You Know It Makes Sense

The coppers round my part of south London are really pretty good. They chase the occasional burglar; they’re courteous when they come to your door; and if you can get hold of their direct lines or mobiles they’re even better. Last year, my friendly local rozzers did an excellent job of removing a large, noisy gang of criminally inclined hoodies who had taken to congregating on some steps by the estate at the bottom of my garden. This made all the homeowners in my neck of the woods feel much happier and more secure. ‘Hurrah! The police doing their ruddy job for once!’ we all thought.

But stories like that are the exception rather than the rule, aren’t they? It’s like going through US airport security and encountering an immigration officer who doesn’t treat you as if the only reason you’ve come is to kill their president, or ringing a key functionary on your local council and discovering they’re not on extended sick leave: so rare and cherishable a moment that it becomes your staple dinner-party anecdote for months thereafter.

As a typical, nice, reasonably law-abiding middle-class person I find this fact worrying. I’m 43 now, with wife, kids, mortgage and all the trappings. I really should have reached the age and situation where you look on the police as your trusted friends and allies. Instead, I still regard them with the same wariness as I do those frisky Staffordshire terriers being trained by the local drug dealers to kill one another in the park. They seem amiable enough on the surface, but you just never know when they might turn.

Take that woman who was whacked in the face and leg during the G20 protests, or Ian Tomlinson, a news vendor who was knocked down by police and died shortly afterwards of a heart attack.