Why is policing Britain so difficult?
In March this year, YouGov found that fewer than 50 per cent of the public trusted senior police officers. Since then, details have emerged of officers handcuffing Henry Nowak as he lay dying, refusing to respond to his pleas that he had been stabbed – allegedly because his Sikh attacker had accused him of racism. Concurrently, the Casey Review concluded: ‘We have found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Met.’ But it is hard to reconcile claims that the police are institutionally racist, when we hear so many reports of arrests for racist hate speech or social-media posts; or institutionally homophobic, while the police embrace LGBTQ+ ideology and endlessly appear on Pride marches; or institutionally sexist, when women now make up 36 per cent of the force – and rising.
Some argue the issue is a lack of resources. But in 2024, the number of police officers in England and Wales reached an all-time high of 147,745. And while it’s true that official rates of violent crime, burglary and vehicle-related thefts have fallen by nearly 90 per cent from the mid-90s, the public feels as though swathes of the county have been abandoned by policing – as revealed by events in Middlesbrough. Shoplifting seems normalised with the police all too often absent. Even when victims trace stolen items to specific addresses, the police often do nothing. And while many officers must be commended for running into danger to protect the public, the Equality Act requires police forces to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for officers, including working from home for stress or anxiety, leaving already overstretched colleagues to shoulder more frontline work.
One explanation for this seeming disorientation is the accusation that the force has compromised its impartiality and skewed its priorities. Many now believe we have two-tier policing. Like many of our institutions, the police seem to have become bogged down by ideology. As one officer told UnHerd: ‘Senior officers? All they seem to talk about and care about, really, is DEI.’ Police are accused of being soft on certain protests, such as pro-Gaza gatherings, while rounding up those suspected of having ‘far-right’ views.
More sympathetically, police have never been tasked with doing more. They are expected to act as social workers, mental-health responders, safeguarding officers and mediators, often dealing with problems that once fell to families, communities or other public services. Police are even tasked with policing posts on social media, on behalf of offended individuals, which under the pressure of a target-driven results system may represent a much easier win than solving burglaries or serious assaults. Moreover, when police do use effective crime-prevention methods, like stop and search, they are often maligned as discriminating against young black men. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t: the police are criticised both for intruding too far into people’s lives and for failing to be there when they are needed most.
Is British policing being pulled in so many competing directions that it can no longer perform its most basic functions? Why do victims increasingly feel abandoned, while almost every community believes the police are biased against them? And if both the public and the police themselves are losing faith in the system, what would it take to restore trust?
