Policing, crime and personal responsibility, Peter Hitchens

more than record them, and that not too accurately.
After all, it is now politically important that crime
can be said to be falling. So fall it must, even if that
means a theft being recorded as a lost property
episode, or many burglaries in one building being
recorded as a single crime. This is called the bikini
effect, under which the things concealed by official
statistics are more interesting than the things they
reveal.
The monopoly of violence had become
important precisely because the police and the
courts now held sharply different views on right
and wrong from millions of the Queen’s subjects.
And the liberal, blame-free view needed to be
imposed and made plain, so that challenges to it
diminished and – if possible – ceased.
It was this basic change, itself the fruit of decades
of social and moral revolution accelerated by two
terrible wars, that transformed the constable.
The administrative, organisational and ultimately
legal reforms and alterations that made it possible
were not the causes of the revolution. They were
consequences of it. That is not to say that these
changes are not interesting or important, or that
those responsible for them should not be blamed. I
experienced a moment of fierce joy when I was able
to pinpoint the meeting at which the Home Office
signalled the end of proper preventive footpatrolling.
I was jubilant, in a melancholy way,
when I was able to expose the incessantly-told lie
that the police could no longer patrol because of
manpower shortages, when there had never in
history been so many police officers, either as an
absolute number or per head of population. I was
pleased to discover documents in which the
insulting gibberish of equality and diversity were
actually set out in plain sight. If there is ever a court
of history, I shall be able to give evidence to it on
that subject. If you wish to know precisely how
Upholding the Queen’s Peace 51