The police should prevent crime, not just respond to it
By the time an officer is filling out paperwork on a crime in the office, the law and the police have already failed in their aim.
2020 was not the best year for the police, who gained the reputation of liberty-limiters among lockdown sceptics, and, within ‘BLM’ ranks, as conductors of institutional racism.
Even the most ardent supporters of the institution tend to forget its true purpose.
Recently, David Kurten, leader of the Heritage Party, and a member of the London Assembly, wrote that ‘The job of the police is to catch real criminals, not to threaten and intimidate people for meeting their friends and family.’
There is, of course, no disputing the second clause — but the first is quite wrong. The police are not paid merely to catch criminals once a crime has been committed, but to deter said criminals from acting unlawfully in the first place.
The first of Sir Robert Peel's Policing Principles made this quite clear: ‘To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.’
And quite right, too. As I wrote in our fifth print issue:
‘What good is a police officer once a crime has already been committed? He might be able to conduct minor first aid and take notes to be filed at the office, but he cannot unrob or unstab a victim.
‘By the time an officer is filling out paperwork on a crime in the office, the law and the police have already failed in their aim. The presence, on the streets, of police officers should have deterred the criminal from breaking the law in the first place.’
This strikes at the heart of the problem of modern policing. Crime isn’t prevented today not because there aren’t enough officers (there are more per head of population — not just in total — than in the years of proper patrolling), but because the officers we do have are doing the wrong thing.
The Prime Minister skips over this problem when he ‘promises’ 20,000 more police officers (useless if they’re not regularly patrolling, which they won’t be), and conservatives do a disservice to their side when they too flunk on the basics, and forget what the police are there for altogether.
