A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without the consent of the people. Tell that to the residents of what was once East Berlin. But that old canard raises a different problem. Which people are giving the consent? The ones who abide by the law, or the ones who are disposed to breaking it?
I wondered about this when I read two stories over the weekend, both of which suggested to me that the police have long since lost the support of that first group of people, that more numerous community, the people who don’t habitually break the law. The first case concerned a nutter on the Tube, somewhere on the Hammersmith and City line, who decided to drop his trousers and underpants and display his pork truncheon to the various women, children and men who were his fellow passengers.
There is a video online of what happened next. A male passenger remonstrates with the bloke and tells him to pull his trousers up. The nutter shouts ‘fuck off’ repeatedly and becomes aggressive – at which point three or four men wrestle him to the ground and out of the train at the next station, pinioning him with his hands behind his back. He is taken into custody by an off-duty copper and decanted into a convenient booby hatch. After the incident, British Transport Police revealed they were investigating the matter with a view to prosecuting the vigilantes for assault. Part of the statement read as follows: ‘The man had been assaulted by a number of other passengers and was initially arrested by an off-duty officer, before being detained under the Mental Health Act and taken to hospital.’
I am assuming you agree with me that it is not OK to drop your drawers and start waving your gremlins around at other passengers on public transport and that the men who intervened did the right thing, even if they were perhaps a little brusque. I would further venture that the nutter was remarkably lucky he didn’t get a good beating. And I suspect most people would agree with this assessment – but not the police. They are once again more interested in preserving the dignity and security of the offender than they are with the sensibilities of the public.
The same applies to the frankly astonishing case of Rob Davies, who owns a retro clothing store in Wrexham called Run Ragged. He put up a notice in his window which read as follows: ‘Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.’ Somebody reported this little sign to the police and, true to form, a couple of dense coppers turned up at his shop and advised him to remove the notice lest it give offence to people.
It seems to me that the police have long since lost the support of people who don’t habitually break the law
Mr Davies told me that he asked the coppers to whom the notice might give offence – shoplifters, for example? He also asked if the police’s view was that shoplifters were not actually scumbags, but did not receive an intelligible answer.
The irony in this particular case is quite exquisite. Mr Davies said that his store had been the target of shoplifters on five occasions so far this year, and on only one occasion did the police turn up to investigate. In that instance they caught the shoplifter and returned to Mr Davies the shirt that had been stolen, but let the thief off without so much as a warning.
The only good news to come out of this is that Mr Davies has rejected the advice to take down his notice – or, rather, he has taken the original scrawled sign down and rewritten it five times the size on a larger piece of paper. He believes – and I agree with him – that the police behaviour in this episode suggests that not only has shoplifting been decriminalised, but that the shoplifters constitute a ‘vulnerable’ community and that their sensibilities should not be disquieted by being called mildly nasty names.
Again, I would suggest that a good 90 per cent of the country would be on Rob Davies’s side in this dispute, just as I would imagine a similar proportion would lament the fact that the coppers no longer give a monkeys about shoplifting. I daresay a few idiots will insist that it is not a crime for the starving to steal to save their lives – and that would seem to be the premise upon which the police operate: that shoplifters are the downtrodden, the poor, the ‘vulnerable’, and that one should give them every inch of leeway available.
Both stories also indicate how our society is breaking down and both stories make life in the UK that little bit more perilous and dismal. The consequence of what happened in the first story is that surely fewer people will be minded to intervene if they see someone committing an illegal act, because they fear that they themselves might end up getting prosecuted by the old bill. And so instead they will sit and watch, rendered passive by a police force which has forgotten the reason it exists.
And in the second case? What you will see is exactly what has happened in those liberal American cities which have more or less officially decriminalised shoplifting. The former streets of commerce will be a vista of boarded-up shopfronts, with countless small enterprises forced out of existence. And as a consequence of that, our economy will show even less inclination of growing.
Like the landlords forced out of business because the fashionable view today is that all landlords are bastards and all renters downtrodden angels and owners of property should therefore not be able to do what they like with their houses, so the shop owners will go bust because we – or our authorities – have decided that shoplifters are nicer than shop owners and should never, ever, be called scumbags.
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