One of the great achievements of Western civilisation was the creation in the mid 19^th century by Sir Robert Peel of a police force that was both for the people and made up of the people which it policed and which was strictly enjoined to enforce the law and keep the peace without fear or favour. It can be argued that in recent decades the police have not lived up to the exalted aims of their founder.

The police are now seen as separate from the public to a greater extent than they once were. They rarely live with or among the people that they police and are increasingly seen by a growing number of people as the state’s thuggish enforcers of the state’s narratives of multiculturalism and diversity.

The police are now so separate from the public that it’s getting easier to find people who view the police not as impartial enforcers of the law and preventers of disorder, which they should be, but as those who have abandoned the public and who only turn out when there’s heads to crack for the government. I’ve known enough police officers over the years to know that this is not entirely the truth but it is how the police are being more often than not perceived. The police are giving us the impression that they are never going to be there in any effective form when a home is burgled or a person is robbed but they will turn out mob handed for nonsense or ‘political’ stuff, as they did with me back in 2019, because a high profile Muslim whined to them about something I’d written.

Instead of being ‘us’ although uniformed and with legal powers, they are being increasingly seen as ‘other’ and not a part of ‘us’. The graphic that I’ve pasted below is I believe being used as a method of attack against the police by various patriot and nationalist accounts and is basically telling the police that they are fighting for the wrong side.

‘How do you fucking sleep at night?’ This is a powerful statement appealing to the conscience of officers who are attacking those Britons who are only concerned about the utter chaos and disorder that successive governments have created by Islamopandering, excessive migration, Net Zero, deindustrialisation and a whole host of other terrible policies.

This meme is basically telling officers that the forces they work for are now so alien to the general public and divorced from them, that they should stop and examine their own consciences and leave policing. That might be a good decision for some as it’s likely things will get very bad in Britain and that sooner or later things will get so bad that the government will no longer have the capacity to have the police’s back and when that happens officers and their families, will be on their own. That’s something that the personnel who make up our police should take on board because sooner or later they might, like the Milice who undertook policing operations in Vichy France during WWII, one day be held to account and that holding to account might not be pretty – it certainly wasn’t for the Milice.

There might come a time when the problems in society get so great that the money that the police get paid is not enough to insulate them from the multitude of problems that have been created by our political classes. Police officers might not be immune to the tide of troubles that at present don’t affect them but affect the rest of us. Maybe police officers should decide now, rather than later when it might be too late for them, that they cannot stomach being the state’s bully boys or carry on nicking people because some minority or snowflake is upset about words on a page, on a screen or in the street?

Every incident (and there are many) of police officers acting not in pursuit of crime prevention but merely to pander to those who are for example offended by words, creates a whole lot more people who will no longer give the police the time of day. Every bit of police overreach or dishonesty, every ethical scandal or decision to attack Britons in order to achieve career advancement, creates more people who will not stand with the police when the time comes. It’s certainly I believe having an impact on the public’s trust in the police which has slipped in recent years.

Just look at this video from Paul Joseph Watson of a gaggle of police officers not only going after a Christian street preacher because some snowflake was ‘offended’ by his preaching, but showing an obvious disregard and lack of knowledge of the law. There’s hundreds of incidents like this every day when police officers steam in to silence people over ‘offence’ when the public might be better served by police telling those who are ‘offended’ to grow up and accept differing viewpoints. This sort of stuff increases public contempt for the police and that volume of that contempt is turned up to 11 when it is known that officers like these will not touch an Islamic preacher who may have said similarly ‘offensive’ things.

Every ‘speech crime’ arrest, every bit of police intimidation of members of the public for comments on social media, every new incidence of Islamopandering, every misuse of the law for political reasons all adds up in the minds of the public. It adds up to an increasing sense of ‘us’ the people and ‘them’ the police.

I don’t celebrate where we are with public attitudes to the police. I used to work closely with the police as a court reporter and freelanced for police publications and at one point dated the daughter of a highly respected and admirable police officer (she dumped me as photojournalism required being chained to a pager that could go off at any time including the ‘wrong’ time).

We should never have got where we are today and today’s situation might have been avoided had police forces and their senior management not been overtly and covertly politicised from 1997 onward. We once had police forces that were admired worldwide but now they are little different from the sort of police forces in other nations that we once despised and mocked. We used to feel sorry for those living in lands where policing was overtly political, where the police took political sides in disputes but now we live in one of those lands ourselves and it is highly unpleasant.

The British past is a different country and policing in that country was far from perfect. There was misogyny, overt racism and corruption in police forces, some of which I saw and heard of first hand, but policing was not as it is now highly politicised. Yes, the police would police in the interests of the State as it did during the Miners Strike in the 1980’s but rarely did the police back then go after people for saying stuff that some people might have found ‘offensive’. They rarely went after the ‘civilians’ such as those who expressed spicy opinions, only those involved in extremism, disruption and disturbance. You had to do something to put yourself in the firing line to have police attention and that’s clearly not the situation now. We are all in the firing line of government and police oppression.

Today’s police are caught in the jaws of a vice. On one side they have the general public who are increasingly hostile to the police; especially now that they have lost any pretence of being impartial, a situation that is likely to get worse as time goes by. The other jaw of the vice is the police’s own management.

The ex police officer blogger Dominic Adler has written an article called ‘How the police eats its own’ which goes into the subject of how police over correct after scandals. Following the scandals of Wayne Cousens and the exposure of similar wrong’uns the police over-corrected in their efforts to solve the problems within forces that the scandals had highlighted.

Mr Adler said that all the professional standards people have is a hammer and that every problem to them looks like a nail.

Mr Adler said:

“And so the hammer and nails are brandished for words likely to cause progressive pearl-clutching. As a detective from the British Transport Police discovered, when he was nailed to the barn door for using the word “Pikey” in a private WhatsApp group. Our topsy-turvy police forces appear reluctant to apply zero tolerance principles towards crime — even as the Met admits to employing sex offenders in order to satisfy diversity targets — except when it comes to language. Take, for example, the case of the detective inspector issued a written warning for being disrespectful about dwarves.”

The new culture of every problem being a nail that needs to be hammered has created terrible working environments for ordinary decent police officers. Officers are scared shitless that they may do something or say something that will be taken the wrong way.

On the subject of police professional standards over correcting Mr Adler said:

“Police professional standards departments, detecting the mood music, react accordingly. The Police Federation has pointed out how, from 2022-2025, 100 police officers and staff died of suicide — partly attributable to heavy-handed internal investigations. Then there’s the roll-call of officers thrown under the bus for political expediency — like Pc Lorne Castle, who had the temerity to call a knife-wielding male suspect “a bitch”, Sergeant Rhodri Davies, accused of using disproportionate force against a 6’7” prisoner in custody, or Pc Matthew Pike, charged with causing death by dangerous driving (it was the suspect he was chasing who was driving dangerously, as a jury later found).

Then, if criminal “remedies” fail, the Independent Office for Police Conduct gets a second bite of the cherry by pursuing officers for professional misconduct. Compare such cases with that of the former West Midlands Police chief, Craig Guildford — found to have not only constructed a bogus intelligence case against Israeli football fans, but misled Parliament too. Operational officers go under the prosecutorial bus. Senior cops have “teachable moments”, after which they quietly retire.”

The comparison made by Mr Adler about the differential treatment of senior and junior officers is extremely pertinent and instructive. There seems one law for the senior management team members who push politicised policing, even when this form of policing creates injustices, and another much more harsh law for more junior officers who say the wrong thing or do something that can be taken the wrong way.

I must admit that I’m horrified by Mr Adler’s description of the terrible work environment at a police station in London. Mr Adler said:

“Towards the end of my service, in 2018, the Met resembled the politically-correct dystopia of the Nineties action movie, Demolition Man. It has grown worse. I recently spoke to officers from a busy London police station — they described a Stasi-like atmosphere, with officers looking over their shoulders in case grievance-mongering or oversensitive colleagues misinterpret their words.”

I’m not instinctively anti-police, with my background it would be a difficult thing to be. I know that there are decent officers who joined police forces for the correct reasons, such as serving the public. However these officers have been and are continuing to be let down. They are forced to police in a highly politicised manner and have been trained/brainwashed to do so. This has caused them to be increasingly despised by the general public who no longer see the police as being on their side. This is not being helped by policing that is clearly not on the side of the majority of the general public, such as we’ve seen in how various police forces have handled the issue of the Islamic Rape Gangs and the pro-Hamas hate marches.

Decent police officers might soon have to make a hard decision. Do they leave and sleep better at night knowing that they are no longer required to bash the heads of ordinary British people protesting about migrant rapists or do they stay and hope for the best? Do they stay and live in fear of their own management who will chuck them under the proverbial bus in order to advance their management careers at the earliest opportunity or do they leave and do something normal instead? That’s for individual officers to decide but what’s clear is that things are not going to get better soon. The police will continue to be used against their own people for political ends and individual officers will continue to be treated like shit by their own senior officers.

I would like to see this situation turned around because every society needs effective and fair policing but I can’t see the current situation changing radically without top-down change and that’s not going to happen with the politicians that are currently in control.

Links

Dominic Adler piece

https://dominicadler.substack.com/p/how-the-police-eats-its-own

This 2024 source says that only 56% of Britons have confidence in the police

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-923X.13424