What's going wrong with the police?

Exposure therapy at YAM Elvington

To the shock and surprise of absolutely nobody, the Manchester synagogue attacker, Jihad Al-Shamie, was known to the police, and his father is an out-and-proud Hamas supporter. It’s highly likely the police could have prevented this attack, but they’re too busy locking people up for posting spicy memes. In particular, the notorious “Fuck Hamas” meme I posted last week.

Originally created by @BlairIsInTheAir, the meme has taken on a special relevance today. It was written in 2023 as a message to the hate marchers whose incitement culminated in the killing we saw yesterday in Manchester. This kind of thing happens against a backdrop of genocidal rhetoric, wilful disinformation and slander.

The police, in my view, could and should have acted to curtail the activities of hate marchers, especially those who converged on Jewish schools and synagogues. These hate marches are more a show of force, designed to intimidate, and go well beyond the realms of what can be considered legitimate protest.

I would also venture that if North Yorkshire Police has a “hate team” with so much time on its hands that it can trawl through my “offensive” tweets, then it should offer its services to neighbouring police forces with large Moslem populations - and that way they stand a serious chance of detecting Islamists and preventing further atrocities.

Bizarrely, though, when the police are called out to an Islamist attack, it transpires they are just as likely to shoot Jews dead as the terrorists, so it’s worth asking what are the police are actually for? They’re not preventing terrorism or patrolling the streets, they’re not arresting shoplifters or investigating bike theft, and they’re certainly not protecting women and girls, so exactly are they doing? What are we paying these morons for?

This got me pondering just how policing in Britain got this bad. This is where being a blogger comes in handy in that you have a database of all your opinions going back several years. I recall noting in 2014 that local policing was facing an overall collapse. Back then, I lived in Bristol and noted how twenty seven police stations across Somerset were due to close. Even the central police station in central Bath was closed.

I remarked “With Bath, a city in its own right with its own policing needs, losing its own police station and instead being served by Keynsham near Bristol, much of a police officers time will either be spent processing criminals or making the 30 minute journey between the two cities. Criminal lawyer Ed Boyce said the move could turn police into “expensive taxi drivers”. That is exactly how I see it”. I noted:

Bath Police Station is a main station in the very centre of Bath, near to a very busy railway station. Under the plans anyone arrested, instead of being held in Bath, will be taken to one of three new “police centres” at Bridgwater, Keynsham and Patchway (not within walking distance of any major population centre), which house “custody suites” - even though stations with perfectly adequate “custody suites” are to be closed.

Sue Mountstevens, Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner, said “the new police centres would enable officers to serve people better”. Which people exactly? Certainly not the vulnerable people that police thugs lock up for speaking out of turn, and certainly not the taxpayer.

I further remarked:

“But this is about more than just bean counting. This is about a retreat from our neighbourhoods. The excuse used is that police have faced cuts since 2008 but in reality, this has been the direction of travel for a very long time. It has been happening so slowly that few have noticed. It is only now that local and central police stations are closing for good, being sold or demolished, coinciding with the opening of police fortresses like Patchway, that the retreat is visible.

Rather than policing being integral to the community, policing is now abstract to the community - and is set only to get worse. The policing tactics now more resemble an occupying force, similar to that of the Iraq occupation. We will now have central heavily defended police barracks with flex-squads sallying out at night to do snatch operations - probably to arrest people who said the wrong things on Twitter.

Oh boy, did I call it or what? Go on, you can say it. Pete North was right (again, and as usual). This is precisely what happened to me last Thursday. I was bundled into a snatch wagon (pictured) and driven across the county to Harrogate because all the local police stations have been mothballed or placed on a regime of restricted opening hours. We have completely abolished local policing. Cage vans have now become standard because they are, essentially, mobile police stations with a detention cell in the back.

I would venture that this transformation of the force, along with the imposition of endless red tape and bureaucracy has made the job untenable for anyone with an honest desire to serve the public - and consequently, we are left with dead-eyed drones doing the job with no adult supervision. This is what makes the police so incompetent and dangerous.

This, though, is only one component of a broader collapse. The justice system is also collapsing. Hundreds of magistrates courts have closed and now all the work is funnelled through courts in major cities, adding to the backlog. Between 2010 and 2019, over half the courts across England and Wales were closed. We have a bloated state seeking to do more of what it shouldn’t and less of what it should. This is how civil society collapses.

This is a point I put to Sir Alec Shelbrooke MP this afternoon. I met with him to discuss my arrest last week. He is already on the case and takes this as seriously as I do. Understandably, he will not intervene in an active police incident, nor would I ask him to, but there are still serious questions that must be asked about police command level decision-making - not least why they’re choosing to waste their resources arresting people for memes, but also why they’re using cage wagons to arrest vulnerable people for non-violent alleged offences.

I was extremely encouraged by Sir Alec’s response. He’s a very sharp guy. I didn’t need to elaborate on anything or labour any points. He completely gets it. I am also told he is a founder member of the FSU. A good guy to have in your corner - and exactly what I want in an MP. My next step is to put in an official police complaint. I’ve already been on with the FSU and will be consulting with professional legal advice soon. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Speaking more broadly, this is a subject to which I will return. I have already sketched out the basics of a policing policy on The Manifesto Project but this latest refresher course in police ineptitude demands that I revisit it at the first opportunity. The deterioration is far worse than even I imagined.