Tonight:
4°c
I am a privileged citizen. I have a law officer on almost permanent duty outside my door.
He may stray 50 yards up and down the street but he is rarely out of my sight, employed at my expense, uniformed and with gadgets and phones at the ready. I should feel very secure.
I do not. The reason is that he is no ordinary policeman but one who is rightly regarded as an enemy of the people.
He has residents perpetually looking out of their windows at him, nervously consulting their watches and frequently sending cheques to the council in payment of what, in most world cities, would be seen as bribe money.
This policeman never smiles or greets passers-by. He never offers to help and is uninterested in muggers, pickpockets, burglars, litter-louts, drunks or lost souls.
His sole concern is to suppress one near harmless lapse of public order, illegal parking, which he does with a petty ruthlessness that is close to obsessive.
Of the tens of thousands of offences thus detected each year, less than one per cent is probably deliberate.
Yet more of London's human resources spent on visible law and order go on fighting this single offence than all others put together. It is absurd.
Meanwhile, if we are to believe the O'Connor report on the policing of last April's G20 protest, the "real" police are cooped up in barracks waiting for a rumble and someone to thump.
Given the bad publicity that has long attached to the Met's riot squad, renamed the Territorial Support Group (TSG), it is astonishing that it can still behave as it did to a small bunch of protesters in the City of London last spring. It was clearly out of control.
O'Connor is a wily policeman who knows where bodies are hidden in the murky world of modern policing. He duly criticised the command and control of the TSG.
He criticised the "confusing and difficult to implement" kettling tactic. He criticised the removal of identification numbers by squad members.
O'Connor also pointed out that modern electronic surveillance cuts both ways. Just as the police could watch and film protesters, so the protesters could film the police and hold them to account both at law and before public opinion.
Thus pictures of London officers armoured to the teeth and lashing out at defenceless people were instantly flashed round the world.
The TSG was thus converted into an institutional smear campaign against the liberal reputation of the capital.
In a nutshell, said O'Connor, if the police do not change their stance from battling with protesters to facilitating the "freedom to protest", then public consent for their activities would be withdrawn, leading to "another sad erosion of the basis of British policing".
The trouble is that neither O'Connor nor anyone else has a solution. The last head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair, was a distinguished policeman who tried, but clearly failed, to reform it.
He followed similar steps taken by equally able predecessors, and is succeeded by Sir Paul Stephenson, who also claims to want reform.
Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens in the Met, an introverted freemasonry surviving from the dark ages of London government. The Met is not a local constabulary but a Home Office private militia.
It works to performance targets fixed by the Home Secretary, largely determined by the requirements of his or her public image.
A sure sign is the plethora of political operations with gimmicky titles, as in Operation Hawk, Operation Blunt 2, Operation Trident and Operation Payback, each an excuse for putting senior cops behind desks and taking junior ones off the beat.
Thousands of officers are currently diverted from police work to swoop in vans on children leaving schools, parks and playgrounds to frisk them for knives, finding virtually none.
As long as the target is for stops, searches and arrests (rather than knives), that is what happens, especially if you're not white.
Any journey round central London reveals clusters of yellow-jacketed officers gathered like wasps round a honey-pot, either conducting some "operational" search or just waiting for something to happen.
This will never improve until control of London's police is emphatically remitted to local control.
Until 2000, the Met was under the sovereignty of the Home Secretary for "reasons of national security".
Not since Roy Jenkins in the 1960s did a Home Secretary make any effort to clean it up or support chief officers who wanted to do so.
After 2000 the Met passed to the Mayor, in uneasy harness with the Home Secretary for reasons that were entirely to do with Whitehall control freakery.
Apart from offering to spend more money on the police to do what they should have been doing already, which is to patrol, the mayoralty has made little difference.
The one successful reform that came to London law and order in the 1990s was the institution of borough commanders and a paltry return of beat policing.
But the numbers involved, less than a third of the force, and the continued reluctance of officers to walk the streets on their own and thus meet the public means that citizens see little result.
Beat policing, regarded by Londoners as holding the key to a sense of public safety, is now delegated to quasi-civilian support officers and security guards.
Meanwhile the boroughs themselves recruit a city-wide army of wardens, in effect as informal tax-gatherers.
The City of Westminster now collects more income from parked cars than from taxpayers. The wardens are the most public face of local government in London, yet they illustrate only a money-grubbing impotence.
The biggest recent failure of law and order in London is the growth of violent gangs, cause of the surge in gun and knife crime and the terrorising of council estates and schools.
This cannot be cured by some Home Office "operation", any more than domestic terrorism can be cured by the Brigade of Guards in Helmand.
It requires meticulous neighbourhood intelligence of the sort that vanished from the Met when its officers disappeared into cars in the 1960s.
Borough commander should be the highest rank in the Met below commissioner.
Local voters should be able to choose the priorities of their local police through borough councils enjoying some discretion over operational policy.
They should have other sources of income than parking tickets, so wardens can be retrained as neighbourhood "eyes and ears".
Pigs should also fly. Nothing will happen, except the image of the London bobby will change from a smiling officer in a helmet to a riot cop beating a member of the public. And I am left with my traffic warden.
Reader views (5)
James, Chester UK
Gosh, James, aren't we lucky to have your Chester expertise to tell us , in London, what we should think.
I know it is a bit hard for you to understand but the use of the Traffic Warden in the story was synbolic of what has happened (which of course you know at first hand living in Chester?).
By the way The Tamils were treated with kid gloves by the police. After all they are not English and the police could be done for descrimination if they roughed them up.
But thanks, Jimmy boy, you really put Mr Jenkins down with your pithy Chester irony.
- Minnie Ovens, London, UK, 20/07/2009 15:47
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You must be an embittered person if you view your attitudes towards the police based on one officer, of course you are entitled to an opinion just like us all.You said the "real police" are in cooped up in thier barracks waiting for a rumble and for someone to thump, well in never seen or heard that when the tamils invaded westminster making thier illegal protests for weeks on end, come to think of it there was hardly any media coverage at all.
- James, Chester UK, 20/07/2009 14:47
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It seems Mr Jenkins from your article, your only experience of the Met is the traffic warden who operates where you live(which is obviously in central London) and what you saw in the media about the G20 protests. Most Met officers, certainly at the rank of constable to inspector, are among the hardest working people around, whether they be walking a beat, responding to emergencies(yes- in cars because thats the quickest way!!) or Detectives investigating crime. Your perception is based on your experiences but if you stepped out into the real London you'd see that real Police work is done every day by Police officers. In fact, if you stepped into most pubs where ordinary people drink, they'd agree with me, not your article. You're not far wrong about the senior officers and politicisation of the job but it is people of your profession who have given us our reputation. You all write about our profession as though you are experts and most of you have no clue what our job entails.You think you are in touch with the public but you are not, in fact you will never be any where as in tune as any front line Police officer. You've clearly no idea what the real London or the real world is like. Worst still, you don't want to know.
- Metpc, London, 20/07/2009 14:47
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You cannot judge policing in London by one traffic or parking warden plonked outside S J's house. There are serious accountability issues and failings but many factors historical and modern are missed in this pieces - the old GLC Police Committee, the borough wide Consultative Groups established since the mid 80's. The Eighties efforts by many London Labour Councils to increase police accountability. The above developments have had only very limited influence but they cannot be ignored from the discussion.
- Ian Cameron, london, 20/07/2009 14:47
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Amen to that. It's not just the Home Office that are to blame - there are great swathes of police officers closeted in silos at New Scotland Yard who have made a career out of political manoeuvring and have no concept of real policing. They are only interested in kissing the backsides of politicians in order to progress their careers.
All of the bad publicity around the Met and poor decisions made by the Met are a result of initiatives dreamed up in those central silos. Sack the lot of them and, as Simon says, make Borough Commander the highest rank in the Met below Commissioner.
- James Baker, Bromley, 20/07/2009 14:47
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