On policing: “The police are the public and the public are the police” – Robert Peel

Introduction to Original Notes

This book is about contemporary Britain, its swift and catastrophic decline from a proud and confident “Cool Britannia” celebrating the start of the London Olympics in 2012. The vehicle for the story is Britain’s iconic unarmed police force, the famous British “Bobby”. This is because the first duty of government is to protect its people and the Bobbies dispensing justice are the frontline of that defence. In 2009, as a British government official, I set out to sell British justice as a global good. Over a fifteen-year period I witnessed British justice back home being systematically hollowed out. This serialised book explains how and why. Each chapter’s narrative introduces an amusing anecdote that links to dark current affairs.

Existing subscribers will get a five-minute read every fortnight or so. I won’t clutter your in-tray or describe anything gruesome. Think of this note as a Preface to a book. The book will be published here, in fortnightly chapters. These ‘Original Notes’ will try and link today’s policing issues with their origins. They will also link street policing with the global rule of law which, you may have noticed, is under attack. They will seek to illuminate the relationship between everyday crime-fighting and global issues like ‘illicit financial flows’ and the defence of democracy.

These ‘Original Notes’ are for everyone. We all do policing. Parents police their children, managers police their staff, colleagues police each other and all of us start policing as kids, at school and at play. From an early age, we make up rules and learn what happens when these are broken. We learn about fairness and justice and their opposites. We learn these ideas before we learn the words that describe them, we learn them before anything else.

As we grow up we gain skills for ‘policing’ our own lives: getting information from talking to people, investigating when things have gone wrong, searching for stuff that’s missing, researching data online. Policing is something we all have to do, to some extent, in our daily lives.

My perspective on policing may help in daily life, it may help make sense of the news, which talks about policing all the bloody time. Sorry about that, but sometimes swearing is appropriate and the way policing is treated by the British media is swear-inducing. I’m an expert on policing, not as a spectator but in the arena, as an operational police officer. I stress though, I’m just an expert, not the expert. I will refer to the writings of other British experts such at Dom Adler, Iain Donnelly, Jeff Harris, Jonathan Sutherland, Graham Wettone, please point me to other experts whose views make sense to you.

I like experts, I can’t get enough of them, to paraphrase a British politician . I’m British by the way, but these ‘Original Notes’ are also based on 15 years as a globe-trotting ‘rule of law’ consultant, after I left the police, so there will be something for everyone (I hope).

Policing lacks an agreed definition but I quite liked a recent response to a post on Dom Adler’s excellent policing blog , I am obliged to ‘Boris’, whoever he is, who commented that policing was needed when:

'Something is happening that shouldn't be happening and would someone please make it stop?’

Normally, an ordinary person becomes the ‘someone’ who stops the ‘something’, but when it gets abnormal, chaotic or terrible sometimes you have to call the actual police. When that happens, you want the police RIGHT NOW. You also don’t want any old police, you want the best possible police. You want police who can deal with, well, anything. Robert Peel, quoted at the beginning, could not list everything the police would be called upon to deal with, so he established nine Peelian principles which expanded on the public/police concept. For you the call is serious, it’s your top priority. For you it is never a ‘petty’ crime or ‘trivial’ dispute, you hope it will be handled in a principled, ethical manner.

For the police who turn up it is not just a job, it is ‘The Job’, that is what police call their profession. As a society, we need the best possible police because:

"The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens," (attributed to both Gandhi and Jimmy Carter).

Who in society works with our weakest and most helpless citizens? This job falls to the police, so, how we treat the police determines how those citizens get treated. Many people who encounter the police at an ‘incident’ are only temporarily ‘weak’ or ‘helpless’. It might be you. You might be vulnerable, temporarily, the victim of a crime, a crash, a physical or mental illness; or this has happened to someone close to you. How will your police treat you?

I was proud to work in the Metropolitan Police, the home of the legendary unarmed ‘bobby’ and that byword for detective excellence ‘Scotland Yard’. In 2010 British policing was viewed as the ‘gold standard’ of global policing. Police managers from all over the world crowded our police colleges and headquarters to find out how we did it, as they had for years. Somehow British policing is not viewed the same way now as it was then:

'Something happened to British policing that shouldn't have happened. It is still happening now and someone needs to stop it.

My motivation for all this is therefore driven by the current drive for police reform in the UK and the global attack on the rule of law and democracy.

People now think that policing needs reform, but then, they always did. Policing always needs reform. Society wears its police on their sleeve and society keeps changing, so the police must change too. Also, everyone has a view about police reform, which is fine, everyone should have a view.

In the first three decades of this history (1980 to 2010) reform led to progress. British police reform in the eighties, led to the eradication of significant corruption. In the nineties computerisation radically reformed police effectiveness. In the noughties radical reform of legislation saw a new multi-agency approach and a brand-new ability to attack the proceeds of crime, a progressive step away from mere incarceration.

Then came the biggest reform of all in the 2010s. A radical experiment to politicise British policing, cut its funding and weaken the rule of law across the board. Now we are mid-way through the 2020s, seemingly trying to reform a weakened, vilified institution without recognising that something happened to British policing that shouldn't have happened.

I will keep talking about financial investigation, corruption and international organised crime and I will link these to everyday crime and policing. This is also a sort of diary, dipping into experiences over the last forty, forty-five years, more or less chronologically, and tagging them to what is happening now.

I want to take you on a journey, five minutes at a time. Every couple of weeks a five-minute history will arrive by email. The tales will be short and often quite funny. I will try to link them to topical issues. I am hoping it will be a book, eventually, and I would really like you to comment, so I can include your views. I really value comments. I will read them all and reply and amend my own posts if I agree with you. So, hit that ‘Comment’ button, you know you want to.