Ah, the last days of summer. Long evenings, sunny weekends, and crusty Extinction Rebellion hippies blocking arterial traffic lanes to the audible grinding of teeth from the police officers tasked with standing by and politely watching their sub-art-school amdram productions, rather than getting on with the business of giving them a much-needed hosing down with Boris’s water cannons.
As Charlie Peters has pointed out for the Mail, the impression of police impotence has nothing to do with the willingness of the bobby on the beat to break out a truncheon and apply it liberally to the thorax of middle-class graduates enjoying their day off by making everyone else late for work.
Instead, their natural inclination towards robust enforcement of the law is being held in check by red-tape and lawyerly wrangling, and by the tacit support of their superiors for Extinction Rebellion’s ‘important cause’.
It’s no wonder officers find themselves in trouble when the rules are so inconsistent
It’s natural for the police to want to stay on the good side of public opinion, but looking over the last year it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the upper echelons spend more time trying to triangulate their position in the political game than they do actually enforcing the law.
When Black Lives Matter dominated the political conversation, Chief Constables said
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