'Shiny headquarters are full of promotion-chasers wearing rainbow-lanyards.' Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images.


February 6, 2025   6 mins

Policing is an acronym-rich occupation. Among the rank and file, the most popular is “TJF” — “The Job’s Fucked”. Senior officers have long viewed such cynicism as mere shop-floor griping. Policing, after all, has never enjoyed harmonious industrial relations. Frontline officers can’t strike, and support staff who can are currently staging a two-week walk out because they can’t work from home. But since the rape gang scandal, it’s become clear that the rot goes far deeper than bickering over conditions, let alone the hardy perennials of corruption or racism.

Talk to officers, and there really is an “end of days” feeling at stations up and down the land. If, to put it bluntly, we failed the victims at Rotherham and Telford and a hundred other places so catastrophically, how can we ever recover, either professionally or in our relationship with the public? The answer must begin with reform. No — not another report, but genuine change, a red-tape-cutting Trumpian revolution everywhere from the law to leadership, which together can expunge 30 years of failure, and finally build a service fit for the 21st century.

The last few decades have been torrid for British policing. Austerity led to plummeting officer numbers, and a recruitment and retention crisis. The service’s obsession with DEI impressed activists, but led to no discernible improvements to performance. Then came Covid, casting the police as government stooges. All the while, the public became tired of authoritarian busy-bodying around Non-Crime Hate incidents, especially with the virtual decriminalisation of theft, and after Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving officer.

Amid all this rot, it’s surely worth asking: what, in this day and age, is policing actually for? It’s a question that seems to baffle the Home Office, College of Policing, Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chief’s Council. Conquest’s Third Law of Politics springs to mind here: the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it’s controlled by its enemies. It’s an overused term, but it’s impossible to avoid “Blob” here too. Spend long in British policing and you’ll see what I mean: the self-interestedness, the sluggishness, the groupthink, even as trust collapses and crime soars.

Once you grasp that basic fact, it’s easier to conceive of a solution: a Musk-like insurgency, with a Milei-like chainsaw, against complacent bosses. In practical terms, I’d start with a wide-ranging Royal Commission on policing. That’s surely needed, and not just because the last one was in 1960. Turbo-charged public inquiries, Royal Commissions are independent and uncomfortable to the powers-that-be.

What would this fantasy Royal Commission conclude? In the first place: that the police need to do less, but better, and concentrate on their core mission of fighting crime and keeping the peace. That would reverse the decline into a “social work policing” model, whereby officers pick up the slack around mental health, the homeless and youth services. The police, to be fair, are beginning to address some of the problems. Yet talking to officers on the ground, so-called “precautionary principles” mean they’re still routinely diverted from core duties. This is before we even delve into the issue of public order and demonstrations, another drain on resources.

From there, our Commission would hopefully embark on a DOGE-like spree. For one thing, we need fewer forces (there are currently 43 in England and Wales) but with local commanders enjoying much more subsidiarity. Forces are already collaborating sneakily via “strategic partnerships” which means collaborating on things like fighting organised crime. The genius of this arrangement for police chiefs? It doesn’t threaten the 43-force model, meaning senior officer posts are preserved. So pass me the chainsaw: modern technology would easily allow local policing to operate without multiple layers of management. While we’re at it, officer numbers will need re-examining too. Norfolk’s case is instructive: the chief constable is being forced to hire cops rather than admin staff due to central diktat, obliging him to use cops as admin staff.

When Toby Young first introduced Free Schools, I wondered what it would be like if the Home Office allowed Free Constabularies: officers empowered to use their initiative and be answerable for the results. That, however, would require technocrat cops to relinquish control, or anyway be forced to relinquish control. As it is, policing is currently ruled by spreadsheets and process maps, not common sense and discretion. Virtually every police function, from arrests to basic investigation to safeguarding, involves overwhelming policy, bureaucracy, guidance and advice, with some officers avoiding certain duties altogether.

“Virtually every police function involves overwhelming bureaucracy”

Then there’s law and procedure. This is policing’s operating system — which, at the risk of revealing my age, resembles Windows NT 3.1. Law, for understandable reasons, moves glacially. Sadly, modern society moves cheetah-fast. Add to this the clunky Blairite legacy, a hybrid of common law muddied with continental-style statute, and a rights-based framework designed by a cabal of London lawyers, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Unless, of course, you’re a lawyer paid by the hour.

Therefore our notional Royal Commission should consider a bonfire not only of red tape, but of wider legislation too. Policing doesn’t exist in isolation. It relies, rather, on its partners in the wider criminal justice system: the courts, legal profession, prisons and probation services. Penal reform is a case in point: the Fabian-esque British establishment holds a traditional distaste for incarceration. This is unfortunate, because it works, as any police officer (and, indeed, criminal) will tell you.

When I say works, I mean it’s an effective way to offer respite to working-class victims in crime-plagued communities. These, too often, sit at the bottom of police priorities. Strangely, nobody listens to police officers, despite being one of the few professions to whom criminals speak candidly. From hundreds of hours of listening to criminals, occasionally while monitoring covert audio of their conversations, I can assure you the “criminal fraternity” are utterly contemptuous of the bleeding hearts who run our criminal justice system.

Then there’s the 500-pound gorilla in a custodian helmet: leadership. Pass me a dozen chainsaws. Post-Macpherson services, desperate to erase the smear of institutional racism, were uniquely vulnerable to the insidious effects of social justice politics. And so a querulous chief officer cadre took the police from being an organisation with problems around race to — an organisation with even more complex problems around race. From DEI programmes to allegations of two-tier policing, senior officers indulged in an orgy of meaningless virtue signalling. Why? To fit in with the dominant political culture, one in which advancement is contingent on ideological compliance. Yes, the “canteen culture” of laddish humour is dead. Now, though, there are non-denominational prayer rooms and soulless “patrol bases” on the edge of industrial estates. Meanwhile, shiny headquarters are full of promotion-chasers wearing rainbow-lanyards.

It would be some comfort if my views were merely the grumblings of a disillusioned backwoodsman. Sadly, they’re not. There is, however, hope. The police have demonstrated an ability to pivot. To blow with the wind. If the political will exists, the police will change accordingly, if only for reasons of self-preservation. Which brings me back to my point about the current administration. Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer seems to me Conquest’s Third Law made flesh. So why not parachute in a new breed of leader, I hear you ask? They’ve tried that: there’s little point in having direct-entry senior leaders if they’re recruited from the same civil service cohort responsible for all that rot.

What’s the way forward? The party manifestos on law and order at the last election were uninspiring, just platitudes about bobbies on the beat and being tough on crime. Tough on crime? The increasingly ludicrous College of Policing takes a dim view of “zero tolerance” policing, even as it’s loathed by many academics for ideological reasons (which is a shame, because it works). Like every other part of the British state, in short, the wishes of our elected representatives play second fiddle to the civil service and special interest groups. Reform, intriguingly, offered a tiny ray of hope, promising to do away with the College. Considering many coppers refer to it as “Hogwarts”, you can imagine how they’d feel if it went.

Not that any of this is easy. Quite aside from all those blobbish reactionaries, reforming a police force is like changing the wheels on a speeding train: you can’t just shut it down while you fix it. More to the point, meaningful change implies upending the existing political and cultural settlement. And is a Leftist government — by which I mean Highgate Left, not Hartlepool Left — likely to accept the challenge?

Beyond targeting “far-Right” rioters and Facebook posters, the answer is obviously no, even as a leaked Home Office-commissioned report on the disturbances suggests large segments of the British establishment are happy wallowing in cliches over “behaviours of concern”. Even the public itself is a potential stumbling block here: we like robust policing in principle, until we’re actually policed robustly. Just recall clown-show decisions by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IPOC), let alone the old saw that a conservative’s a liberal who’s been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

Yet with officers increasingly charged with serving an increasingly balkanised society, to say nothing of rising anarcho-tyranny in towns and cities, perhaps we no longer have the luxury of being policed by consent, reforming chainsaws or not. All the while, the question looms: what will happen when the next disaster finally, inevitably, arrives? I suspect the constables behind the riot shields will offer a familiar answer: TJF.


Dominic Adler is a writer and former detective in the Metropolitan Police. He worked in counterterrorism, anticorruption and criminal intelligence, and now discusses policing on his Substack.