We are all equal before the law. Controversial? We don’t think so. Democracy advocates that all people should be treated equally. Controversial? We don’t think so. The human condition dictates that all lives matter. Controversial? Only if you’re brainwashed, or fearful of appalling hypocrisy crashing about your ears or worse – fearful of politically influenced police commissioners and chief constables that have a dick (Cressida), but no balls (colloquial).
By not listening to the majority, the chief puppeteers are creating racial divisions, not healing them. Indeed anyone with the temerity to question, is not an upstanding member of the public, but a far right activist, as the administers of our laws make no distinction between honest right wing politics and the extreme right. Consequently, a vociferous minority aren’t challenged because the force is neutered through fear of false accusation or disciplinary action.
Let’s consider those who uphold the law and just how far we’ve moved away from Peel’s principles; so far in fact that many of us how now moved Orwell’s 1984 to the non-fiction section of our book collections. Dear Robert believed that police effectiveness is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime. The approach expressed in his principles is commonly known as policing by consent, but this doesn’t mean policing by consent of that minority, but the consent of a society as a whole, as society that is founded on the equality of all its citizens.
He believed in seeking to preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy. In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens with a transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
We don’t see much of that today. We want this decline into the the farcical, the blatant move to partiality – where the vociferous few are indulged and the honest vilified – to stop now. We need to return to that place where our police officers are supported at every level, where they uphold the law, not politically expediency – and reverse this creeping evolution of Thought Police UK.
The Hampshire Independents have supreme respect for what the police are capable of doing in our name, but this county needs a new collective name, who will stop the degeneration and fight for the robust force that Hampshire society needs.
