conjured circa 1997, oblivious to reality, hunkered down with their obsessions of identity, race and culture. The Home Office meat-puppet, the risible College of Policing, resiles from any notion of “Zero Tolerance” style policing. And so, for operational officers — in a job where performing one’s duty routinely invites being sacked — the response is a collective shrug of the shoulders. 

Reaction to the disturbances varied, some wearily invoking moral panic akin to Mods and Rockers kicking off in the 60s. Chris Bayliss, more helpfully, observed that “the predominantly black youths we saw congregating in Clapham belong to a sub-culture that is very clearly distinct from that of most of the rest of the country. They speak in a sociolect that is so specific it can often be difficult to tell that it is based on English, and as we witnessed this week, appear to be motivated by things that the general public would struggle to understand.” And, of course, the old saw lamenting a lack of youth clubs was wheeled out, probably by people with a very 2026, fin-de-siecle, faith in “hubs” and “free breakfast clubs.” None, however, address an urgent issue — how do police respond to the world as it is, not as imagined by the crapulous London Mayor, The Labour Party, Home Office and National Police Chief’s Council? The depressing answer? They can’t.

The police are genuinely trapped, caught in a political pincer movement from both left and right. Since 1997, New Labour espoused a broadly “soft” policing model, a near-Pavlovian response to the Party’s Thatcher-era grudges. The Conservatives, on the other hand, were obsessed with cost-cutting and privatization agendas, yet fully accepted the Blairite legal model tying police hands. Theresa May’s combination of parsimony and political correctness was disastrous. In 2010, for example, London had around 150 police stations open to the public. Today that’s 36. Even more incredibly, of that 36, only two are open 24 hours a day, for a city with a population of over nine million. 

In policing, despite reassurances from academics and senior officers, footprint and presence are all. Instead, to save money, police retreated to “patrol bases” and centralized custody facilities. The majority of police officers, poorly paid and trained, now have less than five years’ service. Furthermore, senior officers were complicit in shrinking core policing. Given the unenviable choice between rescuing neighbourhood teams and protecting specialist units, then-Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe chose the latter, decimating the frontline. As the Casey Review reported, in 2023, London effectively no longer has a functioning neighbourhood policing service. This means local police are unable to “surge” areas with officers to contain disturbances. The support units who might back them up? They’re abstracted to endless pro-Palestine demonstrations, or reassurance operations demanded by incidents such as the Golder’s Green arson attack.

Put bluntly? The line, now lost, must be retaken

There are other, interconnected, vectors of failure — policing outcomes are contingent on our similarly devastated criminal justice system. Even as London’s Mayor shakes his tiny fist, insisting offenders will be punished, everyone knows there’s little court capacity, prison places or effective offender management provision. Feral youths also know police are wary of allegations of racism or violence. As a result, the consequence-free environment we have created, unwittingly or otherwise, is now the default. What happened in Clapham is notable only due to its scale, and that it occurred in an area familiar to the Capital’s media classes. Smaller versions occur in every city, every day. 

The debates will continue. Around race. Around our broken social contract. Around social media. Around our seemingly unstoppable descent into a low-trust society. Put bluntly? The line, now lost, must be retaken. Otherwise, and very soon, our policing model will resemble that of a developing country. The result will be more lawlessness and vigilantism. So I shall say it, sadly, again: Policing By Consent has become, in too many of Britain’s urban centres, a moron’s chant. Who, though, will listen?