Given the complaints recently about “two-tier” policing of crime and disorder in the UK, I thought it worthwhile to set out this summary of the principles of policing as set out by former Home Secretary and reforming British statesman, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), also renowned as founder of the modern Conservative Party (Tamworth Manifesto of 1834), remover of Corn Law tariffs, reformer of banking (with some remaining issues), and general all-round good guy of British history:
1, To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2, To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3, To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4, To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5, To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6, To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7, To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8, To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9, To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
Ideas so crazy they may actually work!
All of them have been inverted and/or perverted beginning from the year 1920.
A modest proposal: go find the head of the London Met Police and tatoo these on his forehead!
I’m an American so maybe my target is not the best, but you get the idea.
And once your tatoo guy does one, the other thousand that are needed will go faster!
If funds are needed, I’ll donate.
Strange, but the entire list reeks of prior restraint as opposed to enforcement of law. There is a difference.
Peter Hitchens argues that the modern police force has been corrupted by the ideas that are taught at universities and training colleges and pushed by the Home Office (no apologies to the people who do not like me pointing out these ideas are from modern Marxism – Herbert Marcuse and co) and there is some truth in what he says.
However, Mr Hitchens argues the cure is a new 100 thousand strong force of police – not seeing that this is exactly the sort of centralised and trained forces that is a natural target for ideological capture.
In parts (parts) of the United States there have long been locally elected county sheriffs with a mixture of volunteer and professional deputies – subject to being hired and fired by the sheriffs who are themselves subject to be hired and fired by the people are election time.
This is a decentralised and democratically accountable system which is much less vulnerable to bureaucratic manipulation and ideological capture.
By the way – from his earliest years in the Senate, Mr Joseph Biden advocated centralised “justice” forces – at both the State and Federal level – he was always an enemy of locally elected sheriffs and of volunteers – ordinary citizens risking their lives to oppose robbery and violent attacks.
@bobby b
That’s an interesting take which had never crossed my mind.
I disagree, but respectfully. Or perhaps don’t disagree, but feel that dissuasion doesn’t count as prior restraint/punishment of thought crime.
I’ve always thought that, for the majority of Americans, the archetypical policeman is a Boston-Irish baton-wielding bruiser or a gun-slinging Watt Earp, whereas for those of us of a certain age in the UK, it’s Dixon of Dock Green. All three archetypes are, of course, partial and misleading but it may explain a difference in attitude.
There is also the basic matter of “what is the law?”
Is “the law” an effort to put in practice the non aggression principle that people and their property should not be violated?
Or is the “the law” any command by the state aimed at, what the state thinks will lead to, the greatest happiness of the greatest number?
Sadly in the United Kingdom both English law and Scottish law have moved from option one (trying to put the into practice the non aggression principle of not violating the persons and property of others) to option two – any command from the state that is for the purpose of what the state thinks will serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
If “law” is just the commands of the state and there is no justice AGAINST the State (both Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham) – then it does not matter what form of policing we have, as there is going to be tyranny.
As the United Kingdom now accepts the position, on what “the law” is, of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham (i.e. the definition of “the law” is the commands of the state) then the natural conclusion is tyranny.
Read the Bill of Rights – not just the United States Bill of Rights (1791), but the Bills of Rights in most American State Constitutions.
This is what Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, or London Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, would consider “nonsense on stilts” or “crime think” (to use the term of George Orwell – who also said that the rifle on the wall in the home of the ordinary working man is the sign of English liberty).
Someone like Police Commissioner Mark Rowley does not accept that there is any such thing as a right AGAINST the state – not Freedom of Speech (which to him is “Hate Speech”), not the right to keep and bear arms, nothing-at-all.
This is the attitude the education and training of such people as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has led to – if he did not hold these opinions he would not have been given promotion after promotion.
And it is not just the police – it is also the judges…
For example, a drunk was recently sent to prison for calling out that he was going to kill Ed Miliband.
People often call out that they are going to kill Nigel Farage – and they are never sent to prison.
This is because Ed Miliband is a Progressive and Nigel Farage is a Reactionary – so “two tier policing” is matched by “two tier justice” in the courts.
Put up “racist” stickers and you will get two years in prison, put up Revolutionary Communist Party posters and you will not get one day in prison.
Ditto rioting and everything else – whether someone is Progressive or Reactionary matters, matters very much, to the courts.
And this is starting to apply in the United States as well – both in the Federal Courts and in some (some) State systems of “justice”.
The political and cultural opinions of the accused (whether they are a Progressive or a Reactionary) is what matters to the courts – both to the Progressive judges and even to juries picked from certain locations.
I do not see any profession or even a pretence of a commitment to equality in those principles, so how would they be squared with the public sector equality duty on the police and all State functionaries and functions?
Asking for a friend.
As for “the public” – remember to the establishment, the public are “racist far right thugs”.
Why would the establishment want the approval of “racist far right thugs”?
It is the duty of the state, from the point of view of the “liberal” (they have reversed the meaning of the word “liberal” – it now means hostile to liberty) establishment, to crush the public – not to act with the approval of the public.
Sir Robert Peel himself would be considered a “racist far right thug” today, or just a “reactionary” like Nigel Farage.
Remember – to Sir Robert Peel, or Winston Churchill, the preservation of the nation was the primary concern – now, for example, the Prime Minister of Hungary may agree with that, in relation to his nation, but the British and American establishment (and that of many other Western nations) certainly do NOT agree with this.
Indeed to them – the preservation of the nation (the people – their culture, history, and so on) is “crime think” – it is precisely what they are AGAINST. Such ideas are, to them, the ideas of “racist far right thugs”.
If international governance (a supposedly wonderful new world) is to be achieved, independent nations and national cultures (peoples) must go – both by internal undermining of national culture and people (very much the policy in many Western nations from the 1960s onwards), and by inviting in (giving inducements to come) very large numbers of migrants – who, with their children and children’s children (who are encouraged NOT to assimilate into the existing national culture) will help with the task of undermining the nation – the Res Publica.
Once this was dismissed as “paranoid conspiracy theory” – now our rulers openly declare themselves “Global Citizens” and sign up for such things as Agenda 21 (which goes back at least to 1992), Agenda 2030, and the Paris Accords of 2015-2016 (under this Corporations who do not follow the correct political lines of conduct can find their supply of Credit Money cut off – remember all nations use Credit Money now, no nation uses gold or silver as money, so all money is political and can be used to control all business enterprises and private citizens), with such things as “Climate Change” being presented as a justification for what is really a long standing agenda – an agenda that goes back long BEFORE concerns about C02.
Ideas that may actually work, so they won’t be tried.
APL – these ideas are still in place, in some (some) areas of the United States, where there are locally elected sheriffs assisted by deputies who are a mixture of volunteers and professionals.
As for United Kingdom – we are a Jeremy Bentham top-down country now, the sort of place that Thomas Cromwell (the hero of a leftist historical novel series) is said to have wanted to create, long before Mr Bentham.
The left sometimes pretend that they support ordinary local people coming together and deciding how they should govern themselves.
In reality that is the last thing the left support – the left support Plato (Guardians) or Rousseau (the Law Giver) telling people how to live.
Ordinary people coming together and governing themselves is like Appenzell Innerrhoden (at least before the usurpation of power by the Swiss “Confederation” – which is no longer really a Confederation) over many centuries.
Farmers, craftsmen, merchants (and so on) getting together every year, wearing their swords as the mark of their status as free men, to govern themselves – over many centuries.
Chad King: Ideas so crazy they may actually work
There is no doubt that it was Peel the politician who was responsible for the passage of the Police Bill in 1829 however the form of the New Metropolitan Police and its philosophy are largely due to the exertions of Charles Rowan who as a young officer in the 52nd. Regiment of Foot [The Oxfordshire Regiment] came very much under the influence of Sir John Moore who laid down not only the manual “Military Training” for the drill and movements of the new Light Infantry but also “Moral Training” which laid the detail for raising the status of the soldier as an individual and teaching himself respect, by means of new intimacy in his relationship with his officers.
Rowan, the first Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, took Sir John Moore’s “Moral Training” principles and applied them to the fledgling “Met”.
As a young “Copper” in the far off Antipodes in the late 1950’s I had them drummed in to me by my Officers and in like manner passed them on as I progressed through the ranks to Commissioned status. I am long retired after 34 years maintaining the Queen’s Peace and my old outfit no longer resembles what it was then – or perhaps I am looking at the past through rose coloured glasses.
The actions of Policing organizations during the Covid hysteria and some subsequent issues with racial overtones would seem to indicate that the “Principles” have been forgotten or are being ignored by a seemingly long march into more intolerant times.
David, very good comments and yes, the soldiers who fought in the Peninsular War had a big impact on the ideas of the Met. Sir Robert Peel, who was a young man at the time of that war, would have been in understandable awe of them for their military exploits, discipline and focus.
Police forces in England and Wales were not compulsory till the Act of 1856. In Ireland (that test subject for statist ideas from London – that government policy in Ireland was “laissez faire” is a LIE) the national police force was created long before – and long before Sir Robert Peel was in government.
I see no good reason why compulsory police forces should have been forced on places such as the rural county of Rutland in 1856. Was there blood soaked chaos in Rutland, and elsewhere, in 1855?
David – thank you for your service Sir, and there are still policemen who hold to the principles that you held to (I know some of them) – but they have to keep very quiet in the new political police force.