Sunday, May 09, 2004

BRITAIN'S POLITICAL POLICE

In Britain, "PC" used to stand for police constable. Now the UK police are "PC" in a different sense:

"Somehow, during the past 20 years, a silent putsch has transformed the police of this country. Increasingly, they are commanded and staffed by Leftwing radicals who dislike and suspect Middle Britain and who are neutral between the criminal and his victim - and quite capable of arresting the victim if he has defended himself or his property.

The old, gnarled, seen-it-all crimefighters of the past seem to have been purged or to have retired. When we meet the modern police or hear them talking on the radio or the TV, we hear constant weary phrases about racism and sexism, those giveaway code-words of liberal-elite thinking. TV police heroes have mutated too, from grizzled middle-aged thieftakers along the lines of PC Dixon or Inspector Barlow to feminist campaigners against child abuse such as Jane Tennison in ITV's Prime Suspect.

The striving classes - working and middle alike - are learning, reluctantly and slowly, to mistrust the force they once relied on. And the police also show a growing scorn for exactly the sort of people they once viewed as allies. This seems to have happened quite suddenly. And one key to making it happen was the Macpherson Report of 1999. Most people still have not grasped what this report was about. They think it was about the failure to convict the murderers of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. It wasn't. Those killers, whoever they may be, are still free.

Its main effect was to subject the police of this country to a permanent, politically correct inquisition which has all but destroyed the socially and morally conservative elements in the ranks. Those who haven't already retired often long to do so.....

Black Britons are insultingly stereotyped. The official view seems to be that if the law is imposed on them, they are likely to explode into rioting and arson. Worse, it assumes they will not co-operate with the law in a normal or polite manner, even when it is in their own interests, and so must be given special handling. This is a message of despair for the many black Britons who are victims of crime - at the hands of blacks and whites - and who would be only too delighted to see some 'heavy-handed' policing in their home areas.

It is clear from this rather revolting official bigotry that the whole thing is not actually about ending discrimination at all.

The only people who suffer are the public, black and white, who are less protected from violence and disorder than at any time in the past century.

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