Here's an Interesting Complaint About British Policing.

I wonder what David Copperfield has to say about it? From The Telegraph, in its entirety:

'Police aware' - but not, apparently, of you and me

By Charles Moore
(Filed: 21/05/2005)

Driving along, you see a car, possibly stolen, abandoned by the side of the road. You slow down to look, perhaps intending to report the vehicle. A piece of paper is stuck on the windscreen which says "POLICE AWARE". This reassures you. But suppose you drive past again next week, and then again next month, and the vehicle is still there, your attitude to the notice changes. If the police are aware, you think, why aren't they doing anything about it?

Gradually, a still more irritating thought dawns. You realise that the police declaration that they are "aware" is considered enough. It is not a prelude to doing something about a crime: it is a substitute for it.

This does not apply only to cars. You or a friend or a family member report a fairly minor but upsetting crime - a bag snatch, a break-in, a drug deal on the corner. Oh yes, you are told, there's a lot of this around, we think we know who's doing it, it's just a matter of getting the evidence. POLICE AWARE.

Sometimes this goes on for years, and with much more serious crimes. Several people I know suffered from a spate of very nasty antique thefts in the South-West. The gang were expert, and violent. They carefully chose elderly people in quite remote places, came in the small hours, and sometimes let off smoke bombs to confuse their victims into thinking their house was on fire. For ages, the police said they knew the large criminal family behind it all, but they were reluctant to close in. They did so only after determined and prolonged protests from rich and influential people in several counties. So how much worse it is for "your poor, your huddled masses".

Again, crime late at night in the West End of London is huge because of the people who go there to get drunk. The police are "aware", of course, but they believe that the problem is so great that their only practical tactic is dispersal of the troublemakers rather than large-scale arrests. An eccentric and brave Westminster city councillor called Ian Wilder has made a habit of photographing crimes being committed. Recently he snapped an attack in which an innocent passer-by died: Wilder's lens captured the poor man lying on the ground. Far from thanking him for his public service, many police were furious at his drawing so much attention to the trouble - POLICE AWARE, but they do not want others to be.

I do not believe this happens because British policemen and women are useless people. Most of the officers one meets try to be helpful and some are outstanding. It is a problem deep in the way public services - not only the police force - are run.

A friend of mine is a police officer at "the sharp end", though, far more often than he wants, he is actually at a desk. The Home Office targets come down to him and his colleagues. They demand, for instance, X numbers of detections per month. So it is hard not to go for those detections that are easy rather than the ones that are most important. And once a force has these targets imposed, it turns inwards upon itself, setting itself targets for its targets, reprimanding people not for failing to go on patrol, but for failing to write the necessary report in the prescribed time.

In real life, explains my friend, the proper pursuit of crime can play havoc with targets. Suppose, to take an extreme example, that the police were after a psychopathic killer of six children. That would require, rightly, huge amounts of money and men but, if successful, it would show up simply as six detections.

All the other detections that were put on one side to concentrate on the crime that mattered most would skew the statistics: so the force that caught the murderer would fail to meet its targets.

My friend and his colleagues were also compelled to do long hours of "community awareness training".

He thinks it is important not to offend ethnic minorities through ignorance, but the area he polices is more than 98 per cent white and so it may not matter very much to know the difference between a Buddhist and a Dravidian. When the police "stop-check" someone in the street, they have to ask them their ethnicity, and send the record to the Home Office. Funnily enough, says my friend wryly, stopping people in these circumstances is not like market research: "Most of them don't want to stand around and have a chat about ethnic issues." You don't get proper answers and so you end up consuming your energies in "a process just to show you're doing it".

Now the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, admits to the Police Federation that his office imposes too much bureaucracy on its members. But this is not the sinner that repenteth so much as the alcoholic who promises to reduce his intake to one bottle of whisky a day. For the fault is not in Mr Clarke's civil servants, or even in Mr Clarke, or even in New Labour (though none of these helps). It's in the system. It's the question of who's boss.

The Met's case is the most extreme. It is accountable to the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, the Community Safety Plan, the Mayor of London, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Home Secretary. So the confusion is complete. The only clear thing is that the Met is not accountable to the public through their votes.

It follows from this, with an iron logic which no amount of personal niceness by individual officers can break, that the public become a nuisance to the police. Their orders don't derive from the public, and no punishment comes from displeasing them. The top jobs come from pleasing Mr Clarke, not the widow cowering behind her window grille or the corner shop owner watching the youths sprinting off with his takings.

That is why the police like to say that it's not crime but the fear of crime that is the problem: it's a polite way of saying that the customer is always wrong. Thus Neighbourhood Watch becomes a bore, private security becomes a menace, concerned citizens who ring the police with information are just clogging up the switchboard, "have-a-go" heroes are breaking demarcation lines. Go away - POLICE AWARE.

They can only say that because they are not answerable to the customer - not in the Met, neither in leafy Surrey, nor in gritty Liverpool, not in the outer Hebrides. From time to time, you see television interviews with American lawmen - a sheriff in Arizona who has chain gangs, a Mr Big from New York who has cut crime in half. They are presented strangely - half-mocking their sheer American-ness, half-admiring their tough talk. But the real point is not that these men are better or worse or braver or cruder than our own: it is that their careers as policemen depend on the communities they serve. Ours don't.

My friend the police officer says that the police need to "find out who the local community are and what they want". How poignant, how tragic, that, for all their efforts, they don't know already. We must be given the power to tell them.

I can't add anything to that.