“BRITISH policing has lost its way” – the opening words of a damning new report on how an increasingly woke police force is damaging public confidence.
I would go further: British policing has lost its mind.
The new report by the influential think-tank Policy Exchange calls on the service to get back to basics.
It claims there is too little leadership, an abandonment of the core principles of policing, and that some crimes such as burglary and theft have effectively been decriminalised.
This is a sentiment the Government claims is strongly shared by Home Secretary Priti Patel.
She agrees that “traditional policing and making our streets safer” should be the priority for officers.
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Tough-on-crime platitudes are all well and good but policing priorities have strayed so far from where they should be that the Home Secretary should send out a search party for the values and principles which once underpinned our police force.
Impartiality has been eroded and public confidence is on a knife edge in spite of police funding continuing to increase.
In 2015, overall funding was £12billion.
Over the next year, policing will receive £17billion, including a seven per cent boost on last year.
But while funding is going up, this new Policy Exchange report shows confidence in the force is plummeting.
According to YouGov, the number of people who think the police are doing a good job has fallen from 70 per cent in July 2019 to 52 per cent just three years later.
In the capital, the situation is worse.
The Mayor’s own data shows that fewer than half of Londoners think the police are doing a good job there.
On top of this, recent polling by news website CapX found that nearly double the number of people agree that “the police are more interested in being woke than solving crimes” than disagreed.
What a damning indictment of how identity politics has infiltrated our forces.
We are paying for criminal justice and getting too much social justice.
The mere presence of a bobby was once enough to strike fear into the hearts of local criminals.
Now the police are more likely to send criminals into fits of laughter as they parade around in rainbow-painted cars, preoccupied with pronouns and offensive tweets.
When officers took the knee at a BLM demonstration in 2020 to prove they were “anti-racist”, you’d have thought the public backlash sent a strong message: With so much crime around, we want arrests, not activism.
The way to actually show that black lives matter is to stop black kids stabbing each other in the streets — something the police cannot get a handle on.
But it didn’t stop at race.
Over the past two years, rarely a month has gone by when officers haven’t been pictured parading around like activists, clearly unfazed by much of the public now seeing them as a national embarrassment.
Police teams were pictured clad in rainbow hats and LGBTQ+ face paint, dancing the Macarena at the Lincoln Pride Festival last week.
Any passer-by would have been forgiven for thinking they were walking past a children’s birthday party.
Then there’s the absurd amount of police resources wasted recording so-called “non-crime” hate incidents.
This is where anything is said or done to someone which the person perceives has happened because of their race or another protected characteristic.
The number of such incidents recorded by police runs into six figures.
But they don’t even meet the threshold of being crimes.
The police continue to waste time dealing with issues which are offensive, but not offences.
Over the past few years, our bobbies have stood by as public statues have been torn down by activist mobs, as neanderthal climate catastrophists have glued themselves to things and blocked roads, and turned up at people’s doors for “offensive” tweets they posted.
They’ve become less a police force and more a police farce.
We need whoever is the Home Secretary this time next week, when a new Prime Minister is chosen, to ensure the Conservatives live up to their claim of being the “party of law and order”.
If they don’t, we might as well get used to the nickname “lawless Britain” — because that’s exactly what policing in this country is ensuring we’ll become.
NOTTING Hill Carnival took place over the bank holiday weekend.
Dating back to the 1960s, it’s a two million-strong congregation of revellers celebrating Caribbean culture.
Although the vast majority of attendees are well-behaved and decent, common scenes include scantily clad girls twerking and dubious young men on the prowl.
Sadly, there is also violence.
This year, that entailed a murder, six stabbings, 74 injured policemen and women and more than 200 arrests (including 33 for possession of weapons).
Should it be any surprise, then, that I have no interest in going to the carnival?
It’s assumed that just because I’m young and black that this is “my scene”, and that I’m a prude and killjoy for shunning the event.
The thing is, I quite like not being surrounded by drunk, rowdy, sweaty, half-naked adolescents; I quite like not going home smelling of second-hand cannabis; and I quite like not having to look over my shoulder for fear of being assaulted.
IF someone said I was so clever I reminded them of Albert Einstein, or so divine I was like Jesus, I’d take the compliment, but would I go around boasting about it?
Absolutely not – because I’m not a raging narcissist.
Meghan Markle clearly has no such narcissism filter.
In a new round of painfully cringeworthy interviews, she has boasted that South Africans have likened her impact on public life to that of Nelson Mandela.
Except one is a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in a tiny prison cell for fighting apartheid.
Another is an opportunist who has spent years basking in self-pity as she lives a dream life as a duchess in a Californian mansion.
Slightly different.
If mass public condemnation doesn’t shame Meghan into realising how ludicrous that was, this should: Nelson Mandela’s own grandson has criticised Markle, saying her legacy is nothing like the great freedom fighter’s.
The fact Meghan even needs this saying is yet another reason in a long list why she needs to really take some lessons in how to not be such a deluded egomaniac.
WHEN the plan was announced to send male asylum seekers crossing the Channel for processing in Rwanda, I said it could be a stroke of genius as far as deterrents go.
“Could” was the key word, as the plan would inevitably face backlash, outcry and legal challenges before the planes even warmed up on the Tarmac.
I’ve lost faith in the Rwanda plan ever getting off the ground, adding to my woes about a hopeless Home Office.
But, credit where credit is due – the Home Secretary has hatched another plan which looks hopeful.
After it revealed that between 50 and 60 per cent of migrants crossing the Channel were Albanian and therefore not fleeing a war-torn country, the Home Office has said it will draft in Albanian police to help.
They will cross-check migrants’ fingerprints with Albanian criminal databases – and identify and swiftly deport those migrants with sketchy records not “conducive to the public good”.
Perhaps similar piece-meal deals with other nations might work better than the grand Rwanda plan.
At this point, the British people will take any small win over nothing, because precisely nothing is what has been happening for far too long.
POLICE are yet to find the killer of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who tragically died after a gunman forced his way into her Liverpool home last week and fatally shot her as he chased another convict.
Police believe the incident may be linked to gang violence.
I cannot see how, once Olivia’s killer is eventually found, anything other than a whole life term can be justified.
I fear the day her killer is brought to justice and those dreaded sentencing words “life with a minimum of” are read out.
The bare minimum her poor family deserves is to know that whoever did this will never ever be allowed out of prison.
We already hand down abysmally short sentences for those who hurt and kill children.
Surely justice can only be served when people who kill innocent children are locked up for life.
YOU will seldom meet a woman who has not at some point had a huge crush on Titanic heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio.
So many ladies will welcome the news he is now on the market after splitting with his latest model girlfriend Camila Morrone.
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However, if your birth year begins with a 19, you can forget it – because the 47-year-old has never publicly dated a woman aged over 25.
I can’t be the only one who thinks Leo’s dating pattern is slightly creepy.
He might like to consider that the reason he has a catalogue of failed relationships is because all his girlfriends look so young they would be asked for ID trying to buy a set of cutlery.
