Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The police have bowed to the mob

A crowd blocks an immigration enforcement team, Peckham

On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail.

The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job.

We cannot have a situation where groups feel they can obstruct the law with impunity

British law enforcement is based on the principle of ‘policing by consent’. This has traditionally meant police forces winning the confidence and trust of the general public so they can pursue their roles with minimal resistance. Over the last five years this code has been gradually updated. Policing by consent increasingly means ‘by the consent of the mob’, with the enforcement of the law dependent on the goodwill of any interest group capable of mustering a crowd.

Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Black Lives Matter and other protest groups have shown that police forces tend to back down when push comes to shove. This in turn has encouraged the adoption of increasingly disruptive tactics. Identical scenes played out last year in Glasgow, when immigration enforcement picked up two men in Pollokshields. A crowd formed, the police backed down, and the SNP had a field day. Nicola Sturgeon slammed the raid ‘on Eid, in the heart of our Muslim community’ – neither man was Muslim – as ‘dangerous and unacceptable’.

This line of reasoning takes as read the principle that the threat of violent disorder is the ultimate determinant of whether or not a law is enforced, abandoning the idea that laws are applied evenly and predictably to all parts of society.

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