The Police: Reassuring the Public or Enforcing the Law
David Green, 11 November 2004
David Blunkett’s police reforms are intended to reassure the public. But as Julia Magnet, a New Yorker now living in London, points out in The Times, the aim of Mayor Guiliani’s police reforms was, not to pacify frightened citizens, but to stop crime.
At last, some common sense. They way to reassure the public is by stopping criminals from committing crimes. That means that you have to catch them, and then deal with them quickly. If a youth spends 3 months waiting to go to court to be charged with some relatively minor offence, there’s no real connection between crime and punishment.
I’m going to take issue with the claim that we don’t want police officers being “part of the community” though. My dad is part of my family, but that didn’t stop him from being a figure of authority if I stepped out of line. A police officer should occupy a similar niche in a community. It’s much harder to develop an “us and them” mentality if some of the police are “us” rather than “them”.