Goodbye, Sir Ian Blair – we won’t miss you

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights pressure group Liberty; the families of the Soham murder victims, whom he offended; many of his own assistant commissioners and deputies, including Tarique Ghaffur (alleged victim of racism) and Brian Paddick (unavoidably detained in the jungle); the media; Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney-general whose calls he bugged; anyone from the Brazilian embassy; and above all, of course, Boris Johnson, who did what less brave politicians only muttered in private, and forced Sir Ian out.

In many ways, the Met under Sir Ian has done rather well, with officers up and most crimes down. Despite Mr Ghaffur, it has almost certainly never been less racist and less corrupt than it is today. It has done a fine job against terrorism, and without the frightening powers Sir Ian spent so long demanding. Even teenage knife killings may, just may, be slowing: there has been only one in the past two months.

But the paradox of Sir Ian's time, and one of the reasons he went, is that the Met doesn't quite feel like the success it is. As applications for the new Commissioner close, how should he or she improve the force and bring the perception of the Met more into line with the reality?

Some of the lessons from Sir Ian are obvious enough. Police chiefs have to be highly politically skilled, without (and this is part of the skill) looking overtly political. Sir Ian got it the wrong way round: he was overtly political, without being at all politically skilled.

So, please, no more acting as an auxiliary party whip for this or any other government when it has an unpopular bill to pass. No more personally-authored articles for The Sun on the day of the crucial vote, urging rebel MPs into line. What we need is a solid, reassuring figure who talks about, well, crime.

That, however, is the easy part. Trickier is the broader relationship between the police and the law-abiding public, which has somehow gone wrong, to the great detriment of both. It used to be thought that policing was everyone's responsibility - in the words of Robert Peel, founder of the Met, "The police are the public and the public are the police."

Now, however, the web of social support for the police has weakened. Adults and informal authority figures such as bus drivers or school caretakers challenge misbehaviour less. We now see the maintenance of social order as we see the maintenance of cars - something best left to the specialists. But the specialists, the police, can't possibly cope on their own.

Partly this change in outlook comes from us. We are simply (and rightly) more afraid to challenge misbehaviour: we might get hurt. But it also comes from above. We have been discouraged from social intervention by the state - and by the police.

Thanks to New Labour's legislative mania, and desperation for new things to tell the tabloids, borderline nuisances which might often still be better handled informally have become matters for the grinding mechanisms of the law and courts. The whole category of "anti-social behaviour" and the vast, mostly ineffective, superstructure of the Asbo is a classic example.

The discretion of the police has been unduly restricted, and they must often now follow fixed procedures all the way into charging and court. There are reasons for this - discretion was sometimes abused - but the truncheon has swung too far in the opposite direction.

That can be the reason why you read that some have-a-go-hero is the one that ends up getting charged, not the toe-rag he's trying to stop. The police don't always want to do that but the system doesn't always give them a choice.

More discrimination is also needed between the genuinely criminal and the basically law-abiding. "Zero tolerance", in the half-hearted way we apply it here, has often come to mean the prosecution of easy targets for trivial things (children fighting in school playgrounds, say) while more important but wilier criminals get off.

As much as anything else, all this creates even more work for the police. Not only has New Labour given them too many forms to fill in, it has (often with their enthusiastic agreement) given them too many new laws to enforce.

One other thing about the Met is that, intentionally or otherwise, it presents a far more threatening face to the public than it used to. Even though its officers are less likely to to use excessive violence than before, their standard-issue body-armour and dangling weaponry makes them look intimidating.

Police officers in far tougher places than London, including most American cities, do not routinely wear flak jackets. I am not sure it was necessary to move away from the concealed "Met vest" worn under the shirt, which protected the officer and preserved a civilian appearance.

Thankfully, the new regime at City Hall is turning its back on Whitehall policing machismo. The MPA has just rebuffed plans by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, to give vastly more officers Taser stun-guns, since there is no evidence for her claim that these dangerous weapons are the "tools the police need". Actually, assaults on London police have fallen by 11 per cent in three years.

And for all Ms Smith's insistence that the new Commissioner will be her choice, Boris will in practice exercise great power here, too. No one will want the job without assuring themselves of the Mayor's support.

We need a new Commissioner who wants to repair relations between police and public, make the Met less threatening and, with Johnson, to rebuild, where possible, the network of informal authority figures who help maintain order (such as the conductors on Boris's new buses).

The next few weeks will be London's chance to decide whether we change the way we're policed or whether we are doomed to repeat Sir Ian Blair's mistakes.