Police

The past decade has not been kind to those we entrust, in the words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000, with too many choosing to leave the force owing to physical and emotional assaults in a stressed and underfunded job. I can sympathise, because I had to step away from the front line and the job I loved three years ago. At the time, friends and family repeatedly asked me why I felt I had to leave. Set against the latest news of escalating assaults on police, I’m not so

On Monday, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Munster Square in Camden. A Witness reported seeing three men ‘screaming and laughing’ as they chased him with a machete. The poor kid apparently sought refuge in a house, banging on the door and pleading for help, but his pursuers were close behind him. A couple of days before, across town in Leyton, a police officer had been attacked with a machete after trying to stop a van. PC Stuart Outten was slashed across his head and hand but courageously resisted the attack and survived. In Tottenham, a week before, an 89-year-old woman was reportedly raped and murdered in her

Is it a crime to mock a criminal’s unfortunate hairstyle? Police in South Wales seem to think so. Last week, Gwent Police posted on Facebook calling for any information on the whereabouts of 21-year-old Jermaine Taylor, a convicted drug dealer from Newport who had breached his license conditions. They put up the obligatory mugshot, in which Taylor sports his one-of-a-kind do – completely bald on top, two vertical, wispy columns of hair in the back. Facebook users proceeded to rinse him for all he was worth, with thousands of jokes, memes and puns. ‘Who done his hair? Moses?’, said one user, nodding to Taylor’s Red Sea-style parting. ‘Barber: “What you after bro?” Jermaine: “You know Joleon

Poppycock Sir: Last week’s lead article (‘Boris begins’, 27 July) suggested that if we leave without a deal, ‘the Johnson government will have another huge challenge on its hands — how to avert large-scale economic damage’. I have some experience of the conduct of economic policy, and I hope you will forgive me for saying that this is poppycock. Leaving the EU without a trade deal will cause some short-term disruption, but the essence of good government is to do what is best for the medium and long term, whatever the short-term difficulties. And although the main purpose of Brexit is political — i.e. self-government — the economic consequences will be hugely positive,

Support for stop and search Sir: Mary Wakefield is rightly exasperated by fatuous comments over police use of stop and search (‘Stop posturing over stop and search’, 29 June). Perhaps this year there will be 200 murders of children by other children. Swamping areas with police is obviously a visible response to the problem, but gangs know there is a reluctance to stop and search and this is part of the reason for their arrogant attitude. Stop and search is street policing in the raw. It often leads to arrest, and it can be a messy, frustrating, confrontational business, even when done with tact and patience. As a Met PC

We are extremely good at accusing others of doing the very thing we excel at. A case in point: we rightly criticise the Chinese government with its dystopian surveillance and social score systems, when we are considering building something similar. In a recent episode of BBC Click, journalist Geoff White followed the police’s pilot of live facial recognition technology. (The Metropolitan Police are running a number of pilots). In one chilling moment, a man walked past the facial recognition cameras and covered his face. The police stopped him, forced him to uncover and then took a photograph of him anyway. ‘This gives us grounds to stop and verify him,’ one

It is 25 years since Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a London suburb, solely because he was black. The subsequent Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, chaired by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, which I helped to compile, uncovered in this particular case, ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police. That carefully chosen wording has been misquoted ever since. We did not say that police were institutionally racist, as if it were official police policy to stigmatise black people. It was — and clearly still is — more subtle. Institutional racism is the product of unwitting prejudice, ignorance, carelessness, stereotyping and a reluctance to change. That aggregates to a festering prejudice. And it’s widespread.

Today in Britain, some of our poorest communities are under siege from gangs and violent crime – and it can be stopped. It is near impossible for people to realise their potential when they do not even feel safe in their communities and so it is a social justice issue that the Home Secretary is right to weigh in on. Sajid Javid is said to be planning a significant extension of police stop and search. After years of restricting these powers, it’s about time. Javid is far from alone in believing stop and search is part of the answer to dealing with surging knife crime and serious violence. The Centre for

Spring has come to my local park in its usual way. First the magnolias, then the cherry blossom, then the little silver ampules which once held nitrous oxide scattered in the grass. On Sunday the kids appeared, not a gang exactly, more a swarm of teens, angry and unstable. A boy of about 14 raced a moped at breakneck speed around the toddler playground. ‘Can you stop?’ said a brave father. ‘You might run over a child.’ ‘Fuck you,’ said the boy. ‘And I’ll fuck your mother too.’ On the way home, another spring staple: a police helicopter hovering over the Essex Road and below it the remnants of a