In the end, the trainee resigned, but Andrew’s problems are hardly over. For if modern British policing resembles a moth-eaten tapestry made up of many tawdry threads, one thread is surely the cohort of officers that joined after 2010. Old police hands have a tendency to unfairly decry new recruits. Yet recent blunders, from muddled reporting over Ann Widdecombe’s death to the anti-racism row over the Henry Nowak case, expose just how broken British law enforcement now is — not least when it comes to recruitment and training.

Interviewing insiders from forces across Britain, I unearthed a story of bad policy, craven leadership and chronic underinvestment. Yes, DEI can harm policing, but not necessarily in the way critics imagine. Because while the strictures of the Equality Act cause doubtless harm on the streets, it also means forces often spend as much time wet-nursing vulnerable recruits as they do catching criminals. Combined with a raft of other problems, from a shrinking talent pool to the continued scourge of discrimination, and the future of British law enforcement looks grim.

***

To understand how Andrew’s trainee could avoid over 95% of her duties, you must first understand the Equality Act. Passed in early 2010, as New Labour stumbled towards defeat that May, it bundled existing anti-discrimination law into a single piece of overarching, rocket-assisted legislation. By creating nine “protected characteristics” — from age to sex to disability — lawmakers dumped employers into a legal and procedural minefield. Forcing managers to constantly balance rights and responsibilities, the Act is riven by ambiguities, making it easy to exploit or misinterpret. Crucially, the police have no blanket exemption to any of this: every officer’s duties must be considered on a case-by-case basis. 

This creates maddening issues for police forces, especially given a seemingly insatiable appetite for what the Equality Act calls “reasonable adjustments”. Paul*, a recruiter for one Northern force, heard of a young officer who suffered from “hypersexuality” requesting an extra 30 minutes in the work day to “sort herself out”. She was refused. Most adjustments are more mundane, typically involving working from home or avoiding certain duties. 

Much of this dysfunction comes from the top. As one former staff officer puts it: “Senior officers? All they seem to talk about and care about, really, is DEI.” This is borne out if you tour the upper echelons of forces nationwide. During one specialist policing course, a visiting chief superintendent spoke of nothing but opening up opportunities for minorities. On the actual subject matter? Not a word. Initially, this enthusiasm was probably a function of ambition, with promotion linked to pushing DEI. Then came a cultural and generational shift as a more activist cohort of officers entered the top tier. 

It doesn’t help that police line managers complain of having decisions challenged by staff networks — representing ethnicity, religion and neurodiversity, among others — established to protect minority rights under the Equality Act. One instructor complains how “the prestige of being able to say we’ve recruited officers from this or that underrepresented group” trumps operational efficacy. This is exacerbated by endless excoriating reviews, contributing to a culture of tale-telling. Stations increasingly resemble schoolyards, bubbling with rights-based resentments. Officers allege discrimination to distract from poor performance. And managers find themselves engulfed in office feuds, when really their focus should be on fighting crime.

Beyond the vagaries of the Equality Act, Gen Z recruits do also seem more vulnerable. Andrew recalls one officer who had to leave a tape-recorded interview after a suspect began swearing at her. “I found her hiding in a cupboard with a blanket over her head.” By 2024, officers reportedly took 774,000 man-days off for mental health reasons. No wonder many sergeants and inspectors complain of becoming little more than HR officers with truncheons, occupational health advisors and therapists to Gen Z rookies. 

Before any of this, though, new coppers need training. Until the Equality Act, many would have been precluded from joining. Now, though, forces must now find a way of adapting to recruits with a range of physical and mental health issues — even as courses themselves are less rigorous than ever. 

***

Hendon Police College, stranded in an unglamorous corner of northwest London, was always ugly. When I trained there in the early Nineties, before going on to serve at the Met for a quarter of a century, it felt like a Soviet housing project. Now, with its rows of modern, yellow-topped classrooms, it resembles an Amazon fulfillment center. The old Hendon site was demolished in 2015, after doubling as the Eastern European country of “Sokovia” in an Avengers superhero movie. 

Back then, officers joked the real supervillain was Theresa May. As home secretary, May oversaw reforms responsible for today’s desiccated police service, not least in terms of cuts. Officers no longer attend costly residential training courses, instead commuting to training centers or universities. What was once a quasi-paramilitary model, complete with square-bashing and long hours, became a more congenial, “civilized” experience. 

Veteran officers believe the old model was better: it developed a sense of camaraderie and focus. More than that, it gave instructors far more insight into their charges. My own time at Hendon involved daily role-playing exercises involving negotiation, confrontation and exercising practical legal knowledge. On the “training roads” around the campus, knots of novice coppers acted out arrests, stopping cars, searching people, adjudicating disputes and taking statements. Our performance was dissected by the instructors, our failings explained firmly but fairly. It mattered, too, that until the residential training centers were closed in the early 2000s, trainers were all sergeants.

Now, though, this robust in-person training is increasingly replaced by distance learning. In practice, this means fewer practical demonstrations and more learning how to stop and search from an online questionnaire. This, Paul argues, creates “officers with little life experience, a superficial knowledge of the law, precious little knowledge of how to put a prosecution case file together, and [who] have to fill in their lack of knowledge with enthusiasm”. For their part, sergeants have been replaced by more junior PCs, cheaper to employ but who seem to be more “professional trainers” than practical officers. Paul adds that he’s heard training increasingly involves short days and “directed self-study”: a euphemism for unsupervised homework.

Instructors are themselves under pressure to keep costs down. Now retired, Alex* taught “student constables” in the South West of England. “Recruiting’s driven by accountancy mindsets,” he says. “This leads to corner cutting, kit shortages and no investment in training amenities.” This typically means swapping out resource-intensive roleplays for abstract lectures.

Given all this, officers are reluctant to attack the newbies too harshly. “The current set-up’s broken,” admits Liam*, who before his retirement trained direct-entry detectives for a Northern force. “I’m not blaming the recruits, it’s just the initial recruitment process is flawed. During Covid, the whole thing was done over Teams! How can anyone be accurately assessed over Teams?” 

Nor are recruits responsible for the way senior staff indulge the worst Whitehall predilections. Alex describes how health-and-safety legislation has led to “a regime terrified of any risk, leading to sterile and false training scenarios”. Officers are now unlikely to receive proper training to deal with aggressive suspects, let alone undergo scenarios where their partners deliberately lie. One only needs to glance at the Henry Nowak video to see the potential problems of this approach. 

***

My Hendon class, in 1992, consisted of 14 trainee constables. Two were from ethnic minorities and two were women. Aged between 22 and 46, our number included three graduates, a former bus driver, an insurance salesman and a retired army warrant officer. One colleague had memorably been a male model. If we weren’t wholly representative of Londoners, we were at least reasonably educated, in good health and level-headed. 

If initial training was doubtless better then, my interviewees also agree that the talent pool has shrunk. In part, that’s down to broad societal changes. Alex, the former instructor, cites the smaller armed forces, so fewer take that “well-trodden path” to the police. Alternative careers, from digital nomadism to IT apprenticeships, are also more available than in the early Nineties, offering better pay for less anti-social hours. 

This coincides with sea-changes in recruitment. Hoping to “professionalize” policing, policymakers encouraged would-be officers to pursue degree training alongside a nursing-style license to practice. Significant pay cuts arrived too, meaning new recruits are generally younger and less experienced. Like Andrew’s ex-colleague, people can also now join as “direct-entry” detectives, missing out on the two years of beat experience older officers insist is key to becoming an investigator. This route is particularly popular among middle-class recruits, whole are less suited to dealing with the ugly realities of Britain’s criminal class. 

But perhaps most significant is the 2020 change which allows 17-and-a-half-year-olds to sign up. Some of these younger officers, I’m told, come from challenging backgrounds. Their life experience and education is significantly different from officers of my generation: and generally for the worse. Their relative youth, Alex explains, also means “they’re learning so much, so quickly, and are so unprepared, that they struggle”. 

Yet it’s hard, here, not to return to the Equality Act. Paul tells me about one new officer with cerebral palsy, who secured reasonable adjustments despite being unable to pass the personal-safety training where recruits learn to use handcuffs and CS spray. Another newbie, a direct-entry DC, failed the same course because of dyspraxia so severe he kept dropping his baton. Apart from tolerating candidates physically unable to perform basic duties, forces are also required to cater to pre-existing psychological issues. Despite holding generally “progressive views” — and suggesting the emphasis on the racial aspect of DEI training was over-egged — Paul nonetheless despairs at the consequences. “What victim cares that the new PC is anxious or has debilitating dyslexia?” 

As in policing at large, attempts to challenge the status quo are given short shrift, with managers keen not to rock the DEI boat. Alex, the former recruit instructor, says “the tone set is one that says ‘we’ll support your decision, just as long as it’s not contentious or difficult.’ The fear culture arises out of a combination of factors, ranging from the diversity industry; a promotion system that’s all about group think; and selfish ambition.” 

Alex’s experiences chime with my own service. By the time I retired, in 2018, the Met felt like North Korea — run by David Brent. I remember enduring computer-based DEI training claiming that telling sexist jokes was only a few steps from genocide. No wonder supervisors struggle to manage new recruits. “There’s a fear of doing anything informally at any level,” Alex says. “Now it’s just ‘pass the buck’ straight to [professional standards] for any level of allegation regardless of how minor or frankly daft it may be.” 

The new police training regime is supposedly built of good intentions. The irony, though, is that if it allows nice if unsuited candidates too much leeway, this system also does little to stem the flow of genuinely malicious recruits. There are plenty of examples here, from David Carrick to Cliff Mitchell, with the usual blend of cuts and remote work partly to blame. Wayne Couzens, too, dodged recruitment vetting before going on to murder Sarah Everard, while cuts to training meant he was enthusiastically received into the Met on account of the firearms skills he’d acquired in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. 

***

After marching off Hendon’s parade square, I was posted to a West London police station. There, along with three others, I went through the final stage of my training — being “puppy-walked” for 12 weeks by a sweaty old sergeant and three tutor constables. It was made clear that, should I be found wanting, I’d be dismissed from the Met. The tutors were patient, but happily issued bollockings where appropriate. There were fines — 50p here, a pound there — for stupid mistakes, the proceeds going towards an end-of-course drink. Meanwhile, my first arrest was closely supervised and mentored until the arrestee was bailed. I felt confident and supported throughout. 

These days, though, quality control is infinitely harder — and the Equality Act is again partly to blame. “You can’t get rid of people unless they use hurty words,” says Andrew, the Met DS. “There was one uniformed officer playing the diversity game like a pro; she’s got every protected characteristic and a portfolio of reasonable adjustments. She’s bagged an office job and hasn’t been on the street for years. I mean, she can’t even meet the public or leave the building unless she’s working from home. As far as I can see, she does very little.” Not just her: thousands of Met officers aren’t “fully deployable” because of their health or performance. All the while, officers are stoutly defended by the ever-present support networks; for the feckless and shameless, it’s a license to take liberties. “Nobody ever challenged this officer,” Andrew adds of her colleague. “Then she boasted about the PIP payments she was claiming. Talking about it makes my blood boil.”

These problems are compounded by questionable mentoring practices, especially when rookies are now led by colleagues who faced similar training. More than a few crack under pressure. Over the past five years, forces reported up to a 19% attrition rate from new-officer resignations, unsurprising when policing was recently described as “one of the most complex frontline positions in the public sector”. It’s hard to disagree, particularly when any error is soon plastered on social media. Forces, keen to atone for previous scandals, adopted zero-tolerance professional standards policies. Yet in another irony, this means that officers most prepared to get involved in operational policing are also those most likely to be disciplined. Many fear being “chucked under buses” for making mistakes, even in good faith. At a time when we desperately need more mature, experienced officers, we appear to be traveling in the opposite direction.

Nor is any of this theoretical. The recruitment, training and mentoring regime I’ve laid out here was responsible for producing the officers involved in the Nowak case. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, the force in question, ceased residential training in 2006. After watching footage of the incident, I fully agreed with Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector and now a Labour MP, who said the decision to handcuff the dying Nowak was “unfathomable”. But frankly, was it really, given how officers are now recruited and trained? 

***

Amid these horrors, and polls showing less than half the public trust the police to deal fairly with complaints, can forces really change? There are some tentative signs that they can — at least beyond London. As Paul puts it of his Northern force, “the current regime does produce officers who are smartly turned-out and have a healthy respect for rank.” More than that, Paul says his colleagues would balk at the more absurd consequences of the Equality Act. “We wouldn’t dispute such a diagnosis,” he says when I ask him about that “hypersexual” young officer, “but wouldn’t support 30 minutes wanking time either.” This pragmatism is borne out elsewhere, with Sir Stephen Watson, the head of Greater Manchester Police, coming out strongly against rainbow lanyards and dancing with protesters. 

The reasons for these regional differences remain relatively unexplored. Yet Sir Stephen’s trenchant attitude — and my conversations with officers — suggest that the mood music from police headquarters percolates downwards. This only works, though, if chief constables feel supported by their bosses. It seems unlikely that Sadiq Khan will champion a campaign of common sense in the Met anytime soon.

All the same, it’s striking that even London’s famously progressive force is shifting. The service recently introduced a scorched-earth policy for “adjusted duties” officers. It’s a sign, perhaps, that managers are waking up to the disasters they’ve wrought. Yet even here, Andrew believes that the belated fightback is partly because the Met still doesn’t have the courage to back its managers. “The Met’s terrified of being sued for discrimination,” she explains, “so it decided to treat everyone equally badly.” The upshot? Well-performing staff with genuine health problems face six-monthly moves to other departments, a process one officer describes as “a stealthy form of constructive dismissal”. 

I asked the Met to comment on this and other issues raised in my story. It declined. All the while, British policing seems happy pursuing policies that are meat and drink to its critics. For example, the Telegraph recently reported that trainees are instructed to write essays “reflecting on antiracism”. Hopefully the investigation into Henry Nowak’s death will delve into the reasoning behind this ideological focus, as important as managing fractious crime scenes doubtless is too. 

Fail and the public will only keep suffering, as fantasies of inclusion collide with the brick wall of reality. Andrew, now nearing retirement, shakes his head. “It’s the Met all over. They lowered standards for diversity reasons and to hell with the consequences — until it bit them on the arse.” Of course, that doesn’t stop chief officers from insisting they’ve built inclusive forces, staffed by properly selected, well-trained constables. Politicians offer specious announcements around funding and officer numbers, claiming to support forces in keeping the streets safe. As Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in January, “I’m putting police back where they belong — on the beat and fighting criminals.” To which the public is presumably entitled to reply, like the officer who handcuffed Henry Nowak, “I don’t think you have, mate”.

***

*Names have been changed.

Ideas such as: innocent until proven guilty; the independence of the police force and prosecutors from political pressure and public hysteria; the skepticism of our lively media that will question, rather than swallow, party lines. Epstein mania has swept all these checks and balances aside. Of course, questions of due process and the proper functioning of institutions don’t sell newspapers. But they are more important than ever when the mob decides to pitchfork its victims.

Of particular concern is the hasty arrest of both Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson under the vague statute of “misfeasance in public office”. This common law offense is notorious among legal scholars for being poorly defined: the Law Commission recently dedicated a whole report to it, concluding that clarity is lacking both around the definition of what constitutes a public office, and what constitutes the “recklessness or willfulness” required to prove criminality. It is not clear, for example, that the largely ceremonial role of UK Trade Envoy that Andrew held even counts as a position of public trust. It’s a woolly law and therefore easy to abuse; the Government had already tabled new legislation to replace it.

In recent years, the statute has been generally used (in 92% of cases) for police and prison officers who have been found in flagrant sexual or financial wrongdoing. In only four convictions out of the 191 since 2014 was the law deployed against senior officials — and no politician has ever been prosecuted under it. In 2008, Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after a civil servant leaked documents to him for political purposes, but the DPP at the time (a certain Keir Starmer) dropped the case as not passing the required threshold for criminality. It’s an unprecedented use of a bad law, and it just happened twice in the space of a week.

We might ask, too, why either man had to be arrested at all. Surely a discreet interview with police could have been arranged with Mountbatten Windsor instead of a theatrical arrest at 8am at his home? As for Mandelson, he maintains that such an interview had already been agreed for the week commencing 9 March, but the police suddenly arrived asserting that an emergency arrest was required on the basis of new information passed to them that he was about to abscond to the British Virgin Islands.

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Alongside the implausibility of this suggestion, and the fact that the UK has a full extradition treaty with the BVI in any case, the police claimed that this information had been passed to them via the Lord Speaker — a detail that Lord Forsyth vehemently denies. So who did provide them with this false information, bringing about a public arrest that would provide humiliating photographs for the media and a confirmation in the mind of the public that Mandelson had somehow met his comeuppance? The proper process had somehow been hacked.

Even more grave are the implications of dumping vast troves of private correspondence and truncated notes by investigators into the public domain, as happened with Epstein’s emails. Day by day, innocent lives are being upended as the media discovers a new intriguing name among the cache; careers are ended on the flimsiest of pretexts, as companies and institutions abandon anyone with the remotest connection with the scandal; wild theories about supposed code words have flooded the internet and deposed rationality. The thrill of glimpsing how the rich and powerful correspond privately with each other may make good copy, but it is not justice. If ever we needed a reminder that the flip side of free speech is a right to privacy, it was surely this. Without privacy, there is no freedom, and everybody will be a little more fearful about writing to friends or associates after this.

This massive release of private emails prompted  another concerning development: in both the Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson case, the British state is deploying what you might call the Al Capone strategy. The American mobster was never convicted of the murders and gangsterism for which he was notorious, but instead was imprisoned for tax evasion. Most people in the UK by now, having been saturated in media coverage connecting both characters to the “convicted paedophile/sex offender” Jeffrey Epstein, will have made up their minds that both men are guilty by association of some kind of collusion in some kind of sex crime. That’s the “real” taint that is propelling these investigations.

But this is where the Al Capone analogy breaks down: Capone really was a mobster. But there has yet to emerge any firm evidence of sexual wrongdoing on Mountbatten Windsor’s part, and for Mandelson it is not even seriously alleged. Context-free photographs of hanging out on Epstein’s island with young women are not proof of anything at all, nor is settling out of court, nor are suggestive private emails between friends, no matter how distasteful they may sound.

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Instead, the Al Capone approach risks degrading the normal standards of proof for the lesser crime in order to deliver a politically convenient satiation of the wider public anger. Indeed,  there is already the sense that both men have been found guilty of something — notwithstanding the fact that neither has been convicted of anything. But what crime are they supposed to have committed, exactly?

In the case of Mountbatten Windsor, sharing details of his forthcoming trips as UK trade envoy to Epstein and his associates in order to set up meetings would not be particularly surprising or intriguing were it not accompanied by the stench of scandal shrouding Jeffrey Epstein. If all that emerges after this inevitably long, drawn out investigation, is the tawdry reality — and one that we already know — that Andrew had bad judgment in friends and deployed those connections to do business deals, it is neither new nor illegal. It is certainly not enough to provoke a constitutional crisis, with special acts of parliament to remove him from the line of succession. Labour minister Chris Bryant may be right that the former Prince is a “rude, arrogant and entitled man”, as he said in the Commons yesterday: but so what? If we arrested every politician or royal who fell under that category, how many would be left?

Meanwhile, the most serious claims against Mandelson are that he showed no loyalty to the government he served in and shared privileged government information for personal financial gain. Forwarding emails (even non-secure ones) originally addressed to the prime minister to powerful friends, apparently to show how useful you are, is no doubt unedifying. The breezy, disloyal indiscretions in the emails are deeply embarrassing, and would probably have constituted a sackable offense were he still in post. But the fact that Mandelson was indiscreet about the goings on in government, or that he said mean things about Gordon Brown, is hardly news — just ask any political journalist of the past 30 years who delighted in his briefings.

Things obviously get more serious should financial gain be shown. If indeed there were multiple payments of $25,000 from Epstein to Mandelson, that would demand explanation. But let’s apply a dose of reality: most of the indiscretions that have so far emerged would have been mildly interesting, titillating even, to an investor like Epstein. For now, though, there has been no smoking gun to indicate corruption. Most of Mandelson’s “revelations” were widely commented on in the media at the time. The most serious among them would seem to be the theoretically investible insight, confirmed by email by Mandelson to Epstein, that the €500 billion euro bailout would be announced that evening, 9 May 2010. Epstein emails: “sources tell me 500 b euro bailout, almost complete”, and Mandelson replies: “sd be announced tonight.“

Cavalier, sailing close to the wind, but hardly a big scoop — Epstein already had the information, as did thousands of others. The terms of the imminent deal had been discussed on the front cover of the Sunday Telegraph the previous morning, and economic correspondents across Europe were tracking the progress of the talks throughout the day. The day before, at a summit of all 26 EU finance ministers, the terms and timing of the euro bailout had been breathlessly reported on, and the UK had refused to take part. Each of those European teams, with their staff and civil servants and accompanying journalists, would have known as much or more than the outgoing UK Business Secretary. Of course, there may yet be revelations that prove serious wrongdoing. But what has so far emerged is pretty weak tea.

A world in which due process is bent in service of political panics, supercharged by an increasingly deranged social media, is a less just one. Both Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Peter Mandelson have been hung out to dry by their own teams (respectively the Royal family and the Labour party) who have their own agenda, fearful for their own survival. The two men have no allies left. This is precisely when a sober-minded media, police and justice system should be the last line of defense. Right now, they are nowhere to be found.

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action’s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.

From a personal perspective, I’m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn’t just criminal damage, it’s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June’s attack came before the group’s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest the total costs here could hit £55 million.

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be “terrorists” is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain’s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn’t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London’s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist’s dream, and every public order commander’s nightmare. And that’s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity — but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it’s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.

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To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK’s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public… for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. If that sounds flexible, it’s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as “temporary provisions”, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.

Crucially, the term “terrorism” was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here — existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favoring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.

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Why, then, wasn’t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list of proscribed organizations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall’s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour’s confusion over Palestine. The party’s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by “Gaza Independents”. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party’s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the “populist” Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn’t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper — but on this issue they’ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing’s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that’s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I’m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act’s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers’ errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it’s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it’s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers — but also other, subtler tools.

Bedford, they had all been told by the police and local authorities, had been getting better, despite its post-pandemic troubles with crime and civic drift. But no one believed them. And now they were willing to listen to a man with a successful YouTube channel. For the next eight weeks, McCormack plans to self-fund a private security scheme in Bedford to guard the high street. The private security firm would act as “scarecrows” to deter vagrants and sex pests that had come to plague the town.

“Is there a danger,” asked one elderly woman in the crowd, “that we are bringing more shame on people who are already vilified? Do we have a long-term plan to help them?” Eyes rolled. “This is what I like to call suicidal empathy,” answered McCormack. “I care more about the working people of this town than criminals and drug addicts.” The crowd nodded in agreement.

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This was the start of Project Bedford, a model of civic renewal and regeneration for Britain’s provincial malaise that McCormack has described to one American podcaster as a potential “political coup.” To put it differently, it’s the ethos of “you can just do things” brought to a small English town, where a broader national schism of mistrust and cynicism has manifested itself in angry shopkeepers and radicalised dads in Ralph Lauren shirts.

But this wasn’t just about men in high-viz jackets guarding the Lidl carpark. The stories shared at this beleaguered caucus pointed to some deeper cosmic disturbance in the natural order of a boring English market town. Shoplifters chased away with shovels, pedophiles using their business’s wifi to download unspeakable things, a lady who had locked herself in a cupboard, because the police wouldn’t come to deal with a man pursuing her. This was a moral degradation for which the hollow and mimsy hallmarks of modern English civil society — with its neighborhood policing plans and community outreach initiatives — seemed unable to resolve.

On first impressions, rumors of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford. “Somewhere in England,” was how evacuated BBC broadcasters referred to their new home during the Second World War. In trying to remain anonymous from the Luftwaffe, they had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect description of that parochial yet reassuring dullness you can still find by the banks of the River Ouse. This is an atmosphere that, over its 1,000-year history, has nurtured everything from Pilgrim’s Progress, the deepest work of devotional introspection in the English language, to what will soon be Europe’s largest theme park.

Bedford is the spiritual middle of middle England. A town of 100,000 people, equidistant from both Luton and Milton Keynes, it now finds itself in some unwilling struggle between those two archetypes of modern England. At some point in the Sixties, its post-war architects lost interest in the idea of Bedford as a quaint county town, burrowing a concrete shopping center right through its central hearth. Today, it’s home to a closed Marks and Spencers, haggard South Asian Deliveroo drivers, and delirious alcoholics. The town and its surrounds, Victorian suburbs, new build estates and genteel hamlets, tend to avoid the place altogether. Visitor numbers to the town center have fallen by half a million a month.

Walking through the old center, you can still feel the spirit of the curtain twitcher, the bossy parochial council, that stifling and sinister provincial mystery that promises to hold the place together for eternity. Now it’s been put to the test, with disorder so hallucinatory and surreal it appears like a paranoid apparition for a town that once dreamt of being in The Sunday Times property supplement. The morning of McCormack’s meeting, I watched a topless crack addict barrelling through a shopping arcade filled with families and their toddlers licking ice cream. A mid-morning frenzy of lolling eyes and semen-stained trousers.

Further up the high street, there was more disorder. “Someone causing trouble with a knuckleduster,” said one bystander with morbid glee. Two police cars had pulled up outside the Natwest, and in the ruckus a suspect was bungled away. In the brief return to normality, the topless man took out his pipe, rubbed it on his wobbling belly, then lit up in relief.

McCormack’s plan is popular. Nearly everyone I spoke to welcomed the scheme, with many noting that Milton Keynes already has its own private security run by My Local Bobby. The firm is increasingly operating across the country, after its success guarding central London and its affluent suburbs. But McCormack’s vision is less the preserve of a flashy neighborhood watch, and more of a market town populist driving a wedge in the ongoing war over perceptions of reality in Bedford — between the people who live here and those tasked with running the place. Between those who say things are getting better and those who believe it is not.

In the aftermath of his event, John Tizzard, the local police and crime commissioner, accused McCormack of “exaggerating and spreading misinformation about the town’s decline,” arguing that official statistics showed that crime was improving. During McCormack’s meeting, a patrol car made a point of crawling past, promptly dismissed by attendees as a pathetic sop. McCormack is now in a public spat with Tizzard, who he has called a “weak man”, who must resign.

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Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on. One shop owner, who runs one of the town’s longest-running stores and didn’t want to be named, said he had “stopped engaging” with officers — “if I tell them how it is,” he said, “then I’m scared I’ll get arrested.” Mark, a construction surveyor who has lived in the town for 35 years, shared a similar loss of faith. When I ask him to explain how the town has declined, he thinks long and hard before bringing up the former England rugby player and policeman Martin Bayfield, who used to work for the local force. “The problem is we don’t have people like him anymore,” says Mark of the six-foot-10-inch former officer. “Everyone knew Martin, and no one wanted to mess with him.”

This war over reality when it comes to civic decay is now playing out on the national stage, with Nigel Farage recently launching Reform’s latest “Britain is Lawless” campaign. Among other things, Farage points to erroneous statistics that exclude shoplifting, or else that fail to weight for high crime areas. In Bedford, one excellent example of revealed preference is the local mayor, now more than happy to lean on the philanthropy of a YouTuber.

“What does the mayor think of all of this?” a young man sneered during the meeting at Real Coffee. A large, jolly Dickensian man, the Conservative Tom Wootton, stood up and bellowed across the room. “In a few years time, less than three miles there’s going to be eight million visitors. We’ve got a short window and a short time and we’ve got to make it work.” He’s referring to Universal Studios Great Britain, a planned 700-acre theme park and resort complex just outside of town, one supporter claims could bring 28,000 jobs to the local economy.

It’s this looming deadline, to restore Bedford into a gentle site for tourists, that adds an unsettling urgency to McCormack’s campaign. Given his bleak outlook, five years seems a long time for a government he sees as pushing us towards state collapse a la Venezuela. And with Reform’s newfound councils discovering the legal and professional limits of their promise to overturn Britain’s provincial decline, it’s one McCormack believes could come to a head in Bedford.

“The grievances of the colonies against the King were the same as we have now,” he had previously told an American podcast. When I ask him in the more sobering setting of Bedford high street if he’s serious, he doesn’t back down. “If enough people are angry enough we could look at the playbook of the Velvet Revolution,” McCormack says. “An entirely peaceful revolution no shots were fired and it brought down the Czechoslovakian government.” And could that start in Bedford? “Maybe, maybe so. I think we have enough reason to say that the Government is now illegitimate; they have no mandate. I’m going to walk up to that line and hover around it.”

All the while, the people of Bedford remain elusively discontent. Before I left, Mark took me on a tour. The night was drawing in, and wandering through the town center like lost shoppers are scores of vagrants who line the boarded-up shops. “No one really knows where they’re coming from,” Mark says. And then we see a scene that sums up the war over reality taking place here in Bedford. There, outside what was once Clinton’s cards, is one of the council’s “Rapid Response” vehicles. Inside are two security contractors from South Asia, one with his feet on the dashboard, slowly herding a merry huddle of drunks through the derelict shopping center in a bemused, ineffectual daze. “We love them,” says one of the drunks.

The last place Mark showed me was a lamppost outside a Greggs. It’s the spot where Thomas Taylor, just 17, was stabbed and stamped on by four youths and “left for dead” at the start of the year. That day, the front page of the local paper had the latest details of the trial. One of the 18-year-old killers had habitually carried a ten-inch knife, even into the Job Center across the road. On the lamppost were no flowers, just a black piece of tape to mark the spot.

During Monday night’s disturbances, rioters focused their attention on housing occupied by the alleged perpetrators and other Roma in Ballymena’s Clonavon Terrace, smashing in windows and setting fire to the hurriedly vacated houses. In the nearby village of Culleybackey, the car and home of a Filipino migrant, entirely unconnected to the alleged assault, was also firebombed. In Ballymena, Filipino residents affixed Filipino and Union flags to their doors to ward off attacks by locals.

But on Tuesday night, with a much larger crowd, the local anger was directly squared against the police. Young rioters in black sportswear and ski masks built barricades and hurled missiles at PSNI armored Land Rovers, while crowds of onlookers cheered them on. Middle-aged women clapped and jeered triumphantly when one policeman was struck directly on the head by a hurled rock. “Right in the head, nice one,” another middle-aged woman said, observing a well-aimed firework strike a police officer. Police fired baton rounds at protestors to disperse the crowd, extinguishing burning barricades with cold jets from their water cannon as rocks and bottles smashed against their vehicles.

Rioting is hardly a new development in Northern Ireland, especially on warm summer nights. What is novel, however, is the focus on mass migration as the proclaimed rationale, a process accelerated by the recent uptick in asylum seekers dispersed to Northern Ireland by the Westminster government to take advantage of the province’s low-cost housing. In a country whose unhappy history is defined by the 17th-century Plantation of Scottish settlers — the ancestors of Tuesday night’s rioters — this latest wave of settlement has introduced a volatile new element to the country’s politics. “Within the last two or three years, I think Northern Ireland just got to the stage now where it’s like, we’ve had enough,” Julian, a local man, told me, as he watched youths hurling rocks at the police. “This is probably the first time now it’s really kicking off, but it’s starting to creep up slowly, I think, around the rest of the country, in [the Republic of] Ireland as well.”

In a mostly Protestant town bedecked with Union flags and Loyalist paramilitary imagery, one striking note was how often protestors referred to parallel but distinct anti-migrant riots in the Republic of Ireland when asked to explain why they were on the streets. “Down south, Dublin’s really kicking off,” Julian told me. “They’re [migrants] coming through from England, and then they’re going into the Republic, and they’re making their way from the Republic up to here. And the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are now coming together, so even though there’s a border between the two countries, both of them know what’s going on.” Yet while Ulster Protestant anti-immigration protestors increasingly allude to a common cause with their Catholic neighbors — a dynamic vastly exaggerated by external commentators — the feeling is not reciprocated. What little overt anti-immigration sentiment is expressed by Northern Irish Catholics manifests instead in traveling down to mass protests in the Republic.

I asked one 17-year-old youth, who chose not to give his name, whether the rioting would spread. “I hope so, aye,” he replied, telling me that they were protesting against “corruption in the government, opening the borders and so on”. Which government, I asked, the devolved parliament in Stormont — increasingly the focus of Ulster Loyalist dissent — or the British government in Westminster? “We don’t have a government here, we never had. So we are more protesting about Westminster and opening all the borders. Keir Starmer, you know.” Rumors spread among the crowd that police from England, Wales and Scotland were being brought in to suppress the disorder. Eager to remain part of the British state around which their community identity revolves, these rioters were also willing enough to confront any forces of order introduced from the “mainland”.

Convoys of armored PSNI Land Rovers raced through the burning barricades, jeered and taunted by local rioters beneath a wallside mural of William of Orange. Using charges of riot police and a water cannon, the PSNI slowly moved the rioters away from migrant housing towards the center of town, where they set up new barricades, tearing down tourist information billboards to feed the flames. One pensioner in a motorized wheelchair, wearing a Roman legionary’s helmet, weaved in and out of the water cannon jet to loud cheers. As a line of riot police fell back against their Land Rovers under a barrage of rocks and bottles, Rob, a Liverpudlian who claimed to be a military veteran, shouted at them to “put your fucking guns down, you faggots”.

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Dominic Cummings, revolutionary

By Aris Roussinos

“I think it’s pathetic that they’re raising guns against their own people, it’s pathetic,” Rob told me angrily. “They’re the police, they’re supposed to be protecting the people. What the fuck have they got guns for? There’s little girls that are getting raped by fucking grooming gangs and look who shows up to get the people who are outraged.” Like Rob, locals furiously accused the PSNI of “protecting” the alleged perpetrators, by which they meant preventing the angry mob from dealing out its own rough justice.

Unusually for such occasions, teenage girls in black balaclavas were prominent at the forefront of the fight, angrily hectoring the police and daring them to advance while youths behind them lobbed rocks and bottles over their heads. “They’re protecting people who are doing this to young girls,” one teenager, who claimed to know the alleged victim, told me. “We’re getting justice for her cousin,” she said, indicating her ski-masked friend, “and justice for every girl who doesn’t feel safe in her town any more.” Eventually, after rioters smashed in the windows of a house occupied by migrants and set fire to the curtains, heavily equipped police in Land Rovers broke up the riot, dispersing the crowd away from the town center at baton point and clearing a path for fire engines. In the deserted fire station, a miserable-looking Filipino couple stood next to their suitcases waiting for a ride away from Ballymena, unwilling to talk.

This week’s riots are likely to soon fizzle out, as summer riots usually do. But like last year’s protests in Sandy Row, sparked by the disorder in Northern England, the violence in Ballymena displayed new trends in disaffection within the country’s working-class Loyalist communities. Becoming a demographic minority in Northern Ireland, some Ulster Loyalists seem increasingly disenchanted with both their own devolved government and the British state whose symbols they so proudly defend, now seen as the engine of their displacement. “The anger’s against the politicians bringing in all these illegal immigrants,” Gus, an older man, told me. “The problem’s in Stormont and Westminster and everywhere. If this is the only way to get them [migrants] out of the town, then this is the way.”

In fact, the long view is looking good.

First, the bad news. On Monday, President Trump proclaimed that the police deserved an entire week in May. America should figuratively pat the boys in blue on the back, he suggested, while the administration attempts to reverse the awkwardly titled “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing, and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety.” That’s Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order directed at mild and fair-minded police reform. Trump also called on Congress to pass a new crime bill intended to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction — to restore immunity to police officers and a mandatory death penalty for those convicted of killing a cop. In doing so, he’s trying to create more George Floyds, rather than help solve the problem.

This federal Police Week comes on the heels of a late April ribbon-cutting ceremony in Atlanta celebrating the opening of the so-called Cop City. For four years, a motley crew made up mainly of the “A’s”— anarchists, activists, and academics — bitterly fought the construction of the police-and-fire training center under the banner “Stop Cop City.” Atlanta Democrats were asking for it: they tried to quietly fast-track a $115 million facility in early 2021, a time when progressives were still making noise about abolishing and/or defunding cops in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

To make matters worse, the ruling Democrats would raze a patchy forest in the ruins of Atlanta’s defunct Prison Farm to make room for the project. It was, as the kids say, not a good look, and soon the anti-police and prison activists teamed up with NGOs and environmentalists to rabble-rouse against the project, which ranged from petitions to the city government to acts of arson against police motorcycles and construction equipment. The movement tried to expand its jurisdiction and make the fight over a police training complex on the outskirts of Atlanta a national flashpoint, the sequel to the Standing Rock protests, which in 2016 won the sympathy of environmentalists, celebrities, and eventually Barack Obama.

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The problem: as it turns out, almost no one wants to actually abolish the police, which is why the Democrats are now pretending that their flirtation with the movement never actually happened. Plus, since Oct. 7, the Cop City protests have been absorbed into a much broader — and spurious — ideological campaign against white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Western empire. That’s why slogans like “From Atlanta to Palestine” circulate on social media, and in their No Cop City, No Cop World book out this month, Stop Cop City activists suggest that Houthi missile strikes on oil tankers in the Red Sea are inexplicably connected to their effort to — say — shower the Atlanta City Council with ping pong balls. What Stop Cop City looks like now is the Left’s Waterloo, a final death of the movement to abolish police and prisons that became a boutique cause de jour in 2020.

So far, so good for those who think we need cops, right? Not exactly.

Even as #Defund fails, it’s not as if the police are an ascendant institution, at least, not on the local level. Two things can be true at once: Trump is granting federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansive and unconstitutional new powers, even as he has little control over the hundreds of thousands of uniformed officers funded and controlled at the county and municipal levels. The latter is slowly going the way of the dodo.

Consider the numbers. The United States employs more police officers today than half a century ago, but population growth has outpaced that increase. Density matters. In 1973, the country had roughly 4 officers per 1,000 people — a ratio that placed it slightly above Canada and Australia, but below Spain, France, and Austria, and nearly identical to England’s per-capita figure of 3.9. That ratio peaked in the early Nineties at 4.3 officers per 1,000, coinciding with the crest of the late-20th-century crime wave during the first Bush administration. (Even then, the American police force was only about a quarter the size of Russia’s in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

But from 1990 to 2020, a paradoxical trend emerged. The national crime rate fell precipitously — by some measures, mysteriously — even as the police presence, relative to population, remained flat. By 2013, the Department of Justice counted approximately 600,000 full-time personnel in local police departments, bringing the officer-to-resident ratio down to about 3 per 1,000 — roughly 25 percent lower than four decades earlier. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2020, the size of the overall police force had contracted even further, placing America’s police density below average for countries in Europe and the Americas.

America’s depolicing trend has only worsened since the pandemic. According to a recent survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, departments across the country are operating with, on average, a 10 percent shortfall in personnel. To compensate, 65% of responding agencies reported cutting back on services or eliminating specialized units, like detective bureaus or community outreach teams, to preserve basic patrol coverage. In Washington, DC, the police force has fallen to its lowest level in half a century, prompting the city’s police union to describe the situation as “dangerous.” Likewise, Philadelphia has a 19% vacancy rate, and in Gotham, the NYPD has seen its headcount decline by 11 percent since 2019.

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By Mary Harrington

As a result, fewer than 50 million people reported contact with police in 2022, according to the Bureau of Justice’s statistics — the fewest number of police encounters since 2008. That’s mainly because traffic enforcement is disappearing. By the end of 2023, officers in Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they had made before the pandemic. Not coincidentally, road fatalities have jumped to startling highs, including a 74% increase in Memphis from 2019 to 2022, which has lost 22% of its force since 2011. All over America, you can spot “Slow Down!” signs in lawns, but little in the way of enforcing those requests.

The problems are structural. Young people, generally, are more cynical and don’t trust institutions, including the police, and are increasingly not willing to accept relatively low pay, long hours, and a lack of remote work possibilities. It’s the same reason military recruitment is down overall (notwithstanding a recent uptick) and civil service jobs everywhere aren’t being filled — even why pools are closed. Why be a cop or a lifeguard when you can get an email job, work from home, and sell photos on OnlyFans? That explains why one of the biggest growth industries is the private security industry, which, according to one report, is expected to more than double in value in the decade from 2022 to 2032.

That America is actually under policed is not an issue that the Left wants to talk about, because progressives only seem to care about state-inflicted violence, not the vastly more common interpersonal kind. However, the truth is that the decline of policing — both in terms of quality and quantity — is a social-justice issue. Eventually, the police departments, the ones publicly accountable to citizens, will abolish themselves and, like nearly everything else in America, public safety justice will become a privatized luxury good.

Hanging people by the neck until dead, or whatever method you use, is a genuinely interesting subject and raises more profound issues than most of the controversies of our time. Yet it is usually embraced or dismissed amid a blaze of rage. Your view of it defines you, though not necessarily in the way you hope. My reluctant sympathy for the ultimate deterrent, forced on me by experience, facts and reason, has made me personally unacceptable in civilized society for decades. That has given me plenty of extra time to read, or admire the sunset, when I might otherwise have been eating agreeable soufflés and quaffing fine clarets with the liberal elite.

It is a topic of extraordinary power, but you will not win the debate by being right. I once checkmated the then Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, in an argument about broadcasting impartiality. I said that the BBC did not employ a single journalist who could have given a hostile interview to the noted anti-death-penalty campaigner Clive Stafford-Smith. He could not contradict me, and I can think of no better illustration of the Corporation’s profound, unalterable bias. This itself is evidence of the unreasoning nature of the abolitionist position. If it were just a debate, then the BBC would hire people on both sides of it. But my logical, factual victory made no difference at all, either to Mr Thompson or the BBC. They continued to think that I was a cruel, unjust yahoo and that Mr Stafford-Smith (who is indeed a lovely man) is a noble humanitarian.

On the other hand, I probably have more supporters among the non-BBC classes — though they are not all that much use to me. They are as emotional and irrational as the BBC liberals. Many of these are the young, assumed for so long to be hopelessly soppy. They are uninterested in old-fashioned Christian thought, and have become practical and tough. A recent opinion poll by More in Common showed that support for capital punishment is now stronger among 25 to 34-year-olds than among 65 to 74-year-olds, and more common among supposedly liberal women than among men. But are these people actually my allies? One in three of them also want the police to be armed, something I view with horror. They do not want the sort of England that I do. They just want eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. They have entirely missed the point. Properly-conducted capital punishment makes a country less vengeful and more gentle.

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So. Farewell then conservatism

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I can just remember this country when it was an actual matter of national pride that our police were unarmed, in contrast with both the French and the Americans, the only countries which seriously sought to challenge us as “top nation”. I can also remember it as a place of gentleness and safety which would astonish the modern young. There is little doubt in my mind that it was the threat of the noose that allowed our police to remain weaponless for so long. Parliament has never actually decided to give the police guns. It lacks the nerve to take responsibility for such decisions. Instead, ministers, civil servants and police chiefs have quietly created a semi-armed constabulary, and if tasers had not been invented, I suspect most officers would now carry pistols. This has quite predictably created a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt.

Probably the single worst instance of this was the 2005 shooting of the totally innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, now painfully dramatised in the TV series Suspect. To this day, the British state has totally avoided taking responsibility for this horror. It was exactly that responsibility MPs were trying to escape when they abolished a proper lawful death penalty, by sneakily voting for a purportedly Private Member’s Bill to abolish hanging. The Bill in fact received vital support from Harold Wilson’s government whips. But the pretence meant that it was never put before the voters, either before or since.

The state’s view of the death penalty shows more clearly than almost any other policy what kind of civilization we live in. By the way, I am not here discussing the death penalty in the United States, an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence, where capital punishment is mainly a political fiction, espoused by candidates in the hope of appearing effective and resolute in the face of crime and disorder. Yes, people are occasionally executed there. I have seen this happen, twice, and it is a profound and disturbing experience.

But in both cases, the crime was many years in the past, and the killer might well, in slightly different circumstances, have lived on for many years. I can’t see how these events, so totally separated from the murders that led to them, could be expected to deter anything. Texas, one of the few states which genuinely applies the death penalty, suffered 1,322 homicides in 2018. It executed 13 killers that year, mostly years after their crimes. Other US states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never impose it. Your chances of actually being put to death for a horrible murder in the USA are only slightly higher than your chances of being carried off to another galaxy by aliens in the middle of the night. Most of those executed in the USA have been waiting to die for so long that they have forgotten what they did.

No, I am interested in Britain before the mid-Fifties, when the death penalty was eviscerated by Parliament.

It carried on half-heartedly for another few years, but Britain’s governing class had lost the will to punish, and by the time hanging was actually abolished, in 1965, it was an ineffectual remnant. People think they know that murder hasn’t really increased all that much since abolition 60 years ago. They are wrong. The number of homicides went up from around 300 per year in the early Sixties to around 700 a year in the first years of the 21st century. But it isn’t quite that simple, and in any case it was never just murder that the noose was supposed to deter. It was certain types of murder, generally the murder of strangers by thieves or rapists seeking to ensure there were no witnesses to their crimes, and certain actions, especially the carrying of firearms or knives, which might lead to murder. There are several different ways of classifying homicide, and the courts have shown a growing willingness to accept guilty pleas for manslaughter rather than to go through a long and expensive trial on a full murder charge.

There will always be murder, though it will sometimes be called by other names. In the modern era of hanging, we had remarkably few executions, an average of 13 a year from 1900 to 1964. We also had few homicides, an unarmed police force and very little armed crime or knife violence. No longer. Importantly, it is not necessarily murder which the death penalty prevents. Some murders are so utterly irrational that no deterrent could affect them. But the extent of the increase in violence has been concealed by the huge improvement in trauma treatment in our hospitals. Thanks to greater skills, better equipment and techniques, hundreds each year who would have died, especially of stab wounds, now survive.

One survey of the crimes of attempted murder and wounding to endanger life concluded that Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics. This was some years ago, but is still in my view valid — almost all crime statistics in this country are now dubious and affected by various and ever-changing political targets, and by the increasing unwillingness of the police and courts to get involved in crime if they can possibly help it. Many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, within living memory, have been facing capital murder charges, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved. So if we still had the NHS of 1955, I suspect we would have a homicide rate comparable to that in the US.

The firearms control expert Colin Greenwood has noted another interesting fact. In 1948, and in 1955-57, hangings were suspended because Parliament was debating the abolition of the rope. Greenwood found a leap in armed and violent offenses in 1948, followed by a return to previous levels when the suspension ended. The 1957 suspension (which ended with a much more restricted death penalty) was followed by a similar leap, a much smaller fall when the law came back into force, and a generally higher level of such crimes thereafter. There was then a sharp increase after abolition in the mid-Sixties, which has not abated since.

All of this is utilitarian, and there is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Utilitarians really have to support capital punishment, unless they close their minds to the facts. Many modern liberals will be shocked to discover that a man they much admire, John Stuart Mill, made a forceful speech, in April 1868, in favor of the death penalty for aggravated murder (what I should call heinous murder). Part of his reasoning was the appalling cruelty of long imprisonment, the only realistic alternative. I particularly share his horror of the living death of life imprisonment, still offered by reformers as a “humane” choice. As he put it: “I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked — on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime.”

There is a deeper reasoning which Mill would not have troubled with. But, as a Christian believer, I have to. And it is neatly wrapped in the 37th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “Of the Civil Magistrates”. It notes that “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”, adding “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.” This seems to me to accept (as I do) that the arguments for the death penalty are more or less the same as those for just war: it is a horrible thing, but sometimes necessary.

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By Freddie deBoer

If you seek office and the power that goes with it, your most pressing task is to stand between your fellow countrymen and evil. To do that, you must maintain armed forces capable of lethal violence and ready to inflict it. If you lack the courage and resolve to do this, then do not seek office in the first place. You are not qualified for it. The apparatus of the death penalty has exactly the same purpose, to defend the weak and good against the strong and evil, by placing a sharp sword in the hands of justice. This point also disposes of the most popular argument against the death penalty, the fear of executing the wrong person. This is indeed a strong point. It is why, now that our courts have been turned into a shameful politicized and emotionalized travesty of justice, I could not possibly support the return of the gallows until major reforms have taken place.

The most important would be to end majority verdicts, a grave weakening of jury independence. Jurors should also be subject to stricter qualifications, perhaps educational, perhaps based on experience of life — 18 is certainly too young. Judges need to be more willing and more free to halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence. The appalling evidence-free condemnation of the nurse Lucy Letby to a slow living death demands a sweeping upheaval of police and courts which would take years to achieve.

But that is a particular point, not a general rule. In general, a well-ordered justice system, watched over by a free independent press, would rarely execute an innocent person, especially with the safeguards provided by modern science. But do those who claim that the fear of killing one innocent person is enough to disarm the state really mean what they say? This is a pacifist argument, and I would respect it if those who made it admitted that its logic means leaving the country defenseless against any enemy, and accepting the consequences — subjugation, impoverishment, extinction of liberty — which would follow.

But few are so principled. Worse, many modern liberals, while denouncing capital punishment, are all too keen on idealistic foreign adventures in which innocents die. I think of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the lawless 2003 invasion of Iraq, and David Cameron’s allegedly benevolent bombing of Libya in 2011, though the pretext for that has long been exploded. You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, after a Nato bombing raid, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher. “In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more,” Fletcher wrote. “Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.”

But this was done on the watch of a prime minister who once said of capital punishment: “There have been too many cases of things going wrong, of the wrong people being executed, of evidence coming to light after the execution, and sometimes there is just too much of an element of doubt. And I just don’t honestly think that in a civilized society like ours that you can have the death penalty any more.” And yet he started a war of choice, to give his conscience a bit of exercise in a foreign field. These people do not really mean what they say. Innocents may die, as long as they are far away. They can also die, as Jean Charles Menezes did, at the hands of armed police, and nothing will happen.

But Kodi, who was just 16, stayed inside and called his older brother, Bailey, instead. Raised by a neglectful mother after the death of their father, the Westcott boys had shared an intensely deprived childhood on south Bristol’s Hartcliffe estate. Built in the Fifties to house those displaced from the inner-city by slum clearances and the Luftwaffe, its neat rows of houses stretch out for miles.

In drill tracks recorded together under the names G-Boy and Young G-Boy, Bailey and Kodi would flash blue bandanas, brag about ditching school to sell drugs, and rep the “13s” — a gang, or loose affiliation of friends, depending on your perspective, named for their postcode.

“On the 4’s block we lurk and attack; anything red gets shot or stabbed,” a balaclaved brother raps on one song, in reference to the group’s rivals: residents of the adjacent estate of Knowle West. Built several decades before Hartcliffe, it has been renowned for social dysfunction almost since its creation. Writing in the Forties, sociologists described residents who had moved out because it was hard to bring up children decently while those of their neighbors had “often unmentionable standards of behavior and language.”

These two areas, BS4 and BS13, have for decades maintained a simmering rivalry despite the many residents who count friends and family members on both sides. “Westers” who spend all week threatening to attack those in Hartcliffe will often find themselves scrapping alongside them at a Bristol City game come the weekend, one youth worker told me. Only in recent years has the division descended into more serious violence.

On the January evening last year when Kodi’s house was attacked, therefore, it was clear to the Westcotts where they had to seek revenge. Bailey, 22, summoned his friend Anthony Snook, a local 45-year-old man, who appeared with a car.

With Snook driving, Kodi, his friend Riley Tolliver and two other boys, who remain unnamed due to their age, headed to Knowle West. In an attack that lasted 33 seconds, they leapt from the vehicle and used large knives and a baseball bat to inflict catastrophic injuries to Max Dixon and Mason Rist, two entirely innocent teenage boys who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Across Britain, extreme youth violence is rising. In recent months, children have been stabbed in schools, on buses and in the streets around their homes. The victims and perpetrators seem to grow younger; their weapons more extreme. Over the past 10 years, the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp object has increased by 240%. Across the same period, adult knife homicides have seen just a 30% rise.

The government has responded to the horror with a technocratic focus on regulating the implements used to kill. Machetes, zombie knives and ninja swords are being banned, while Amazon is blamed for selling them in the first place. But what drives children to kill remains murkier.

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Outside London, Avon and Somerset saw the greatest rise in knife crime over the last year relative to population, according to police data published in January. From 2023 to 2024, Bristol alone saw 400 extra offenses involving blades. Following the killing of Max and Mason and then, the following month, the stabbing of 16-year-old Darrian Williams by two younger children, the city has been undergoing a period of reflection.

Serena Wiebe was already grieving her brother’s suicide when her friend was fatally stabbed. “We kind of all grew up together,” she says. “So it was kind of like, ‘wow, I’ve lost two people that I saw as like family.’” The 21-year-old was raised in east Bristol, around Easton and St Pauls, ethnically diverse areas long blighted by drug violence which in recent years have been dubbed some of the world’s coolest neighborhoods by Time Out, with rising property prices to match.

Here, and further east, gangs from the BS16 and the BS2 postcodes are locked in an internecine conflict. When Williams’ killers approached him, they shouted, “Is that Darrian? Are you 16?” At their trial, his mother held up a green bandana and yelled, “you killed my son for this… is it worth it?” until police officers asked her to sit down.

“They’ll just stab anything at this point,” says Serena. “I’ve noticed now that if you’re in problems with someone, the culture is you have to do something about it. Or there’s people in your ear saying, ‘you need to do something about it’.”

At a low-rise gym close to the roundabout where Easton meets St Pauls, I speak to Serena and other young people working with Empire Fighting Chance, which provides a mix of boxing training and psychological intervention to steer young people away from violence.

Those at the charity are witnesses to knife crime spreading beyond its traditional boundaries. Mariella, 19, had a close friend stabbed to death by her best friend’s boyfriend when she was 14. “I’ve seen kids that have come from relatively good homes,” she says. “Obviously they’ve experienced a few traumatic things, but they’re in situations where they’re safe, they don’t have to carry a knife. And the only reason they’re doing it is because they’re seeing it on social media.”

Both women agree that the competition for social status online is crucial. When Serena recently took her 11-year-old relative’s phone and started browsing Snapchat, the first three stories that appeared were of people holding knives. “If you’re seeing it from that young age automatically you’re desensitized to what’s going on,” she says. “I’ve had to have conversations with him being like, ‘this isn’t normal’.”

When she was that age, Mariella says, there were gangs and some had knives but they were carried covertly. “Now it’s almost like having a designer bag, having a big knife in your hand in a picture.”

Both also agree that those from Bristol’s deprived inner-city and outer-rim estates feel locked out of the city’s growing prosperity. “There isn’t hope for young people,” says Serena. “I remember when I was in school all we’d be talking about is how none of us will probably ever be able to own a house because of how expensive it is. A lot of young people are like, ‘what’s the point? I’m not going to be able to have what my parents had.’ If you’re in that situation, you’re going to live with your parents forever. Where is the hope?”

Amid such despondence, postcode gangs provide an alternative form of attachment. “It’s sort of spread everywhere,” says Mariella. “There’s 10s, which is my area, Southmead. Every postcode is now grouping together and becoming like a gang within itself. It is a sense of belonging, I think.”

Since 2013, Desmond Brown has worked to break children from across Bristol out of such a cycle. I meet him in St Pauls, where his charity, Growing Futures, helps young people dealing with school exclusions, violence, and child criminal and sexual exploitation. He believes a “death cult” has developed among some children: those from stable homes are carrying and using knives because of the culture, not necessity.

Brown fields phone calls from parents who have found stashes of knives in the local park or their child’s bedroom, but do not know what to do and, often, are too scared to confront them. If they suspect their children are carrying, Brown tells them, they must search them every time they enter and leave the house. But they are the responsible ones. In other homes, he says, it is parents who supply their children with weapons.

And while family units disintegrate, the traditional structure of organized crime also erodes. Children can find accounts on Snapchat that teach them how to cook crack, take over and “cuckoo” the house of a vulnerable person, establishing their own county line. Youths need only to find a dealer and they can set themselves up as an ultra-violent entrepreneur. They fan out from Bristol into Wales and the southwest of England.

Amid violent crime and a culture of knife carrying, children are consumed by fear. Many wear balaclavas, Brown claims, because they wish to disappear, rather than intimidate. They brandish longer and longer knives so they can keep a gap from those who seek to harm them. Sitting in his office, he mimes an outlandish swordfight to me, waving his arm erratically at great distance from his body.

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Officials, who are predominantly white and middle class, meanwhile have little understanding of what drives violence, he claims. Children who feel unsafe are going to arm themselves. “No matter what we say about ‘put down knives’, if you’re going to school and you live in Fishponds and you come into City Academy, you’re driving through ops [rival] territory where people will get on the bus and tell you to run your pockets, ask you who you’re repping, where you’re from, and if you say the wrong thing, you could get stabbed.”

When Kodi was sentenced last December, the judge was clear the teenager was likely to have lived in a state of “hyper-vigilance, keyed up all the time”. He had been targeted by rival gangs because of Bailey’s affiliations, because he is from Hartcliffe and because he is mixed race, said Justice May. Amid postcode hostility, carrying knives had been normalized by the adults around him. He likely regarded it as necessary for his safety.

When I speak to Mike Vass, Avon and Somerset Police’s strategic knife crime lead, he is keen to show me a densely patterned diagram detailing the influences which lead children to violence. Is their mother struggling with multiple children and a chaotic lifestyle? Who’s their male role model? Are they being sexually abused?

To combat such factors, primary schools in his patch have begun teaching their pupils not to carry knives when they grow up. “My children, their children and beyond is what we are influencing now,” Vass says with an air of fatalism. “What we’re influencing now is not for the most part going to change in a short period of time.”

Reversing the effects of decades of cuts to frontline services will take 30 years, Vass claims. His parents used to worry that he might smoke and drink; he worries that his two sons will be stabbed.

Revelations from the report prepared on Kodi Westcott by the Youth Justice Service make bleak reading on the influences that shaped him. He missed most of his schooling. His educational level was between seven and 10 years old. His childhood, said May, was one of “scarcely believable neglect and deprivation”.

After his arrest, by contrast, Kodi behaved well. Youth justice workers who examined him said that had he received more nurture his crime might have been prevented. He expressed sorrow for his actions, and May told the court she believed him.

When I visit Hartcliffe, I walk south past children zipping around on souped-up dirt bikes, and head into a large Morrisons on the outskirts of town. At the newspaper display, I see Kodi’s face staring up from the cover of the Bristol Post.

Now sentenced to at least 23 years for murder and detained in a secure children’s home, he has somehow obtained a phone, created an Instagram account, and begun posting mocking references to the 33 seconds it took him to kill and his victims “up in his coffin”.

“Love to everyone showing love to my ting,” he has written to his followers. “This is only the start trust me.”

The police insist they welcome the public’s assistance in the fight against crime. Chief Constables urge us to become special constables, police station volunteers, neighborhood watch coordinators. For many, though, beat-plodding and curtain-twitching don’t get the blood pumping quite as fast as pedo-hunting. There are over 100 such vigilante groups all over Britain, arranging stings and catching offenders — and journalists are increasingly keen to tag along as well.

As the M4 tragedy so desperately implies, however, online vigilantism can quickly go wrong. Lacking any of the protections offered by law, the targets of the mob are easily crushed. And even when they aren’t, online detectives often misunderstand the laws they claim to defend, with every dubious Facebook post putting justice in peril. But with the police in bureaucratic meltdown, and new tech making amateur sleuthing simpler than ever, don’t expect the pedo-hunters to vanish — quite the contrary, as vigilantism goes from online hobby to grim reality right across the country.

The appeal is understandable. It offers moral certainty, a sense of achievement and a soupçon of excitement. And, like most types of crime, pedophilia is impossible for the police to manage alone. Home Office statistics reveal nearly 40,000 child sex abuse image offenses were logged in 2023-2024: and that’s only reported cases.

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Britain's police need a MAGA revolution

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I recall a conversation with a former colleague, an officer I’ll call Mark. “The most depressing thing about this job?” he once told me. “After a while, you begin thinking everyone’s a pedophile.” Mark was starting his fifth year as a full-time covert internet investigator, and spent his days hunched over a keyboard, tracking predators. “There’s thousands of them,” I remember him telling me, exhaustion on his face. “You could nick ‘em all day and all night, there’d still be more.” Like many police officers, Mark thought the only way to manage these criminals was either life imprisonment without parole or capital punishment. Otherwise impeccably liberal doctors and academics I’ve met are similarly hawkish — citing the tactics pedophiles use when pretending to engage with treatment.

I myself have helped convict a would-be contact offender by posing as a pedophile, even if the nightmarish evidence, and the offender’s laughably short sentence, meant I subsequently declined work in the area. Yet, DIY pedo hunting only continues to soar — and not merely, I think, because of the ethical rush it provides. As Adrian Smith’s tormentors showed, all you need to start is an internet connection.

So-called “digilantism” arguably started after the Boston Marathon bombing, in 2013, when online sleuths tracked down witnesses and suspects. Never mind that their hit rate was dubious: a new craze was born. True crime podcasters now work cold cases, while wannabe spies glean data using satellite images. For their part, pedo-hunters have their own MO. After arranging a meeting between a fake child and their would-be abuser, they detain their targets and call the police, handing over the evidence they’ve gathered.

Collaboration between police and civilians isn’t wholly new. During my covert training, tabloid journalists were sometimes cast as Sherlock Holmes, the police as the hapless Lestrade. Back then, hacks were happier to go to the “real world” and confront their targets, warning us police in advance if they were about to buy guns or drugs. Then they’d hand over their notes and, I imagine, wander off to the pub. Their findings could even be compelling, even as they sometimes collapsed into hearsay. Like builders asked to come in and complete a half-done extension, the professional detectives would sigh and get on with it.

Given the shocking scale of pedophilia across Britain, one policeman I know is predictably sanguine. It helps that, among officers, pedophiles have a reputation for presenting negligible physical risks when confronted. As for the digilantes themselves, they seem increasingly aware of law and procedure. Many observe the “agent provocateur” principle of not encouraging a crime, which renders evidence inadmissible (this is the closest English law has to entrapment).

Paedo-hunters also video their activities for transparency. For officers given the task of arrest and prosecution, you might argue that the hard work’s already been done. It’s not dissimilar to the days when officers actually took shoplifting seriously: you’d arrive at a supermarket to find a thief sitting in the security office, a statement prepared and evidence bagged and tagged. Police called these mundane arrests a “GIC” (Given Into Custody). I must admit, I never thought I’d see the day pedophiles were treated as GICs.

Even so, the process isn’t flawless. First, there’s the welfare of the hunters. Notwithstanding their reputation, there’s always the chance that their targets will lash out when cornered. That’s before you consider the safety of the suspect. This is something police officers always do — and which some paedo-hunters clearly don’t. A broader issue is evidence. Though the digilantes are becoming more sophisticated, professional officers understand something they don’t: every theory, no matter how outlandish, offers a potential get-out when cases come to trial. In court, a barrister is perfectly entitled to ask: “Officer, why didn’t you investigate theory X or Y?”

Each piece of well-intentioned online speculation, then, might offer another slither of reasonable doubt. After the former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, in 2006, I was given the job of investigating just such conjecture. I researched online allegations and spoke with experts to examine leads. Yes, internet sleuths, your caffeine-fueled Reddit theory might end up being some poor detective’s day-job.

We’ve seen the limits of online detective work elsewhere too. The Nicola Bulley case is a prime example. She disappeared in January 2023, having fallen into a river. But the subsequent tsunami of poisonous, ill-informed commentary by TikTok “detectives” (some of whom arrived at the scene to create content) only impeded the investigation. Jay Slater, a 19-year-old tourist who fell into a ravine in Tenerife, faced a similar fate, with some true crime obsessives conjuring outlandish theories about how he died. That’s hardly strange. Crime has always been an adjunct to entertainment. And now the internet offers another dimension — interaction, immersion, even as the real-world suffering is all too real.

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In the end, though, I suspect that some officers disapprove of digital paedo-hunters not for ethical reasons: but because it infringes on their turf. Most police work is boring. Once coveted detective roles now involve call-center busywork. Local CIDs investigate a sisyphean landfill of safeguarding cases, domestic disputes and drunken assaults, all to satisfy arbitrary performance metrics. Little wonder officers seek to ringfence genuinely useful online work from amateurs — if UK policing were the British Empire, the few specialisms left would be like pre-1997 Hong Kong.

Ironically, of course, that bureaucratic malaise means officers are stuck with the amateurs whether they like it or not. To give one example, digilantes aren’t bound by the strictures of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The administrative treacle police wade through to monitor an open, publicly-viewable Facebook profile is comical. As I once said to my detective inspector: “I could just go home, boot up my laptop, use a VPN, intrusively research this suspect and phone the results into Crimestoppers. What’s to stop me?” The inspector shrugged.

As bureaucracy grows, and operational budgets shrink, it seems inevitable that digilantism will only increase — especially given the proliferation of easy-to-use online tools and AI. You could therefore argue a forward-thinking police service should incorporate digilantes into the investigative mix. They might offer training, or work towards some sort of licensing regime. That, I suspect, wouldn’t work. The entire point of being a vigilante is to be outside the system, a workaday superhero, stepping beyond the mundane. Batman was never a special constable with the Gotham PD. Batman never had to fill out a 12-page form for permission to monitor a Facebook page, or complete a risk assessment to knock on a front door. Batman never suffered DEI courses or spent days cutting-and-pasting his internet search history into a disclosure schedule. And, to my knowledge, Batman never gave evidence at Isleworth Crown Court.

More to the point, the end-user of a digilante’s work will always be a cop, posing significant risks when detectives are required to manage overenthusiastic or malicious actors. And if the challenges are clear enough online — depressingly apparent from the Canaries to Bristol — just wait until less internet-savvy vigilantes want in on the action too. With law and order collapsing from city centers to quaint Wiltshire villages, it makes sense that posses of wannabe superheroes are heading to the streets, with Birmingham just one of towns now stalked by gangs of vigilantes. But don’t worry: I’m sure the police have a form for reporting that too.

Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialized in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

I didn’t aspire to be a police officer when I joined the force in 1989. My career choice was born of necessity. I had to provide for my young family, so college had to wait. But there was also the calling to serve communities racked by poverty, lack of opportunity, and lousy infrastructure — a state of affairs embodied by abandoned and burnt-down tenement blocks; buildings spray-painted “X” by the Fire Department were unsafe for first responders to enter.

These buildings became havens for drug dealers and shooting galleries for addicts. As rookie police officers, we were tasked with cleaning up areas like that. To combat the visible signs of a decaying city with high crime rates, we were deployed to the busiest precincts, called “shitholes” by the cops. These were the worst of the worst. We were assigned to crack patrols to tackle the emerging epidemic head-on.

Numerous overtime details were created to address crime spikes, one of which was “Operation Takeback,” to which I was assigned. It included tackling minor violations — vandalism, urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like — that could foster an atmosphere of lawlessness. Little did we know then that this was the so-called broken-windows theory of policing in practice.

As a result, New York City experienced a renaissance beginning in the mid-1990s and early aughts. Formerly depressed communities thrived. Times Square, once dotted with peep shows and porn shops, was transfigured into a family-friendly destination. The hipster culture emerged in Williamsburg, marking a significant cultural moment — a “vibe shift,” to use today’s lingo.

These and other changes were driven by a police culture of strict enforcement. These officers were no-nonsense and motivated. They took pride in their jobs and had the support of the mayor, the NYPD brass, the media, and the people they served. Then it all went downhill again.

Although crime rates overall are still low compared to the bad old days, many indicators are flashing red. Since 2019, there has been a 31% increase in major crimes. The murder rate is almost 20% higher than it was five years ago; robbery is up by a quarter; and felony assault by nearly half. As former Queens district attorney Jim Quinn summed it up recently, “there were almost 29,000 more crime victims in 2024 than there were in 2019.”

Behind each of these statistics are real lives permanently scarred or snuffed out altogether by crime. Some of these cases — such as the woman burned to death on a Brooklyn train, or the man shoved onto subway tracks at Manhattan’s 18^th Street — receive national and even international media attention. But many other victims and their families suffer and mourn in silence.

So what happened?

Partly, it’s because the NYPD became a victim of its own success. We failed to adapt proven formulas to changing conditions. Front-line officers were encouraged to conduct “stop-and-frisk” procedures, and higher-ups demanded it during CompStat meetings (at which leaders review neighborhood crime data). “How many touches do your officers have?” was a frequent question from chiefs who were likely excellent academic test-takers but had limited street experience.

The pressure at times translated into needlessly gruff, insensitive treatment. Several high-profile use-of-force incidents drew sharp criticism from communities of color. Fast-forward to the rise of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd “reckoning”, and law enforcers in New York and across the country faced unprecedented pressure. With Covid in the mix, it felt like an all-out war on police and law and order.

In the year 2020, under Mayor de Blasio, these trends reached a terrifying crescendo. That was when the state legislature in Albany launched its disastrous experiment with bail “reform,” eliminating cash bail and removing judges’ discretion in detaining criminal suspects. As if that weren’t enough to hinder law enforcers, the activist chorus to #Defund police grew louder.

De Blasio and his police executives didn’t know how to handle it. Even at the height of the Floyd reckoning, overwhelming majorities of African-Americans indicated they wanted the same or even higher levels of policing in their neighborhoods. But instead of taking a holistic view of what the public wanted and balancing competing demands, the de Blasio administration folded to the loudest activists. Hizzoner permitted rioting, property destruction, and assaults on police officers. Mass police retirements occurred nationwide and in Gotham. Police morale sank — and remains low: applicants to the NYPD sank to 8,000 this year, down from 18,000 in 2017.

Mayor Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain who took over from De Blasio in 2022, inherited his predecessor’s crises — and failed to overcome them. Adams appeared to appoint friends rather than qualified executives. Four police commissioners have served under him, formerly unheard of. And on the streets, a climate of criminality continued to fester.

The criminal element felt empowered by the revolving door of the criminal-justice system. Nearly 20% of offenders break the law again, according to data released this week by the New York Department of Corrections. Offenders are often released on the same day they are arrested, and many go on to do more harm even as earlier cases against them are still pending. Yet district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg remain committed to so-called restorative justice and diversion programs that keep criminals on the streets.

All this sends the wrong message to offenders. Criminals have come to believe that crime pays, and there are no consequences; law-abiding New Yorkers live in fear, especially in the confined spaces of the subway system.

Political leaders assert that the public perception of crime, especially in the subway system, is not aligned with actual crime statistics. Things aren’t that bad, they insist, and it’s only sensational media coverage that makes us feel unsafe. It’s true that overall crime rates have decreased — marginally, compared to the worst of the pandemic years. But compared to the renaissance of the 1990s and aughts, things are unquestionably and dramatically worse.

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As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently noted, despite the marginal decline in crime numbers, the department must work to enhance the sense of safety. To tackle crime in the city, especially in the subway system, we need a stronger uniformed presence, particularly at the turnstiles. By preventing ne’er-do-wells from entering the subway in the first place, we can likely win half the battle. And we need officers on the trains. We need undercover cops, both underground and aboveground. Although tough anti-crime units have recently been controversial, they remain a valuable tool for policing.

Today’s cops act as therapists, social workers, racial reconcilers, and peace officers — all rolled into one — as other institutions of social care have eroded. But police officers aren’t a panacea for all social woes. Tackling the root causes of criminal behavior requires ensuring that individuals in crisis have access to mental health and social services. This approach can help reduce recent violent incidents linked to homelessness and mental health issues. Agencies responsible for assisting this segment of the population should also be held as accountable as the police department is. Otherwise, we might well fall back into the state of affairs when I was a boy.

The bad old days are better kept confined to old movies.

Blanketed in two inches of snow, Keighley is a feast of pretty houses. Residents shuffle through its icy backstreets. Children throw snowballs. Deep in the Pennine moors of Brontë Country, Keighley once boasted a proud history: the birthplace of Yorkshire’s first cotton mill, a heritage steam railway, and Timothy Taylor beer.

But in 2002, it became the birthplace of Britain’s “grooming gangs” shame. It was in Keighley that Ann Cryer, the town’s Labour MP, became the first politician to expose how groups of Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls — drugging them, abusing them, raping them. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

Yet over the following decades, the town’s victims — some not even in their teens — were gradually forgotten. Attention was drawn, instead, to Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, each suffering predatory horrors of their own. Of the 10 inquiries and reports that have since been held into the scandal, none focuses on Keighley. It has been much the same over the past fortnight. Spurred on by the wild tweets of an American billionaire, the subject of grooming gangs has again been turned into a game of political football — with Keighley again ignored.

In recent years, in fact, only one national newspaper has done any significant reporting on the town: The New York Times sent a reporter to write a soft feature about the Keighley Cougars, a Rugby League team with a new kit designed to match the colours of the trans flag. Before their first match, a drag queen performed “It’s Raining Men”. Today, the stadium’s gates are named after Captain Tom Moore, another child of Keighley.

One man shuffling along the ice is Martin Thompson, who has lived here for 50 years. He dismisses the past fortnight’s feverish debate. “Elon Musk is just jumping on the bandwagon,” he says. “This will die down and he’ll move on to the next thing.” An unenthusiastic Labour voter in last year’s election — Keighley and Ilkey is a rare bellwether that remained Conservative — he has little time for Nigel Farage or “hateful” Tommy Robinson. “None of them really care about us,” he says.

***

Keighley’s exorcism began in 2002, when seven distressed mothers appeared one morning at Cryer’s constituency office on Devonshire Street. They didn’t know where else to turn. Their daughters, they explained, were being befriended by older men from Keighley’s Pakistani community, who make up roughly half of the town’s central ward. The girls were then taken to parties, plied with drugs, and sexually abused. The mothers handed Cryer a list of the names and addresses of 65 men they believed were implicated. They had made similar complaints to the police and social services — but had been ignored. They were desperate.

After Cryer was also stonewalled by the police, she spoke out publicly: about the girls, some as young as 11, who were being abused, and about the ethnicity of their attackers. Less publicly, Cryer tried to meet with religious leaders in the Pakistani community, after she learnt that the News of the World had offered the victims’ mothers £1,000 to tell their story. She feared the damage that a media paroxysm would inflict on the town. “We could have race riots,” she later warned. But when she approached elders at one of Keighley’s mosques with a smaller list of 35 alleged perpetrators, Cryer was told it had nothing to do with them. Members of her own party disowned her as a racist. After receiving threats to her life, she was advised to install a panic alarm at home.

Race riots didn’t follow, but tensions started to simmer. The following year, in November 2003, after the police finally launched an investigation, Delwar Hussein, a 24-year-old youth worker who groomed and had sex with a 13-year-old girl, became the first man on Cryer’s list to be convicted. It should have represented a grim act of closure for the girl and her family. Instead, the case was seized on by the British National Party, who used it to blame the local Labour council.

By May 2004, with a local election looming, the BNP were confident they could win. Three weeks before polling day, Channel 4 pulled a documentary about the area’s grooming gangs after anti-fascist campaigners and the police warned it could play into the hands of the far-Right. “A lot of them have a way with words to make you feel you’re gorgeous,” said one 14-year-old girl in the programme of her groomers. “He told me he loved me and how beautiful I was. I thought I loved him.”

Yet the BNP parlayed the censorship to their advantage, claiming that only they could protect Keighley’s girls. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, held a rally at the town’s Reservoir Tavern, in which he described Islam as “a wicked vicious faith” and railed against the Muslims turning Britain into a “multiracial hellhole”. His rhetoric found purchase, and the BNP won the ward of Keighley West.

Their victory, however, was temporary, and the BNP were evicted almost as quickly as they arrived. In the 2005 general election, Nick Griffin was beaten into fourth place. The following year, after a by-election was held, Keighley West was won by Angela Sinfield, a mother of one of the grooming victims who had joined the Labour Party the year before. As she said at the time: “The BNP used [the scandal] for their own ends without ever doing anything concrete about it — and for me that is unforgivable.”

***

Jean Gee was there at the start with Ann Cryer. Now 77, the former social worker helped to introduce the MP to the victims’ mothers in 2002. “I used to work with kids who were excluded from school,” she tells me. “And I’d see first-hand how they were picked up by men in their taxis.” At the time, Jean didn’t know that one of the girls would be a close family member.

Amber* was raped just over a decade ago by a man she believed was a friend of her father’s. Unlike a number of the town’s victims, who have left, fearful that their attackers still walk its streets, Amber still lives in Keighley. Every day is a reminder of her trauma. She suffers from a severe eating disorder that has left her unable to have children. Her body is skeletal, her arms tattooed. “It marks a girl for life,” Jean says.

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Around the same time as Amber was being groomed, a gang of 12 men were targeting a 13-year-old girl, Autumn*. The torment she would endure — over 13 months between 2011 and 2012 — would become Keighley’s darkest chapter. During one incident, she was gang-raped by five men; during another, she was raped in an underground car park next to a wall brazenly graffitied with the names of some of her attackers.

In 2016, Autumn’s 12 attackers were convicted — and the judge found she’d been failed by police and social workers. After one attack, officers dismissed her as a prostitute; after another, they failed to progress a medical assessment. As for her abusers, the judge concluded that “they saw her as a pathetic figure who… served no purpose than to be an object that they could sexually misuse and cast aside”. In their mugshots, two of her attackers are smiling.

Autumn’s younger brother, Adam*, now in his early 20s, believes the past fortnight’s debate over grooming gangs is fuelled by hypocrisy. “Politicians of all stripes colluded with the police to engage in a cover-up,” he tells me. He blames the Conservative Party for “failing to act on this issue despite so many cases occurring under them”. And he blames Labour, whose leader this week suggested it was a “far-Right” issue, despite the “most impacted areas being run by that party”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform — which registered 10% of the vote in Keighley in last year’s general election, well below its national average — is also trying to make political hay. “At least the SDP here have always prioritised the issue of grooming gangs,” he says. As for Elon Musk, who described Labour MP Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and called for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison, Adam views him as “clearly unstable” but welcomes his intervention. “Anything that brings attention to this issue is good,” he says.

Back in town, though, most are oblivious to this week’s political mudslinging, which culminated on Wednesday in a failed Conservative vote to force a new inquiry. Few of those I speak to — Pakistani and white, young and old — are aware of Musk’s recent comments. “If Tommy Robinson came to Keighley, he’d get beaten up,” says one white woman in her early-20s. “When will [Pretoria-born] Musk start tweeting about South Africa’s race problems?” jokes one bemused madrasah teacher.

There’s a similar lack of consensus over calls for a new inquiry into West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs. This is partly because people doubt its sincerity; neither the Conservatives nor Reform mentioned an inquiry in last year’s manifestos. But it’s mostly because few believe another investigation will be acted upon. “What would the value be?” says Gee, who voted Conservative last year. “How likely is it that something will happen? It’s not as if we have the money to change anything. Just look at our housing and social care system.”

Even Adam has his reservations. “What comes after? We need to deal with the source and not just address the past.” Typical was one stallholder in Keighley’s indoor market. “I know I’d feel different if my daughter was one of the victims,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a priority now.” Keighley, she points out, may be pretty — but it isn’t thriving. In some neighbourhoods, 40% of households are classified as deprived.

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Still, there are attempts to learn from the past. After school, youth workers patrol the shopping centre and adjoining bus station where many of the town’s victims were once ensnared. “There are still creeps around,” says one teenage girl. “But they’re not just Pakistani. To be honest, they’re more likely to be a 60-year-old white guy.”

There are those, however, who remain concerned that former groomers have gone unpunished. After all, if Cryer and those seven mothers were correct, and there were at least 35 offenders in the town, not all have been caught. “Membership of these gangs is informal and often it’s hard to pin down members,” says Adam, who still believes the abusers walk the town’s streets. “You also can’t blame girls who haven’t come forward given the police’s previous failures.” Jean agrees, though also believes many “grooming gangs” have been replaced by county lines gangs, whose members are both Pakistani and white. Just this month, more than 50 members of one such gang in Keighley — peddling heroin and crack cocaine — were arrested by police.

But such developments don’t fit into the narrative of Britain’s national debate — a binary war, fought mostly online, between those uncomfortable with highlighting the ethnicity of West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs and those who seek to exploit it. Meanwhile, the affected communities are viewed as collateral. As one fed up local told me: “We’ve got enough wars going on without your Tommy Robinsons starting another.”

In Keighley, few are worried about the return of the far-Right. Their Conservative MP, Robbie Moore, has been outspoken about the need for another inquiry, neutralising movements further to the Right. In 2017, the EDL tried to hold a protest in the town and were outnumbered by police. But there’s still disquiet. In 2022, three members of a neo-Nazi cell in Keighley were jailed after being caught buying a 3D printer to make a gun. The following year, a teenager was jailed after he planned to attack one of the town’s mosques while disguised as an armed police officer.

Nor has faith in its institutions been restored. Last November, the town was left horrified when a local police officer was jailed for having sex with a vulnerable domestic abuse victim whose complaints he had been tasked with investigating. When I asked West Yorkshire Police how it hopes to regain Keighley’s trust after decades of neglect, I was told the officer’s “offending was not connected to grooming gangs” and redirected to an old press release.

But it feels connected, feeding into a pattern of betrayal. Despite the best efforts of a noble MP, Keighley remains a case study in exploitation — first by a terrified establishment who ignored the abuse of the town’s young girls, and then by a far-Right menace who sought to capitalise on their cowardice. And now, as attempts are made to reheat their trauma, Keighley’s residents might be forgiven for their ambivalence. They’ve seen this before, and know how it ends. The fires of our digital ecosystem will consume its subjects. But in Keighley, cold resignation preserves them.

*Names have been changed

Both men were in good company. This week, a National Policing Statement was published documenting significant increases in recorded crimes of violence against women and girls and describing the epidemic as a “national emergency”. And at the start of this month, Peter Skelton KC, representing the Metropolitan Police in the “spy cops” public inquiry, apologised to the many women deceived into sexual relationships with undercover officers — echoing the terms of an apology delivered nine years previously to eight women I acted for in a civil claim against the Met. The apology in 2015 coincided with the commencement of a public inquiry into undercover policing spanning the period from 1968 to 2010, when the police spied on over 1,000 political groups for the undemocratic purpose of getting intelligence on organisations engaged in political protest. More than 50 women are now known to have been targeted and subjected to state-sponsored sexual deceit — many had relationships with men they viewed as their life partners. These women discovered not only that they had been deceived about the identity of their partners, but that this deception had been enabled and funded by the police.

The spy cops scandal is merely a snapshot of the endemic and corrupt history of policing that continues to the present day. From the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met police officer in 2021, to the prosecution of serial rapist, abuser and serving officer David Carrick, to the almost weekly stories of other officers prosecuted for violence against women — such horrifying stories of misogyny from within the ranks of those responsible for protecting women are nothing new. How will our newly elected Labour government tackle the multiple scandals that have rocked the most vital of institutions?

I wrote about the long history of police abuse and corruption in my recently published book, Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men, which focuses primarily on the female victims of the institution and draws on my career as a solicitor. I fought high-profile cases: from the nine-year battle by two of the victims of serial rapist John Worboys to the struggle for justice by the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot dead by the Met.

These legal cases exposed abject failures in policing and established a legal precedent by which the police, previously held to be immune, are under a duty to conduct an adequate investigation of serious violent crimes. I also instructed prime minister Keir Starmer, when he was a young barrister, in cases involving police misconduct. He was an active member of the Police Action Lawyers Group which sought to hold police officers accountable for misconduct; he went on to set up the Northern Ireland Police Board in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement; and was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions where he oversaw initiatives that, for a while, led to an improvement in the prosecution of sexual offences. As I see it, Keir Starmer couldn’t be better equipped to understand the underlying problems. But it remains to be seen whether his government will limit itself to police reform or to radically rethinking the institution itself.

And it’s undeniable that the rot runs deep. In submissions made last year to the undercover police inquiry, reference was made to the “Police in Action” report published in 1983. Commissioned by the then-head of the Met police, Sir David McNee, the report sought to conduct an independent study of “relations between the Metropolitan Police and the community it serves”. At the time the 1983 McNee report was published, it was noted that only 9% of police officers were women. It was, in fact, unofficial Met policy to keep the proportion of women at about 10%, even though this amounted to unlawful discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. In a section entitled “Sex, women, sexual offences”, the report found that policemen’s attitudes towards women and victims of sexual abuses amounted to a “cult of masculinity”, and, moreover, that “a certain pattern of talk about sex and women is expected”.

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The level of institutional police sexism that both the 1983 report and the spy cops scandal exposed reveals a direct link with recent accounts of Met police misogyny today — they clearly did not appear from nowhere. The “Police in Action” report described police culture in terms which echoed Baroness Casey’s excoriating review of the Met published last year. From a woman who declared herself “fundamentally pro-police” in the report, the findings were extraordinarily damning. She claimed the Met was failing on so many levels that the crisis was existential, flagging the widespread bullying, deep-seated homophobia, and routine sexism and misogyny. “Public respect has fallen to a low point,” she wrote. “The Met has become unanchored from the Peelian principle of policing by consent set out when it was established.”

So, what can be done? Baroness Casey highlighted in her review a phenomenon she called “initiativitis”, where the police are constantly announcing new initiatives but don’t follow through — that is to say, nothing changes. I responded to the review on behalf of the legal charity that I founded in 2016, the Centre for Women’s Justice: “The only way forward to restore the rule of law is to start re-imagining how policing can serve all citizens.” I specified one of the critical issues with policing, namely “the culture of loyalty which militates against self-criticism, against whistle-blowing and allows collusion and silence”. The path to change would start with “hearing the voices of survivors and others at the hard edge of policing… There needs to be real accountability built into the system for those failing to address the problems and there must be adequate powers to ensure recommendations are followed.” Until then, “nothing will change”.

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The Centre for Women’s Justice aims at holding the state to account around violence against women. In 2018, we became a designated body able to make police super-complaints, enabling us to raise issues on behalf of the public on harmful patterns or trends in policing. In March 2020, we submitted a super-complaint highlighting systemic failures in the investigation and regulation of police-perpetrated domestic abuse. Our report received significant public interest, which was boosted the following year after the murder of Sarah Everard. More than 200 women came forward to describe their own experiences of police officers abusing their powers to control women they are in relationships with and to highlight the inadequacies of police forces across the country to tackle this serious criminality within their own ranks.

The charity has already made proposals for legislative reform to make policing more accountable. If the new government wants to tackle the current and repeating crises in policing, they must act quickly and radically to address the serious loss of trust in the police. Consideration must be given to requiring the 43 separate police forces across the country to be subject to an overarching regulation framework.

Now is the moment when an intelligent government equipped with an understanding of the importance of building accountability mechanisms can and must take the bull by the horns and do something radical to restore true policing by consent. When confronting the endemic corruption, misogyny, racism and homophobia in the police, some may call to defund the police. However, if we are also concerned with protecting victims and holding their perpetrators accountable, we need a functioning institution that can perform this crucial task.

But is it fair to castigate the police? A closer look at the Met’s history reveals that the officer in question was less displaying prejudice, than applying principles the force has upheld since its formation in 1829. The decisions taken by the Met officer in the controversial clip appear, in this context, less evidence of Met bias or leadership failure, than the logical consequences of shifts in the capital for which the Met bears no responsibility, and the way these changes mesh with the Met’s longstanding model of policing.

The origin-story of this model, which still largely governs London’s Metropolitan Police, lies back in 1829. Then, Sir Robert Peel’s Act for Improving the Police in and near the Metropolis replaced the older patchwork of night-watchmen, constables, magistrates’ enforcers and freelance “thief-takers” (themselves often also criminals) that previously maintained some semblance of order amid London’s rapidly-growing and notoriously violent, gang-ridden streets.

The “Blue Devils” of this new body were initially treated with suspicion. Citizens feared the “bobbies”, named for Peel’s forename, would swiftly become a militarised enforcement wing of the government. Peel sought to combat this adversarial attitude with three core ideas aimed at ensuring alignment to, and cooperation with, law-enforcement officers and the public.

Policing, he insisted, should be preventive; this presupposed community support, and support required winning the trust of the community. To this end, Peel imposed strict new rules. “Bobbies” were almost always unarmed. They were held to high behavioural standards: half of Peel’s initial recruits were sacked and replaced for alcohol-related offences within two years. They were paid a salary rather than a bonus for arrests, to minimise the risk of corruption. And they were discouraged from forming relationships in the underworld: the Met’s official history describes how (unlike previous enforcers) bobbies were prohibited from entering pubs, speaking to prostitutes or cultivating informants among known criminals.

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Peel’s approach was a success: crime fell continuously for a century after 1829, and his model swiftly spread to other parts of Britain. But the Britain of Peel’s era reached considerably beyond these shores — while the Peel policing model emphatically did not. Across Britain’s colonies, a far more militaristic model of policing prevailed: a pragmatic adjustment to the reality that you’re unlikely to have the same success with “community policing” among resentfully subjugated foreigners than your fellow countrymen.

The standard template for this approach to colonial policing was founded less than a decade after the Met: the Royal Irish Constabulary. As historian Georgina Sinclair shows, colonial Ireland was “the official and unofficial training ground for colonial police officers”. Such forces tended to take a more top-down and coercive approach than the Met, with armed officers in military-style uniforms, and typically adopting a two-tier, hierarchical and racially stratified structure, with gazetted English officers commanding local rank-and-file police. This adaptation to “divided-society policing”, as Sinclair calls it, reflected the reality that such forces were “involved more in dealing with political protest than the prevention and detection of crime”.

Initiated in Ireland, this model swiftly propagated among African and Indian police forces under the British Empire. Ireland became a key training-hub for imperial police officers, and Irish officers often later took up policing posts elsewhere in the empire. After the First World War, the colonial model was also exported to Mandatory Palestine; as the RIC was disbanded in 1922, the year Britain gained the Mandate for Palestine from the UN, several senior RIC officers took up posts in Palestine.

Over the century since that date, Britain’s empire has disintegrated. In more recent decades, though, succeeding domestic governments have embraced a vision of Britain as still somehow encompassing that imperial reach — but in microcosm, via the embrace of “multiculturalism” and, latterly, escalating mass inward migration. The justifications for this vary considerably, but include economic expediency and (for some) post-colonial guilt or payback.

It even appears, sometimes, as though a subset of our political elites feels (though they’d never admit it) a secret sadness at having missed out on the colonial adventure. Whose yearning for imperial status and cosmopolitan subjects is such that, in the absence of an empire to rule, they’ve set about recreating its pluralism and racialised hierarchy within the confines of the British Isles. Were this so, the epicentre of this model-railway replica of imperial diversity would indisputably be London. As of 2022, scarcely above a third of London’s population is white British — down from an estimated 97% in the Sixties. Data from the Trust for London indicate, meanwhile, that what’s left of that demographic in London overwhelmingly clusters in the wealthiest areas of the capital. In other words: London has become a replica of the former empire’s economic and racial stratification and segregation.

It’s popular among London’s elite to view this pluralism as self-evidently a feature, rather than a bug, and such individuals regularly boast about how “diversity” is London’s “strength”. And this may well be true in many respects. But that diversity meshes uncomfortably with the Met’s longstanding policing model, as initially established by Peel. For the Met’s “bobbies” were always intended to serve by consent, as last-resort enforcement for a shared, culturally specific moral framework. And while it’s true that, as its proponents often remind us, ethnic pluralism means more varied restaurants, one inescapable consequence of multiculturalism is, well, multiple cultures. And this includes diversifying attitudes to the law, and diversifying willingness to be policed as per Peel’s approach.

What happens, then, when a policing tradition predicated on high baseline moral and cultural alignment is applied to a population so diverse that such alignment can no longer be taken for granted? The “openly Jewish” debacle highlights what this looks like in practice. For Peel’s insistence that policing should be community-based and representative has already politicised the force along identitarian lines, while driving ethnic hiring quotas in growing tension with other recruitment priorities. And against this breakdown of consensus on what policing should even mean, or who should be doing it, the Peel principle of preventive, community-based policing has mutated into a minimalist policy of containment.

Here, the priority is maintaining superficial peace. In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance. And in this context, it’s easy to understand the officer’s rationale in seeking to keep Gideon Falter away from the Palestine march, however terrible it looked in the video clip. The officer correctly identified Falter as representative of one London “community”, and the protesters as a different, potentially hostile “community”. Tasked with preventive policing, he foresaw a potential breach of the peace should these come into collision. And he set out to forestall it, by applying pressure where it was most likely to be successful: a single individual, from a generally law-abiding demographic. The same happened a month ago, when Robert Jenrick accused the Met of “two-tier policing” after a counter-protestor was arrested at another Palestine protest.

Another version of the same pragmatic policing of “communities” was in evidence yesterday, when footage emerged of riot police laying into St George’s Day marchers — a head-on confrontation that would have been unimaginable at a Palestine protest but which here seemed perfectly consonant with “community policing”. But perhaps this makes sense, given the different demographic involved: one that, as noted, has long since moved out of the capital. Winning the trust of London’s communities, following the Peel principles, logically therefore means treating these outsiders more harshly than those for whom, numerically speaking, the city is now predominantly home.

But what about this evidently asymmetrical treatment of different groups? Didn’t Peel say the Met should be impartial? Certainly the skew is clear enough, and the overall picture is unlikely to make a positive contribution to our fraying national civic harmony. But faced with a pluralistic public in which no overall ideological alignment can be assumed, and that — as with the Palestine protests — sometimes advocates mutually exclusive political aims, it would be a brave bobby who ventured an opinion on what “impartial” even means, beyond maintaining order by any means necessary — however asymmetric the policing decisions required to do so.

Thanks to the policy choices of Britain’s (largely London-based) political leaders, the capital is now too diverse for the historic Met policing model. And given how proud Londoners generally seem to be of the city’s pluralism, the likelihood of its micro-colonial pluralism re-homogenising seems vanishingly low. But the same leaders have yet to update London’s policing model in line with their imperial forebears’ pragmatic approach to colonial law and order.

Instead, they prefer to castigate the Met for trying to keep the peace within a set of policing guidelines designed for an entirely different London. Rather than calling for heads to roll, our leaders should be supporting the Met in policing the London we have now.

There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

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Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

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As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.

The aggregate feeling of having been left by our leaders to rot amid a disintegrating social contract is not a confection of the Right-wing press. It’s a mutinous consequence of visible deterioration. It’s echoed across the media, with reports coming thick and fast of a nationwide shoplifting epidemic, and a documented rise in petty destructiveness such as vandalising shops and restaurants, monuments, or hire bikes. Is this just cuts, or the cost of living? Racism, perhaps? Not enough youth clubs? The causes of crime are complex; but when TikTok is full of video content from across the Anglosphere, in which people — usually young women — boast about their “borrowing haul”, the suspicion arises that some at least are breaking the law simply because it’s fun, and because no one is stopping them.

As we shamble toward a General Election next year, I suspect all prizes will go to whichever politician manages to convince the electorate of their ability to reverse this sense of pervasive decay. But this will be difficult, for it requires us to confront a central cognitive dissonance. That is: the delusion that we can enjoy low-touch policing, alongside the pluralism and rebelliousness that run through post-Sixties Anglophone culture like letters through a stick of seaside rock. For while economics, policing strategy, sentencing policy and the like no doubt have a part to play in crime rates, these beliefs do as well. And together they have chipped away our social order.

For some decades now, Britain has turned away from strong social norms toward pluralistic values and a celebration of the individual. It is received opinion now that the right to be individualistic and even contrarian improves both individual happiness and also the overall social fabric. These beliefs underpin countless platitudes: “Everyone’s different”; “Just be you”; “Each to his own”; or indeed “Diversity is our strength.” Any contemporary reflections on the contribution shared values make to public safety tend to disintegrate into bitter arguments over this last: “diversity”. Which is to say immigration. Over the past week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman reignited that bin-fire, drawing fury from progressives and her own side alike for speeches that framed both the pluralistic values implied by multiculturalism and also mass immigration itself as risks to public safety.

But this has it at least partly backwards. We embrace literal diversity at least in part because we set such stock by pluralism, and so little by shared values. Only a polity that so values letting everyone do their thing and denies any need for such things as shared social norms would fail to anticipate that political and cultural clashes may arise when you fail to integrate culturally distinct sub-populations. In this sense, the immigration debate is only one particularly ugly subset of a wider question that implicates us all. For while we left social conformity behind long ago — some time ahead of the recent rise in immigration, in fact — we stayed committed to a low-touch policing model that relied on that conformity.

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Then, having entrenched pluralism and personal freedom as sacred values, we’re left with a conundrum: how are we to respond to those whose values are so divergent from the mainstream that they exercise their freedom by disrupting the status quo for fun, in ways that make things worse for everyone? Our sacred values make it politically difficult to respond with a strong-arm approach. Quite the opposite: activists respond to such behaviour not with calls for stronger policing but for an even less of it.

In the vacuum this produces, the response to hobby lawlessness we appear to be converging on, by default, is a kind of weary acceptance that there’s nothing that can be done — for doing so would mean attacking personal freedom or values such as pluralism, or calling for (gasp) “authoritarian” policing. Outside the liberal West, states such as Dubai and Singapore solve the equation quite differently. Both these states are pluralistic: in Dubai, nationals comprise only around 15% of the population, while Singapore’s population is around 40% immigrant. And yet both have low crime levels — because leaders in these geographies are considerably less troubled than we are by heavy-handed policing. Dubai retains the death penalty for crimes such as murder, treason, and espionage, for example, while Singapore hangs drug dealers on a regular basis.

It’s possible, then, that the most direct way of achieving a society that’s both multicultural (albeit unhappily so) and low-crime is through brutally authoritarian policing. To date, though, Britain’s tradition of liberalism has rendered this an unappealing prospect — at least for those who make British law. Could this change? Well, I suspect any British politician who delivered Singapore-like levels of public safety would be popular with the British electorate — even if this came at the overall cost of less cuddly policing.

But there’s a marked class divergence on this issue. This becomes visible if we take the death penalty as a crude proxy for an authoritarian stance on public safety: a 2022 poll showed considerably greater support for the measure in the C2DE (working and lower middle-class) bracket (49%) than the 35% of ABC1 (middle and upper class) voters who support capital punishment. Rage and desperation, though, can drive support for stern measures: a recent survey suggested six in 10 voters supported reinstating it.

Meanwhile, in another non-Western polity, the autocratic measures taken by El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele to crack down on criminal gangs have both shocked Western advocates of civil liberties and democratic norms, and so drastically reduced the murder rate as to deliver a reported 93% approval rate among Salvadoreans. I doubt Britain will go full Bukele any time soon. But rampant crime cuts through across the electorate like nothing else; I and probably most of my town will most likely vote, next year, for the political party that advances the most convincing strategy for ending the epidemic of petty crime.

I suspect, though, that doing so will mean looking again at our long-cherished trifecta of pluralism, individualism, and light-touch policing. For if we want space to be contrarian, alongside light-touch policing, that’s going to mean less pluralism. Such a settlement won’t function under the thin shared belief that we don’t need common values. In turn, this would probably mean heeding the warnings of Braverman and her ilk, and making more concerted efforts to slow the pace of demographic change, so a sufficiently robust baseline of shared social norms can emerge in order that public life can once again largely police itself. It’s a long shot. So perhaps instead we could opt for pluralism plus light-touch policing. Then we’ll have to accept that this comes with a clampdown on freedom of conscience. In other words: the soft tyranny of “nudge unit” style nanny-statism, employed by leaders terrified of direct authority, in an effort to manipulate everyone into good behaviour. (Some might argue we’re a good distance down this road already.)

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Conversely, a polity that allows both freedom of conscience and pluralism can only be kept from spinning out of control by far tougher law enforcement than we’re accustomed to in Britain. Values pluralism is a done deal in this country, for now; if we can’t bear to let go of our contrarianism with that change, the only way we’ll enjoy low crime levels as well is with law enforcement that more closely resembles Dubai or Singapore than the traditional British bobby.

What about those who insist that there’s no need to choose? Maybe there’s still some way we can have personal freedom, anything-goes values pluralism, and a police force more interested in dancing at carnivals than arresting persistent criminals? Well, yes, there is. And if we take this route, nothing immediate will happen. Over time, though, this public-safety cakeism will also deliver an ongoing acceleration of every contemporary trend that’s currently making life measurably worse for everyone, everywhere in the country.

That is: unsafe streets, mounding litter, smashed public amenities, rampant petty criminality, and a steady drain of public-spirited people from civic participation. It will mean, in a word, the end of civic life. If that’s not the country we want to be, we’re going to have to stop pretending we can have it all.

The rule of sub judice dictates that little can be said about the case against the defendant, whom we only know as NX121. But this hasn’t stopped Braverman from publicly stating that firearms officers have to make “split-second decisions” and must not fear “ending up in the dock for carrying out their duties” — words that one legal expert told me sound uncomfortably prejudicial.

Hot on the heels of her announcement, Rowley strategically published an open letter in which he “welcomed” Braverman’s support and argued for “the need to let the police police”. At best, open letters are like newspaper crosswords: coded for a particular audience but easily figured out by the average bus passenger. At worst, they can read like a career-suicide note, were circumstances change radically for the author. In this case, should NX121 go down for murder, Rowley’s reputation will take a dive with him. No Met commissioner wants that kind of publicity on their watch.

That said, it is too early to say what the effect of Braverman’s intervention, and Rowley’s tacit support for it, will be. For his part, Rowley’s hastily written gesture only came after more than 100 Specialist Firearms Command officers handed in their blue authorisation cards in protest. As for Braverman, it is unclear what the strategic review she has ordered will achieve.

Tony Long, a former police marksman, is sceptical that the proposed solutions are anything more than a sticking plaster. “The powers that be were talking about bringing the army in, but the only thing that squaddies can do under the circumstances is stand on doors with weapons that aren’t even loaded,” he says. “The aim is to take all the DPG [Diplomatic Protection Group] crews that have been standing on these doors, and redeploy them to do the job currently being done by ARVs [armed response vehicles].” The problem, he says, is that a DPG officer is only trained for four weeks, as opposed to the 14-week initial training course for ARV officers. “Once you’ve done your 14 weeks and been on the team for about a year, only then can you apply to do the CTFSO [Counter Terrorist Specialist Firearms Officer] course which is an additional 21 weeks.”

In the acronymic world of armed policing, where the Met’s specialist firearms unit SCO19 reigns supreme, taking out drug dealers, bank robbers or jihadists requires a skillset that your average embassy cop simply doesn’t have. As far as Braverman and Rowley are concerned, sending in unarmed soldiers or under-trained officers to protect the capital is once again about optics rather than operational capability.

By contrast, few understand the Met’s operational strengths and managerial weaknesses better than Long. A highly commended veteran of 33 years, 25 of which were spent in the force’s ever-evolving specialist firearms unit, he shot five suspects in the line of duty, killing three. He is also acutely aware of the politics surrounding NX121’s situation, having stood trial at the Old Bailey for murder in 2015 following the fatal shooting of Azelle Rodney — who, like Chris Kaba, was aged 24 and sat in a car when a police operation culminated in a “hard stop”.

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Ultimately, Long was acquitted by a jury of his peers. Unlike NX121, however, he didn’t have the luxury of anonymity, something that Chris Kaba’s family, understandably, has questioned given the seriousness of the charge against him. One can only speculate as to why NX121’s continued anonymity was granted during his brief court appearance last week, but the secrecy only adds to a sense of distrust in a police force mired in scandals.

Perhaps sensing this weakness, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has also jumped on the bandwagon, saying somewhat conspiratorially that “nothing is off the table” regarding the potential break-up of the Met. Khan knows all too well that 4,000 armed operations are carried out by the Met each year, resulting in just one or two fatalities. For a city of 8 million, that is a fairly low hit rate.

So why the call for drastic action? Like Braverman, who has failed to impress the electorate on immigration, and who is hoping to turn a human tragedy and an institutional crisis into political capital, Khan’s implied threat is a well-timed exploitation of a family’s grief, voter concerns, a police force’s weakness, and, as Tony Long points out, individual officers’ vulnerability.

“The officers who have downed tools are only taking this unprecedented stand because the suits haven’t had their backs,” he says. “Now that they’ve forced their hand, they’ve changed their tune.” Long is keen to stress that armed officers take on the role voluntarily, for no extra pay, and thus are not striking but using an agreed 10-day period of reflection — a policy designed to make sure that armed officers can get downtime if their “heads aren’t in the right place”.

“Senior management see firearms officers as expendable,” Long says, with more than a hint of personal animus. “They know they’re enthusiastic, keen and professional about the work, despite knowing that, if they shoot somebody, they’re going to get slaughtered in the press, charged with murder or suspended from work for up to five years. But management couldn’t care less. So, you know what? The lads don’t have faith in them, which is why the Met’s now in a bind.”

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While Braverman and Rowley talk a good game about giving armed officers the “support” they need, and while Sadiq Khan cynically suggests that the Met may need to be carved out into various controllable fiefdoms, you can bet they are all working behind the scenes to “bring into line” what one insider describes as a “force within a force”. The wider issue, however, is how to muzzle a minority of armed police officers whose power lies in their high profile rather than their ballistic weaponry.

One way to do this would be to remove the voluntary aspect of armed policing and indeed create a genuine “force within a force”, with a completely different level of accountability that removes the potential for “reflection” to be used as de facto industrial action. Yet one serving firearms officer from another force, whose unit is considering downing tools in solidarity with SCO19, told me that he and his colleagues would balk at the idea of being “professionalised” in such fashion. He pilloried the idea that a separate, dedicated, national armed police force could ever become a reality, so potent is the notion that Britain “polices by consent” rather than political diktat.

Whatever the solution, the fact that we are having this debate at all — regardless of the political posturing at play — is remarkable. Striking doctors, like striking tube and train drivers, may be an inconvenience, but the rise of refusenik police officers smacks of a society-wide existential crisis. When the time comes for NX121 to account for his actions, it won’t just be him in the dock, it will be the Met’s management and the government’s leadership on trial, too.

As a reporter, I am supposed to bear witness: to expose the truth relentlessly and seek justice. I thought I could cope with seeing such horrific things; I would reassure friends that I was fine and point out that I was not the victim in these scenarios. Over the years, I have avoided examining how being immersed in a world of rape, child abuse and femicide has affected me. I would always support those feminist activists who threw in the towel to retire to Spain, but I would feel a bit bemused by their actions. Why would you want to take up gardening, instead of being an agent of change?

Then something shifted. Investigating yet another atrocity, over the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, unable to sleep. I now understand why some activists retire.

It began with the murder of a seven-year-old girl. Nikki Allan lived with her mum and three sisters in a run-down block of flats in Sunderland. One day, in 1992, a man took her to the wasteland outside a derelict warehouse and sexually assaulted her. When Nikki screamed, he pushed her through a window into the building, chased her into a far corner, and shattered her little skull with a brick. He then stabbed her 37 times, before dragging her into the basement. There he left her, propped up against the wall like a rag doll.

Police focused their investigation on a man named George Heron, seen as the local oddball. They effectively coerced a confession out of him. The following year, he was acquitted of murder at trial, after the judge ruled the confession out, but was forced to go into hiding because people in the local community were convinced of his guilt. Nikki’s mum, Sharon Henderson, believed Heron had got away with her daughter’s murder, because the police repeatedly told her that there were no other suspects. The media reinforced this narrative.

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I picked up the story in 2006. Visiting my parents in Darlington, not far from where Nikki was murdered, I saw a photograph in the local paper of a woman standing by the grave of a child. The headline read: “Mum’s bid to dig up daughter”. Sharon was asking police to exhume Nikki’s body, in order to test it for DNA evidence, following a change in the law on double jeopardy, which prevents someone being tried again on charges of which they’ve been previously acquitted. More than a decade after her daughter’s murder, Sharon was still fighting for justice.

“I always said I would never, ever give up campaigning for Nikki until her murderer was locked up,” Sharon told me. “Not until the police answer for that first so-called investigation.”

I first interviewed Sharon shortly after reading that newspaper story. A single mum from a rough part of town, she felt that the police weren’t taking her seriously. Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with Sharon, admiring her tenacity, and her refusal to accept that the police had done right by her daughter.

And then, in May 2022, the unexpected happened. A man named David Boyd was charged, 30 years after Nikki was murdered. A child sex offender, with convictions dating back to 1986, Boyd lived three doors down from where Nikki disappeared, and had moved away from the estate shortly after the murder. When questioned, Boyd had lied, presenting a made-up alibi. So focused were the police on Heron, they didn’t even bother to check it.

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By this point, I had started working on a podcast series about Nikki’s murder, originally with the intention of marking the 30th anniversary, and to give Sharon’s campaign a boost. It felt like we were close to getting justice. I attended every day of the trial, renting an apartment close to Newcastle Crown Court. Sharon and her family would come there between sittings, for respite. I saw, as I had over the previous 17 years, how much pain Sharon was enduring. But here she was, struggling on. The evidence at trial was harrowing. Sharon did her best to listen. But most of the time she would leave the public gallery after only a few minutes, sobbing. “Imagine listening to what that bastard did to your bairn,” says Sharon. “The details of how he murdered her will never leave my mind.”

Day in, day out, the particulars of the murder were played out: the forensic pathologist who examined Nikki’s body in situ back in 1992 came to repeat her evidence, 31 years later. A blood splatter expert, she painted a vivid picture of what had happened to Nikki in life and in death. We saw video footage of the crime scene. Nikki’s body was pixelated out, but the brick that had killed was in plain sight.

“Vicarious trauma” is a term used by psychologists to describe the effect of witnessing or hearing horror stories. It is increasingly recognised as a potential consequence of working directly with seriously hurt and injured individuals — an occupational hazard among Accident and Emergency personnel, for instance, or social workers who witness child cruelty. With wider recognition of the condition, it is becoming more commonplace for employers to offer counselling to staff who encounter atrocity in their working lives.

I feel uncomfortable claiming to be experiencing “vicarious trauma”. I’m not the victim here. I have always felt it important to be resilient, when focusing on the women and girls directly affected by a crime. But something snapped in me, with this story.

During the trial, I would find myself crying at home for no apparent reason. I would be too tired to blank out the stories I’d heard, but then have trouble sleeping. I’d stay awake watching Netflix as a way of escaping my intrusive thoughts, my hypersensitivity, and a feeling of deep, deep despair. I suffered extreme neck and shoulder pain, attributed partly to five weeks of scribbling in a notebook every day in court, but also to the tension of hearing the evidence, and trying not to cry on the press bench. I started getting headaches. I would imagine all kinds of horrific things happening to my loved ones, anything from car crashes to brutal murder.

What was it about the Nikki Allan case that kept me awake night after night, driving me into a depression? It was not the first time I had reported on the case of a murdered child, or seen such terrible evidence in court. But in time, I have come to realise that so many aspects of the case resonated with my own childhood experience, and what I escaped. Growing up in the North East, I witnessed how the police dismiss working-class women, in particular single mothers; I saw how child sexual abuse was minimised. Boyd was free for 30 years to abuse girls a short drive from the rough housing estate I grew up on, where men targeted me and my friends.

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I was first flashed at when I was nine years old. Aged 12, a man violently grabbed my breast as he walked past me in the middle of the town centre. At 16, I was raped by an older man I considered a friend. My job cleaning in a pub ended abruptly when a campaign of horrific sexual harassment culminated in an attempted rape. By this time, I was 17, and had recently joined the ranks of feminists fighting against sexual and domestic violence.

I was drawn to the cause partly because of my own experiences, but also inspired by the widespread protests about the police investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. The misogyny and class prejudice that underpinned this investigation — the idea that the victims were “common prostitutes” and were therefore somehow complicit in their fate — felt familiar to me. Many of the women I was raised among would be seen as the kind who would be “asking for it” simply for going to the pub alone, when they should have stayed safely at home.

Returning to the North East, spending time so close to where I was raised, amid Nikki’s grieving, traumatised family, I sometimes caught myself wondering how my life would have turned out had I stayed put in Darlington. Had I never found feminism. Sharon’s life could have been mine.

But anyone doing this work, immersed in the harsh reality of it, is bound to struggle with the toll it takes on our mental health. I see rape and domestic abuse routinely dismissed and minimised. Victims are dismissed, disbelieved, or blamed for their own predicaments. I also see men excused. They are reassured that what they have done is “not so bad”. Meanwhile, women such as Sharon Henderson are fighting against a system that views them as irritants.

And if the crimes themselves aren’t taken seriously enough in the mainstream, why would those of us reporting on them be given any consideration? Instead, we see the trivialisation of both sexual violence and of the hellish side effects of campaigning for change. I will never understand how Sharon must feel, having lost her seven-year-old daughter to murder; I do know what it is like to be silenced and misrepresented when speaking out against atrocities committed by men, and police inaction.

So, I will always be inspired by women like Sharon (in May, Boyd was found guilty of Nikki’s murder and jailed for life, with a minimum term of 29 years). One positive I cling to, in this bleak state of affairs, is the sense of solidarity that often flourishes between women. Sharon may never have considered herself a feminist campaigner until the unimaginable happened. But the rest of us have so much to learn from her tenacity.

‘Three doors down‘, Julie Bindel’s podcast series on the case of Nikki Allan, is out now

“The knock” is the term given by families to the day the police came for their father, partner, husband, son or brother after being caught downloading indecent — and often violent — images or videos of children or babies. It is a moment when lives change forever, when women realise that the man with whom they have shared their life is actually a stranger, and, in some cases, a monster.

“In an instant, the life you had disappears, and you realise that nothing will ever be the same,” says Katie, a 43-year-old mother of two boys, aged six and eight. “The person you thought you knew, you didn’t know at all. Then the suspicion starts among your neighbours and extended family, because surely you must have known what was going on? Your friends melt away, and your kids’ play dates stop, and the police tell you to be careful of vigilantes attacking your house, and your children ask awkward questions. So, you give up your job and pack up and move, and you end up with nothing.…  You lose your home and your friends and your job, and you have damaged children who will grow up without a father. And even though none of it is your fault, you constantly carry round this irrational sense of guilt.”

What happened to Katie happens to scores of families every month. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, 35% of homes raided because of online paedophilic activity include children. In 2021/22, there were 10,181 arrests for downloading indecent images of children (IIoC) — an average of 848 each month. That figure has risen from 417 a decade ago. This means that an average of 298 families with children experience the knock each month — almost 10 families a day.

This is a massive, and growing, problem in the UK. The viewing and downloading of child porn is increasing all the time. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, the number of child sex sites found by its experts increased by 1,420% between 2011 and 2020. In 2021, it found 252,000 images of child sexual abuse — up 21% on the year before. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which campaigns and provides help to encourage offenders to stop viewing child abuse content, found that “isolation, unemployment and escalating pornography habits” during the pandemic resulted in more than 165,000 people seeking help via its advisory website in 2021. That was a 107% increase on the year before.

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But while the victims of abuse in online images are rightly given help when they can be found, the women and children left behind after the knock receive no special support from the state, whether financial, emotional, educational, psychological or practical. Because even though they become victims of the crime committed by the man in their life, the government doesn’t recognise them as such.

The knock came to the home of Carly Peters, a 59-year-old nurse, at 11am on a winter’s day in 2019. “You never forget it,” she says. “It’s like when people ask where you were when Diana died. For me, it came the day after a lovely evening which my then husband, Matthew, and I had had with my two sons and my daughter from my first marriage, and his daughter from his. We had been together for 11 years and had the perfect life, a great family, no money worries, a beautiful home, all of it.

“The kids — who are all grown up — had stayed over. The last time I saw the man that I thought I knew was at 8:50am that morning. I kissed him goodbye because I was taking one of my sons on an errand. When we got back, Matthew had gone into work — he owns a furniture business — and suddenly there was a knock on the door.

“Two men told me they were police officers and asked if they could come in. They said Matthew had been arrested on suspicion of ‘illegal downloading’. I had no idea what that was. Then they said he had admitted the offence at the showroom — because that’s where the downloading had taken place — and he had told them there was a computer and a hard drive in a bag under our bed. They asked whether I knew anything about that and I said no. My head was spinning.”

The police asked if there was anyone else in the house and Carly said her children were there. Visibly concerned, the officers asked how old the “children” were and she told them: in their late twenties and early thirties. The police relaxed — there were no young children at risk. The siblings were asked to gather in one room and to surrender all their storage devices, laptops, iPads, telephones, memory sticks and so on. So was Carly.

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“I asked them what Matthew was supposed to have done, but they said they couldn’t tell me under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. More officers came in and they took my home apart. They searched everywhere and put all our devices into black bags and took them out to unmarked police cars. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but it must have been obvious to the neighbours that something strange was going on.

“Then the most senior officer took me into our bedroom and pulled a bag from under the bed. Matthew had hidden it there. But I still didn’t know what he was supposed to have done… After two hours, they were gone, and we were none the wiser. They said Matthew would be home later, and he would explain everything, but Matthew didn’t come home.” Over the next couple of days, Matthew avoided contact with Carly, her children and his daughter. He went to the home of Carly’s father, where he tried to overdose on the father’s insulin. When that failed, he took an overdose of paracetamol and ended up in hospital.

Carly had no right to be given details of their partner’s alleged crimes unless the partner gave permission. “We had Googled ‘illegal downloading’ and seen that it could be for pirated music or indecent images of children or something else,” says Carly. This is a common problem for families in this situation, and it creates a vacuum in which offenders can lie about, or minimise, their illegal activities. These periods of deception — during which women are sometimes tricked into staying with the offender — can last for up to two years because of unprecedented backlogs in court cases post-pandemic and the time it takes to have devices examined by digital forensics experts.

“A couple of days after his arrest, Matthew told me he had a problem with pornography and it involved children,” says Carly. “I asked him how old, and he said: ‘Between three and 12.’ I’ve been a nurse for many years and so I have a strong constitution, but when he told me about the poor victims in these images, I vomited.” But it took two years for Matthew’s case to be heard at Crown Court. Only then did Carly learn the full extent of his crimes. He pleaded guilty to possessing or making more than 4,000 indecent images of children.

“The ‘making’ of indecent images charge was brought because of the way he had downloaded them and organised them into folders,” she says. “They were in age groups: three to five; six to eight; nine to 12. Most of them were ‘Category A’ images, the most serious, which means full penetrative sex. We’re talking about people having sex with toddlers.”

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Matthew was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, and put on the sex offenders register for 10 years. Carly stopped living with Matthew after he told her the bare basics of what he had done, and she has since divorced him. She sold their house, changed her name, gave up her job and moved to a new town. After months of counselling — which she paid for herself because she wasn’t entitled to any special help — she says she is making progress.

Families of online child abuse offenders suffer mentally, physically, socially and financially, according to research conducted by Professor Rachel Armitage and her colleagues at Huddersfield’s Department of Criminology. In 2021, they interviewed 126 family members and friends of offenders. They found that all but 17.5% of interviewees had symptoms consistent with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); 70% had symptoms that suggested they ought to have been diagnosed with PTSD, yet only 22 had received formal diagnoses and treatment for it.

The researchers also found that 65% reported symptom levels that were sufficient to suppress their body’s immune system. According to the Impact of Events Scale they used, a score of 35 would merit a diagnosis of PTSD and more than 37 would be high enough to put immune system function at risk. The mean score for offenders’ children was 55.6 and for their wives or partners it was 44.8. One of the women I interviewed said she developed rheumatoid arthritis after her husband was arrested, while her daughter’s hair fell out.

“Some of the respondents referred to experiencing relapses of disorders that were thought to have been resolved in the past — for example, eating disorders — and several also noted that the stress of the discovery had led to them developing physical illnesses such as autoimmune system disorders and irritable bowel syndrome,” the researchers wrote in their findings.

“Participants described how the psychological impacts were exacerbated by the loneliness and isolation of being in this situation where you have little or no access to agency support, where you are unable to disclose the truth to your own family and friends, where you have lost somebody that you love.”

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None of the partners and professionals I spoke to was demonstrably critical of police officers who carry out the knock, but they did wonder whether it could be handled more sensitively — in ways that could protect children from the trauma of seeing their father taken away, their homes ripped apart in searches. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on child protection and abuse, Deputy Chief Constable Ian Critchley, says: “The NPCC are aware of and understand the impact policing can have on families where someone has been subject to an arrest involving online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Often there are restrictions on the amount of information which can be provided due to several factors including GDPR, which we acknowledge can be frustrating and upsetting for innocent family members trying to understand why this is happening.” He says the NPCC is working with police forces, researchers and academics to find ways to make the knock and its aftermath less distressing.

During the period between arrest and trial, wives and partners (who, remember, usually don’t know the minutiae of what their man is supposed to have done) must decide whether to allow their children to see their father — usually under the supervision of a responsible adult — or whether to cut ties completely. If they suddenly remove the father, they risk damaging their children’s mental health; if they don’t, they risk being judged negatively by friends and family. Whatever they choose to do, they can’t win.

Katie White discovered this after agreeing that her husband, Bob, a 40-year-old civil servant, could see their two boys under the supervision of Bob’s mother. Within days of the knock, the Children’s Services department of her local authority had turned up, but “once they assess that your children aren’t at risk – because the offender is no longer living in the household – that’s it; they disappear from your life,” says Katie. “You get no help from them. The only time social services get involved is if your husband applies for more access rights or if you want to change the person who supervises his visits.”

Bob was convicted of possessing more than 1,000 indecent images of girls, some aged under eight. “At first, he had told me he might have accidentally clicked on a few images of girls aged 16 or 17,” says Katie. “It wasn’t until his hearing a year later that I found out the truth. I felt sick — lied to, cheated, and utterly disgusted.”

During that time, however, she had agreed to let Bob see their children once a week, supervised by his mother. The children were missing their father – to remove him completely did not seem like the right option. Not everyone agreed. One of her closest friends cut ties with her for allowing Bob to see the boys. After that, Katie, who had already given up her job, sold the family home and moved to a new town. Life was even harder there.

“I made a real effort at the school gates to get to know the other mothers, and fairly quickly I made a lot of acquaintances, but it was hard to make proper friends because I couldn’t afford to let anyone get too close,” she says. “I told them about getting divorced and said I’d moved there for a fresh start. There would be invitations to spa weekends away, or for late nights out and they would say: ‘Why can’t the kids stay with their dad?’. And I would say things like ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘That’s a long story’ but you can only keep batting away questions for so long.”

Eventually, she told three of her new friends about Bob’s offending, but they, too, judged her negatively for allowing her boys to have him in their lives. “One by one, they told me that if this had happened to them, they wouldn’t have allowed their children’s father to see them,” she says. “They didn’t drop me straight away, but they slowly melted away and don’t call any more. Now there’s nobody. I’m isolated in the community, and I feel very lonely.”

Bob re-offended last year. One of the boys wants to cut all ties with him; the other doesn’t. For Katie, this is just the latest in a long line of agonising quandaries that will inevitably see her cast her as villain, either in the eyes of one of her boys, or Bob’s family, or the so-called friends watching from the shadows.

“Every image contains a real child — an innocent victim — being abused, and that heart-breaking fact is never far from my mind,” says Katie. “All I can do is hope that they are identified and given the support they need. But our children need some professional help as well, because this crime has life-long emotional ramifications for them. They are victims of their fathers’ crimes, and they are more vulnerable as a result.”

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The Ministry of Justice decides who can legally be described as a victim of crime. Under its “Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales”, also known as the Victim’s Code, the definition is: “A person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss which was directly caused by a criminal offence; or a close relative (or a nominated family spokesperson) of a person whose death was directly caused by a criminal offence”.

Being described as a victim is important as it confers statutory rights. Among these are the right to be kept updated with the investigation and the offender’s court appearances and, crucially, “the right to be referred to services that support victims, which includes the right to contact them directly, and to have your needs assessed so services and support can be tailored to meet your needs”.

Victims also have the right to claim compensation — something that might concern ministers — yet none of the women I interviewed mentioned compensation. Instead, their priority was getting practical and psychological support for their children, at home and at school. Neither they nor their children are currently offered counselling or any other kind of help.

Natalie Smith, a 39-year-old partner in an accountancy firm, says she is struggling with the difficult questions that her daughters, Jane, seven, and Sarah, four, are starting to ask, but she has no access to professional help or advice as to how she should answer them. She got the knock two years ago after a tip-off to the police that her husband, Brad, a 45-year-old businessman, had been sharing images of girls aged under 10 with followers on Twitter.

“After his arrest, I began to feel guilty because maybe I should have noticed something,” Natalie says. “Then you feel guilty for the children your husband was looking at, his first victims. You feel guilty for choosing this man to be the father of your girls, because now they are also his victims. And you feel guilty that this is going to affect them for years to come because they will grow up without a father.”

Natalie immediately moved out of the family home and in with her parents. She is still there, and her husband has no contact with their children. When the girls ask where he is, Natalie wants to answer honestly, but in ways that will not adversely affect them in the long term – she just isn’t sure how to do that. All she has to work with are suggestions from other mothers in an online forum set up by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation.

“Jane came home one day and said there was a boy in her class whose parents didn’t live together, but he still gets to see his daddy,” says Natalie. “She asked why Daddy didn’t come home to us, and so I told her he had looked at something he shouldn’t have looked at and that meant he wasn’t allowed home. Then she asked what he had looked at, and I told her she was too young for me to tell her, but I promised I would when she was old enough. Mothers on the forum say I should give ‘age-appropriate answers’, but I have nobody to ask what is appropriate. Recently, Jane has been asking me to get married again because she wants a daddy. She didn’t say her daddy, just a daddy.”

I asked the Ministry of Justice whether it might attribute victim status to partners and children of IIoC offenders. It replied: “The Victims’ Code stipulates that a victim for the purposes of the Code is ‘a person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss, which was directly caused by a criminal offence’.  Therefore, families of offenders are not deemed victims of crime unless they were directly harmed by the offence. There are no plans to change this as it could inadvertently result in victims of crime receiving less support.”

It was a response that disappointed Professor Armitage. “At the very least, under this definition, children of online child sexual abuse offenders should be defined as victims,” she says. But Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham and a leading light in the fight against child sexual abuse and trafficking, not least as a result of grooming gangs in her own constituency, is the only Parliamentarian so far to back the calls to acknowledge them as “victims”. “Whenever a close relative is found to commit some of the most heinous crimes, the impact on their family is devastating, and of course they deserve our support,” she says. “But the children of online child abuse offenders become caught up in a complex and unique situation through no fault of their own. I will be doing all I can to get these children the protections and legal recognition they deserve.”

For now, this is where the story ends. This year, hundreds of families will experience the knock and its disastrous consequences — the broken homes, broken relationships and broken children — yet theirs is a dilemma borne of a despicable act that seems too difficult to talk about, too easy to ignore. “We’re a group of people that society would rather not recognise because of the horrible crime that has created us,” says Katie White. “And while I feel there is an acceptance that all of this horror is sure to have damaged my children, it seems that it hasn’t damaged them enough for anyone to care.”

Names have been changed and details withheld to protect children and families.

If only it were that simple.

“Defund the police” has been the rallying cry of the progressive Left ever since the death of George Floyd in 2020, and has expanded into a policy about much more than race. Obviously the point many feminists make is that since many male officers are sexual and domestic abuse offenders themselves, women shouldn’t trust them. Another is that a large proportion of 999 calls relate to mental health crises — so why are they referred to law enforcement? Meanwhile, making arrests for minor and non-violent crimes — such as burglary, graffiti and low-level acts of criminal damage and public nuisance — locks citizens into a cycle of criminal justice involvement.

Hard leftists in the UK have a tendency to go further: abolish the police service entirely, is their demand, with one activist arguing recently that, “History makes clear that the police do not exist to protect any of us. They exist to have power over us, and like perpetrators, they will use that power indiscriminately to keep us in our place.” The logical conclusion to this argument would be to also abolish all state agencies – including mental health facilities, child protection, and the government itself. It would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s a nonsense, to argue, as they do, that all crime could be dealt with at a “community level” with solutions such as restorative justice.

I emphatically resist these calls. That’s not to say I support the service in its current form. Where I grew up in Darlington, the police were the enemy and rarely protected working-class, downtrodden communities from violence. I saw how the police were complicit in male violence, refusing to admonish perpetrators they related to, man to man. More recently, I’ve been horrified by Baroness Casey’s interim report, which showed that out of nearly 9,000 Metropolitan police officers and staff accused of misconduct since 2013, only 5% were dismissed from the force. Around 1,800 were accused of multiple crimes; less than 1% were sacked as a result. One officer faced 19 allegations, and another was accused of 11 counts of assault, sexual harassment, sending naked images, fraud and leaking information.

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Women have every reason to distrust the police. But the defund the police argument that resources should be reallocated to mental health, homelessness and rehabilitation services makes sense only up to a point. Men do not sexually assault, rape, harass or beat up their female partners because they are homeless, drunk or mentally ill. They do it because they can. Sober, wealthy, landowning men also rape and attack women. In 2021, the chief constable of Merseyside told a reporter that, if he were given £5 billion to cut crime, he would invest only £1 billion in policing, and the rest would go to tackle poverty. But what about those middle-class, affluent, socially respectable men who commit acts of violence against women and children? If we defund the police, who arrests these men?

We know that most violence against women is carried out in the home. More than 100 women are killed every year by former or current male partners, almost always following a pattern of escalating violence and harassment. Reducing police budgets would reduce the capacity for police to respond to domestic violence call-outs and to subsequently implement enforcement measures. Nor can we be sure that funds will be redirected appropriately. In the UK, the majority of police funding comes directly from central government; would you trust our government to make sure those resources are directed to, say, mental health services?

Besides, police will still be first responders to violent incidents, and they have been trained for decades in mental health issues. They know, in theory, when to refer perpetrators to medical services rather than criminalise them. That this rarely translates into practice is because there is a systematic failure of police across the board to implement the powers and measures they have to tackle these problems, preferring, more often than not, to take the easy route.

This isn’t surprising. The force is under greater pressure than ever. We currently have fewer officers than we had in 2009. So you might say that in the UK, there has already been a de facto defunding of the police. This has not translated into improved responses to mental health crises, nor a reduction in violence perpetrated by police towards people of colour. In fact, as Home Office research shows, during 2018 to 2019, police brutality towards black people increased. As Inquest reports, black people are more likely than white people to die in police custody but, to date, not a single police officer has been held criminally responsible.

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Nor has it improved policy towards officers who sexually assault. The Met didn’t seize the chance, for instance, to learn from the case of “Bastard Dave” — and the allegations against Carrick go back to as early as 2002. There are numerous things that could have been done to stop Carrick: he joined the Met despite having been a suspect in a burglary and malicious communications against a former partner a year earlier, and there was no mention of this during the vetting and recruitment process. A year later, he was accused of harassment and assault against another woman. There was no arrest and he received only “words of advice”. Had an investigation been carried out by officers from a different service, Carrick might have been stopped. Even fewer resources would have arguably made that even harder.

I have been sexually and physically assaulted because I am a woman and a lesbian. And having worked in a police station in the Nineties as a civilian supporting police officers during domestic violence call outs, I am well versed in some of their  attitudes towards women. But I have reported all these crimes against me, despite being aware of the force’s shortcomings. I refuse to give up on the service. To defund the police, we would have to believe that the police are beyond reform — and I do not.

So how do we reform the police? With sanctions and consequences imposed upon those who promote misogynistic and racist attitudes or behaviour, and automatic dismissal for officers who commit crimes while serving. We also need to encourage, and properly protect whistle-blowers. Increased resourcing, better training, rigorous recruitment, and probationary periods are all essential changes that need to be made. Instead of defunding an already strapped service, we must radically reform it. And the only way to do that is to refund the police.

Cheryl had always been “the life and soul of the party” before Andrew came along and won her over with his charm and intelligence. But almost as soon as the relationship began, Cheryl changed. “She was always very stressed and on edge,” Georgia says. “Every time they went out, she was always trying hard to put on a front. She was always having to make excuses for his behaviour. By the end, I didn’t really recognise my mum anymore.”

Georgia knew that her stepfather resented her. “I was just a piece of baggage that he had to put up with, but he gaslit and controlled me in just the same way as he did with mum,” she says. “I was boisterous, I was loud and I needed a lot of attention which he didn’t like. Mum was trying to keep me calm and keep him happy, which must have been a nightmare for her.”

Cheryl wanted to leave Hooper, says Georgia, but he had “tied up her finances”, made her “feel worthless” and left her completely dependent on him. But people knew what Hooper was like: “Locally, he was known for being aggressive and violent. He would go out and fight on nights out and get blind drunk.”

Cheryl increased her efforts to get away from Hooper after he started to turn violent. On one occasion he smashed in their television and opened his gun cabinet so that mother and daughter knew how serious he was about not letting them leave. “My mum was shaking so violently, it was horrible,” says Georgia. “She knew it was a threat that he would kill her. I was the one that pushed her to leave in the end.”

Cheryl and Georgia originally left Hooper in December 2017, although they returned for Christmas when Hooper threatened to kill himself. After they left again, Hooper started stalking Cheryl, phoning and texting constantly; he even fitted a tracker to Cheryl’s car. “He was driving around everywhere to find my mum, and told someone, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody will,’ says Georgia.

“I lived in dread for years,” says Georgia. “I knew he was capable of doing us both serious harm.”

Weeks later, Cheryl was dead and Georgia deeply traumatised.

“I had no support from specialist services after it happened,” says Georgia. “Absolutely none. As a family we had a little bit of help from Victim Support but nothing geared towards me as a child.” Yet she had lived for seven years with an abusive stepfather. Inevitably, Georgia “went down a dark path for a very long time”. She admits she turned to smoking and drinking when she was just 14. “I was incredibly lost.”

Domestic violence ruins lives: not just the women who are the victims, but also those poor children who are caught up in the crossfire.

Around 62% of children are present during domestic abuse incidents, and at least one in seven children will have lived with domestic violence by the time they reach 18. A recent report by Action for Children found that support for children affected by domestic abuse was “patchy, piecemeal and precarious”. And yet those children will carry what they have seen with them for the rest of their lives.

The effects can be devastating: girls are more likely to develop an eating disorder, or to harm themselves by taking overdoses or cutting themselves, and boys often learn the behaviour from the male abuser and begin to act out in violent and aggressive ways towards the mother.

Rachel Williams knows only too well the terrible toll it takes on children. In 2011, she was shot by her ex-husband Darren following months of stalking and harassment after she finally plucked up the courage to leave him due to extreme physical and emotional violence.

Tracking Rachel down to the hair salon where she worked, Williams fired two gunshots which hit her leg rather than her stomach as intended. Williams then turned the gun on himself.

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Rachel’s son Jack, 16, who had lived with the abuse since he was two, went to stay with his paternal grandparents while his mother recovered in hospital. Rachel was surprised that Jack didn’t visit her, given how close they were, saying “he was like my shadow, wherever I was Jack was”. Instead of a visit, Rachel received angry texts from Jack blaming her for his father’s death. Then, six weeks after Rachel had been shot, Jack killed himself.

“Had Jack been given the support he needed when this happened, rather than just being told he was 16 so could live where he wanted, he would probably be alive today,” says Rachel. “Jack was very popular and outgoing. He had no problems at all with his mental health until the shooting. Jack was a victim of domestic abuse, not just a witness.”

Georgia, who went to live with her loving grandparents following her mother’s death, managed to stop abusing alcohol and turned a corner from a path of self-destruction by turning instead to campaigning to end domestic violence.

During the desperate 18-month wait for Hooper’s case to go to trial (he eventually was convicted of murder and sentenced to 31 years in prison), Georgia began researching people who’d been through similar situations and she found Rachel’s book: The Devil at Home.

Following her experiences, Rachel founded Stand Up to Domestic Abuse (SUTDA), mainly for those forgotten victims of domestic abuse: the children. “I was like a GP on call in those early days,” says Rachel, “and when a message came in on my Facebook page from Georgia, my heart went out to her.”

Rachel invited the then 15-year-old Georgia to attend a conference she was hosting which focused on domestic abuse survivors. It was there that I heard Georgia speak for the first time about the terrible events leading up to her mother’s death. “Looking back now I can see the signs of how his controlling behaviour became worse,” she said. “And because she was trying to leave the relationship he decided she was not going to be allowed to do that.”

The entire audience was profoundly moved by this young woman making sense of how domestic abuse entraps women and their children, and her rally cry for better understanding and provision for those affected.

“My mum was an incredibly strong character, and not someone you would see as a ‘typical victim’ as if there even is one,” says Georgia. “She gave me that little voice in the back of my head telling me, ‘You can’t let your mum down’.” It was important to change the narrative about who becomes a victim of domestic abuse: these women aren’t necessarily weak or complicit.

Women make up the vast majority of domestic abuse victims. Those most likely to be stalked and harassed, and to sustain serious injury are those who have ended (or attempted to end) a violent relationship. Each year, more than 100,000 people in the UK are at imminent risk of being murdered or seriously injured as a result of domestic abuse, with the risk increasing for those women that leave.

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In England & Wales, more than 50,000 high-risk victims and 70,000 children are considered to be at “high risk” of serious harm, including homicide, by statutory agencies.

When PC Mike Taggart was 15, his mother Donna was murdered by her violent, alcoholic husband after she told him she wanted a divorce. “She was outgoing, warm and bubbly, but 11 years married to him changed her totally,” says Taggart. “It was constant belittling and misogynistic stuff.”

“He was dominant and aggressive to my sister and to me,” says Taggart. “We would do all we could to avoid him, including staying with friends every weekend. That was when he would get steaming drunk.” But it was impossible to escape the effects of living with domestic violence. “We walked on eggshells and would be dreading his next move.”

Taggart, who joined the police at a very young age, has focused on improving police practice regarding domestic abuse, and was awarded an MBE in 2021 for services to victims. He does his work not just with his mum in mind, but all the women and children in a similar situation. And there are so many.

The effects of not dealing with those children caught up in the crossfire of domestic violence and abuse is catastrophic. Numerous studies show that children who grow up with violence are at serious risk of long-term physical and mental health problems, such as chronic anxiety, addiction, depression, and self-harming.

But, in recent years, campaigners have lobbied to change the narrative from “witness” to “victim” when it comes to such children. Under a new law that came into force last year, children affected by domestic violence will finally be considered victims.

Given the numbers of women who suffer from domestic violence, the number of children growing up in a violent household is catastrophic. These children suffer quietly, desperately. They often do badly at school because the frightening experiences at home make it difficult to concentrate. Many refuse to go to school altogether, because they are too anxious to leave their mother alone with the abuser. Then there are those who simply cannot cope at all. So many children are prevented from leading fulfilling lives by witnessing such brutalisation.

Georgia doesn’t live in dread any more. But she can’t envisage a time when she will give up campaigning. “There is so much left to do. So many mothers have lost their lives, and there are countless children who have been left behind.” She’s positive about the new law. Those children may no longer be so easily forgotten.

The only facts we have are these: on 5 September, 24-year-old Chris Kaba was being pursued by police after an automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) camera linked the car he was driving to an earlier firearms offence. After being stopped on Streatham Hill in South London, Kaba was killed by a single shot fired through the driver’s side of the car’s windscreen by a Met police officer.

That officer, who remains unnamed, has been suspended from frontline duties — a routine procedure under the circumstances. But the police’s view of the incident, according to sources, is that their unnamed employee acted in defence of himself, his colleagues and the general public. It’s a line that’s hard to argue with, if one makes a clear case that the individual feared for life or limb.

Faced with a lethal threat, police officers have, under English law, the same right to self-defence as the rest of us. The application of a layman’s “reasonable force”, though, might be augmented by a professional order to “shoot to stop” any suspect engaged in armed violence or life-threatening behaviour. And in practice, shooting to stop often amounts to shooting to kill: police marksmen are trained to aim for the torso — the easiest part of the body to hit — and a single well-placed round, let alone five or six, frequently proves fatal.

The public’s understanding of marksmanship, ballistics, perceptual distortion, perpetrator behaviour and human anatomy is largely based on far-fetched cop shows and disbelief-defying Hollywood beat ‘em ups. The naïve belief that a violent suspect can be easily immobilised by a good “winging” is ubiquitous — and ridiculous. Most people couldn’t hit their own front door with a football from six feet, yet we expect armed police officers to shoot a knife-wielding terrorist in the hand, or aim for the arm of a driver who’s weaponised a vehicle. We suppose that a violent suspect would just shout “Ouch!”, stop what they’re doing, and go quietly into custody. Well, good luck with that.

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As former Met marksman Tony Long told me, when I interviewed him for the Channel Four documentary, Secrets of a Police Marksman: “If they pose an immediate threat to you, they cease to be a human being. They are a target. They have to be shot and you shoot them.” The reality is, an armed confrontation with a police officer isn’t meant to a fair fight. The shock and awe tactics employed by the service, particularly in vehicular hard stops, are designed to intimidate, destabilise and immobilise a suspect by using superior force. As one armed officer told me: “If you don’t want to get killed on the streets of London by someone like me, don’t go out there with a knife or gun thinking you’re fucking Charlie big potato.”

Now in his sixties and retired, Long is a highly commended Met veteran of 33 years, 25 of which were spent in the force’s ever-evolving specialist firearms unit. He knows all too well what it means to shoot to stop a “target”, having hit five suspects in his career, killing three. (“I’ve got a real problem with bullies,” he says.) The first was Yardie police informant Errol Walker, in Northolt, North West London, during the Christmas holidays of 1985. I remember the incident well: it followed the siege of a flat on a council estate, and in those days of scant TV offerings, the unfolding drama made for gripping viewing. His handlers tried, several times, to coax Walker out of the darkened flat with the offer of takeaway pizza.

Walker’s crime was stabbing his wife’s stepsister to death, before throwing her over the balcony and taking the victim’s four-year-old daughter hostage. In the end, he was double-tapped by Long, but  miraculously survived. Grabbing the child, who had been stabbed in the neck by Walker, Long ran out of the flat, carrying her to safety and leaving the incapacitated criminal to be dealt with by colleagues.

No one can fault Long’s actions on that day — nor on another, two years later, when he took down three heavily-armed robbers at a meat-packing factory in Plumstead, South East London, killing two and injuring a third. Such were his gun-toting heroics that the News of the World, having discovered his real name, dubbed him “Dirty Tony”, a moniker he bridles at. The paper also reported the nickname foisted on him by a police commander, Sue Akers: “the Met’s own serial killer”. Her loose lips wound up costing the Met £5,000 in damages, after Long sued his former employers.

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But it was Long’s final shooting that echoes the Chris Kaba incident, in that it was more ethically and practically ambiguous, and called into question the definitions of hero cop, psycho-villain, and, yes, racial profiling.

In April 2005, the officer found himself opening fire on 24-year-old Azelle Rodney, who was sitting in the back of a VW Golf with his fellow gang members, Wesley Lovell and Frank Graham, in the front. All three were black. Police intel, which included the use of a surveillance drone, had indicated that the men were armed with machine guns and en route to rob a gang of Colombian drug dealers somewhere in the outer reaches of North London. Long fired eight rounds from his Heckler and Koch G36 carbine at him, six of which hit Rodney, in the face, head, neck and chest. Rodney died of his wounds.

To cut a long story short: the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict anyone in connection with Rodney’s death. There followed a long, drawn-out inquest, then a judge-led public inquiry, and finally an Old Bailey murder trial in 2015, which saw Long acquitted and his name finally cleared.

All the signs suggest there will be a similarly drawn-out exercise in truth-seeking in the wake of Kaba’s death. Heat, confusion and protest have followed the incident: Sky News bizarrely reported that a large central London protest, featuring Stormzy, was a memorial march for the Queen. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has now opened a homicide inquiry, a move that has prompted the Met’s approximately 2,500 armed officers to threaten handing in their weapons in support of their beleaguered colleague. It’s not the first time such threats have been made, nor will it be the last.

A cynical solution to the perceived problem of specialist firearms units “holding the public to ransom” — a solution that would also, conveniently, help the police regain the streets from violent criminals — would be to simply arm all police officers. The UK (excluding Northern Ireland) is one of just 18 countries, out of 193, that does not routinely arm police. Doing so would surely level the playing field between officers and armed criminals, especially female officers, who routinely face suspects with an advantage in both size and weaponry. Why should the 34,000 Met police officers tasked with keeping a city of nine million people safe be expected to do so, for the most part, with little more than a stick and a pair of handcuffs?

“The subject of arming the police has been going on for years and is normally raised after an officer is shot dead,” Long says, “or more recently after terrorist attacks such as Borough Market where unarmed officers received life changing injuries because they weren’t correctly equipped.” Last week also delivered up another justification: on Friday, in Leicester Square, a female police officer was left with potentially life-changing injuries after she and a male colleague were stabbed by a “frenzied” suspect.

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“Sadly, we’re now at a point where there is more justification in routine arming than ever, but at the very point where the police have never been in a worse position to implement it,” says Long. “The current government and the last two Mayors of London have got rid of 70% of police stations required to securely store sidearms, and all but one of the ones containing a firing range.” The other issue is that “no serving police officer has been recruited on the understanding that they will be required to carry a firearm, so they could not be forced to do so”. Understandably, “incidents such as the recent Streatham shooting reinforce the attitude among many officers that they would never carry a firearm for fear of the way they’d be treated if they ever had to fire it”.

Long says that for a sea change to occur, every Met recruit who joins the service must be prepared to be armed — if not immediately, then at some point in the future. If they refuse, their employment should be terminated.

As Long’s career illustrates, an officer who shoots someone may be characterised as either a hero or a villain. The fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in 2005 — a tragedy of mistaken identity that occurred in the hunt for the 21/7 terrorist, Hussain Osman — tested the resolve of many armed officers, and the thickness of London’s collective skin. But, such was the capital’s siege mentality following the 7/7 bombings, Londoners expected the police to do what they had to do to take out the bad guys. As former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Blair, would later tell me: de Menezes “died in the fog of war” — a sentiment that, alas, many Londoners were prepared to accept in the short-term.

Equally, some battle-hardened Londoners would have written off Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of a specialist firearms unit in August 2011 as just another “scumbag” getting what he deserved — regardless of the details of the shooting. Others protested, and ultimately his death ignited days of rioting. Once again, the Met’s relationship with London’s black community was strained, as it had been after the accidental shooting of Cherry Groce, which triggered the second Brixton riots in 1985.

Ultimately, every police shooting leaves both the public and the police damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We want the police to protect and serve and take out the human trash that other state agencies are failing to catch, but we don’t want to give them the resources to do their jobs. Rampant racial profiling, the industrial scale stop-and-search of black youths, and the service’s failure to get a grip on London’s violent gang crime often makes me question the Met’s motives, as well as its strategies. But as the old saying, mistakenly attributed to Orwell, goes: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” To put it another way: being an armed cop is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

During this period, before feminism had had much of an influence, female police officers endured a barrage of sexist comments in the canteen, and out on patrol. Malton’s nickname among her male colleagues was “The Tart”. Nevertheless, she rose through the ranks to become a Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, becoming the inspiration behind Helen Mirren’s character, DCI Jane Tennison, in the hit Nineties crime series Prime Suspect. Now, Malton has written a book, The Real Prime Suspect, which tells the story of Britain’s police culture from 1970 to the current day.

There couldn’t be a better moment for its publication. Awareness of misogyny within the police service has never been higher, public confidence in police attitudes towards violence against women never lower. I found feminism in 1979, during one of the most shameful periods of police sexism, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, an investigation doomed from the start because police decided that many of the 13 women brutally murdered by the serial killer were asking for it. But in the era spanned by Malton’s career, things haven’t changed enough.

The abduction, rape and murder last spring of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens exposed the persistence of misogyny within the service. Indeed, the College of Policing was this month compelled to issue a statement reassuring the public that “officers who abuse their trust to groom vulnerable victims, or engage in sexual impropriety, including harassment, are more likely to be dismissed and barred from policing” (italics mine). The college admits that there are many officers still in post who have been found to have committed such offences.

The Real Prime Suspect documents recent events, and Malton acknowledges that all is not yet fair and equal when it comes to women in the police service. She certainly reveals the roots of the current toxic culture by telling her extraordinary story of success in the days when female police officers had barely any legal or employment rights, and were often seen by male colleagues as inferior irritants. But her book reads as though the bad old days are long gone.

It’s true that the police service Malton left in the late Nineties was a very different service to the one she’d joined. Women were by then serving in most areas of policing, and it was no longer deemed acceptable to openly refer to female officers as “bikes” or “dykes”. A lesbian, Malton chose not to be out at work in those early days — it was already hard enough being a woman in a testosterone-fuelled environment where resentment towards female officers was rife. But her colleagues soon suspected that Malton might not be interested in men, except as hard-drinking companions, and she would regularly be presented with vibrators, because, as she was often told, all women need is a good fuck.

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Despite her treatment, Malton persevered. She had always wanted to become a detective, and, following the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 — which led to a change in working conditions for women as well as equal opportunities with their male counterparts — her dream began to look like it might come true. “You’re the first split-arse DI we’ve had here,” she was told by her superior officer at her first Central London posting. By 1989, she had made Detective Chief Constable.

That same year, I met Malton at a conference. She was representing the Hammersmith and Fulham Domestic Violence Unit; I was campaigning against violence towards women. In a session on police responses to domestic abuse, a senior male officer claimed that things had changed significantly since the days when the crime was seen as a “private matter” between a married couple. Malton leapt to her feet and told her superior: “bullshit!” She then went on to outline every way in which the police were still letting down victims, winning applause from many of us in the room.

We didn’t know it then, but Malton’s life was about to change forever. In 1990 she had a meeting with a “striking, petite woman with a fabulous smile and a cascade of red curly hair”. Writer Lynda La Plante was developing a script for a TV series about a female DCI leading a murder enquiry. At the time, Malton was one of only three female DCIs in the Metropolitan Police. Soon, she began working as script consultant on what was to become the stratospherically successful Prime Suspect.

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Why women fear the police

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Many of the best-known scenes in the show came directly from Malton. In the first episode, when Tennison is, against many of her colleagues’ better judgment, made head of a murder enquiry following the sudden death of her male counterpart, she is addressed by a young copper as “ma’am”. Mirren throws him a withering look and says: “Call me Boss or Guv, but don’t call me Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.” I remember posters in lesbian clubs with those words coming out of Mirren’s mouth in a speech bubble. Tennison quickly became a major feminist icon. But, though Malton was by that point “out” at work, she advised La Plante that the public was not ready to empathise with a lesbian protagonist. Tennison was developed as a heterosexual woman who fails at relationships because she puts the job first.

Another line that ended up in Prime Suspect came from a story Malton told La Plante about the sexist banter to which women subjected, day in, day out. The character of DS Bill Otley, a vulgar misogynist, was based on an officer Malton had worked with, who had once pointed at a female colleague and asked his mates: “Who would fancy that skinny dyke?” But there’s one anecdote that shocked even me, told to me by Malton a few years ago, when we were working together on a Radio 4 documentary about sexism within the police service, Malton told a hilarious but grotesque story about how male officers, after a few Friday night drinks in the police bar, would see how many 10p pieces they could get under their foreskin. “One officer managed £3.20,” she told me.

When Prime Suspect was on air, a number of serving and retired female officers contacted Malton to tell her they recognised the misogyny exposed by the storylines. Thanks largely to Malton, the dire situation for women in the police became common knowledge. But in some ways that makes it even more shocking that male officers are still getting away with it.

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A whopping 70% of civilian police employees working alongside police officers reported witnessing sexual harassment, according to research conducted in 2018 by the London School of Economics. Of the 311,776 Unison members polled (two-thirds of whom were women), more than three quarters reported sexist jokes; one third reported intrusive questions about their private life; and more than a fifth reported inappropriate leering or staring. There were also complaints about sexual gestures and hints that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment.

Meanwhile, as reported by the Centre for Women’s Justice, almost 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported during the three years leading to April 2018. This data covers three quarters of police forces. It shows that police employees accused of domestic abuse are a third less likely to be convicted than the general public. Fewer than a quarter of complaints of domestic abuse resulted in disciplinary action.

Horrifying case studies abound, and there are hundreds we never hear about. A recent Times expose showed that many disciplinaries of male police officers involving vulnerable females are held in private. It has recently been revealed, for instance, that a number of serving male officers shared deeply offensive WhatsApp messages — such as one who wrote that he “enjoyed the need”, while on duty, to physically restrain a very vulnerable and disturbed 15-year-old girl, because he got pleasure from a “struggle snuggle”.

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Still, the impression one could be left with, having read Malton’s book, is that the vast majority of male police officers are exemplary, brave public servants. I don’t accept this version of events. Malton’s story is inspiring, but even though it’s now 25 years since she left the Met, she remains in many ways fiercely loyal to her tribe. You know the saying: once a copper, always a copper.

So, despite the candid scrutiny of old-style sexism in the cop shop, The Real Prime Suspect is a bit of a puff piece when it comes to the police service today. What we need is a book by a retired female officer who is willing to do a warts-and-all expose. Because it is only when the public becomes aware of the extent of woman-hating in the service that root and branch reform will become unavoidable. Let us hope there is a brave whistleblower out there, who can show the nation how much worse our police force is than DCI Tennison’s.

As DEFUND BPD graffiti took over a prominent billboard on North Avenue, Scott was one of the few candidates who seemed in sync with the activist moment. He questioned the authorities’ over-reliance on police presence as they attempted to curb the violence plaguing the city. What Baltimore needed, he argued, was an expanded social safety net. But the darling of the activist Left would soon find himself at odds with his earliest supporters, as the reality of running a city with a spiking homicide rate became clear.

These tensions between activists and politicians were happening all across the country. Activists had been campaigning to end police violence for years when the death of George Floyd caught the world’s attention: finally, and abruptly, the words “defund the police” and “prison abolition” were appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Local politicians started running on issues such as bail reform. A handful of cities, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle, all announced they were reallocating funds from bloated police budgets to other city services. Approximately $870 million was slashed from police departments nationwide. The idea was that with fewer police there would be more money to spend on the other services people want, which are typically underfunded. This in turn would boost the sense of community and stability — which should create a higher quality of life and theoretically bring down crime rates.

And then the homicide rate started to climb in cities across America. Many other crime statistics remained flat, but opponents to police reforms now had a frame for the backlash. Enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has faded — as has the idea that other services, such as housing, health, and drug rehabilitation programs, should be prioritised.

The debate is now absurdly binary: either you care about police violence, or you care about the homicide rate. Both these issues disproportionately affect the same demographics: economically vulnerable people living in under-serviced neighbourhoods are more likely to experience violence at the hands of both police and non-police. But anyone hoping to be an accepted member of either the Left or the Right must exaggerate one issue and erase the other.

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Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty and violence, is a microcosm of what the defund debate has become. Brandon Scott’s main rival in the hotly contested 2020 mayoral race was former mayor Sheila Dixon. She started in the lead, despite the fact that she’d had to resign after being accused of stealing and using gift cards that had been donated to the city for distribution to needy families. One reason for her popularity, despite her alleged crimes, was her previous ability to bring the homicide rate to its lowest level in decades. Her success was mostly credited to “focused deterrence”, a strategy that includes police presence in high-risk communities and police intervention in the lives of high-risk individuals. Despite being effective and popular, this approach was mostly abandoned in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, after anti-police sentiment had swept the city (the six officers involved were charged and their trials resulted in a mix of a mistrial, acquittals, and dropped charges; all officers returned to duty).

Still, it was Scott, who was city council president, who won out in the end. For years, he has approached gun violence as a public health crisis — one that requires sustained engagement from services beyond law enforcement. He has discussed the reallocation of resources to give other forms of intervention priority; activists interpreted this as support for the idea of defunding the police. And yet when he released his first city budget for approval, and the police budget remained around the same level as his predecessor’s, he was roundly condemned by critics on social media.

In response, Scott gave an interview in the Baltimore Sun, in which he criticised the “defund the police” slogan and its activists for focusing on the means rather than the ends. “We have to do a better job of explaining to folks what we’re talking about.” The goal should be a city in which every citizen is given the opportunity to flourish, and defunding the police doesn’t in itself achieve this. Moving numbers around on a budget is not policy; it is a symbolic gesture. And it’s a gesture that will only satisfy a small number of activists; a large percentage of residents would prefer the same or more police presence in their neighbourhoods. The majority support police reform over abolition.

Scott still believes in reallocating resources and ending the dependence the city has on police, but, he said in an interview with The Trace, “I need time.” He continued, “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work.” But time is not something many activists have been willing to grant him. He has been in office for a year and a half, and has already become a target for those on the far-Left, who often point to this one budgetary marker as a sign of his failings rather than fairly assessing his policies. Scott’s first municipal budget increased funding for police to cover rising healthcare and pension costs. During the Taxpayers’ Night — an open forum for citizens to give feedback about how the city’s funds are being spent — multiple activists waited in line to express their anger and frustration with him. Many said they regretted voting for the young mayor.

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When I moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia last year, I found a similar dynamic, with complicated realities obscured by the binaries, opportunism and bitter rivalries of local politics. Since the summer when 66,000 people marched in support of Black Lives Matter here, Philadelphia has been moving up the list of metropolises with the highest homicide rates in America. In 2019, it was fourteenth; now, it is twelfth. Last year, there were more murders here than in New York and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, police shootings here have not made national headlines. Earlier this month police officer Edsual Mendoza was charged with murder. He shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in March. Between 2013 and 2021, 39 people, 26 of them black, were killed by the police.

Still, only a very small percentage of Philly’s population actually wants a decrease of police presence — including in neighbourhoods where police have killed or brutalised residents. They want services, such as affordable housing and free health clinics and public transportation and better schools, but they also say public safety is a top priority, and see police presence as a part of solving that problem.

Only 44% of Philadelphia residents feel “safe” in their neighbourhoods at night, and the largest percentage of residents who do are white. There is some truth to the criticism that the liberals who support defunding the police often don’t live in the neighbourhoods most afflicted by gun violence and homicides. And it doesn’t help that the most prominent professional activists in this arena, whether part of Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, make headlines for lucrative book deals and expensive real estate purchases. The people on social media who most frequently and loudly talk about defunding the police often have extensive media bylines in their bios.

The city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is adjacent to this demographic: a white civil rights attorney whose  education from University of Chicago and Stanford has been brought up in a few of the conversations against him I’ve overheard. Krasner was elected in 2017, following widespread protests in Philadelphia against police violence — and the arrest of the previous DA Seth Williams on federal corruption charges. Krasner ran on a platform of ambitious reform, and he has delivered: his office has declined to prosecute low level prostitution or marijuana possession, and it is also implementing the controversial bail reform measures. Requiring cash for bail has for a long time left the poorest people in jail for weeks, months, and, in at least one high profile case, years, awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes. Krasner and other reformist DAs like him have pledged to put an end to this possibility, letting low-level offenders go home to wait for trial.

Krasner’s platform and unapologetic manner have brought him national attention, including an eight-part documentary series on PBS that gives an inside look at the work in his office and the controversies that have sprung from his tactics. Bail reform is an easy target for the Right: if someone with an extensive record commits a heinous act, a conservative will inevitably go on television to demand to know why that person was “on the streets” in the first place and not in prison. Locally, Krasner has been blamed for the increasing homicide rate, by both politicians and members of the police.

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But like Scott in Baltimore, the most serious criticism that Krasner faces comes from his own side, the Left. In the mind of his most prominent critic, Michael Nutter, Krasner is a white saviour, thinking he knows best how to order the world while underserving the black people in neighbourhoods hardest hit by violence. The former mayor, who is black, said in an interview with the Washington Post: “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends…’ All that bullshit.”

Nutter has referred in speeches to young black men as an “endangered species”, threatened by imprisonment, poverty, and violent death. He has long been an advocate for public safety, both before and after his eight years as mayor, and his term saw a significant decline in the Philadelphia homicide rate. Although there is no consensus about why or how that drop happened, but Nutter’s work, like Sheila Dixon’s in Baltimore, has often included a close relationship with the police, including controversial measures such as stop and frisk. As soon as Nutter left office, the white progressive Jim Kenney was elected as mayor and Krasner was elected DA, and those tactics were discontinued. And the homicide rate once again started to rise.

The most recent city budget presented by mayor Kenney significantly increased the funding for “anti-violence” programs, including neighbourhood organisations, after-school and summer programs, and workforce development programs — the same types of programs Defund the Police advocates have argued should take priority over policing. Philadelphia has also been slowly implementing other police-related reforms, such as a citizen oversight committee and the deployment of mental health professionals alongside police for certain emergency calls. Krasner enjoys widespread support from black voters, and his reforms have been largely popular in the city, despite the fact that a small handful of crimes have involved people who had been released on charges awaiting trial. But the effects of his work are not yet visible. The homicide rate for 2022 is already above what had been recorded by the same time last year.

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The reality is that when crime rates go down, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific reason. Everything from neighbourhood development to the removal of lead paint from homes to robust police forces were credited with Philadelphia’s drop in violent crime in the Eighties. Similarly, when the homicide rate increased during the pandemic, many contradictory reasons were given. Gun sales had gone up — but was this cause, effect, or unrelated? Unemployment had gone up, but when it declined again it had no effect on the rate of violent crime. Were the police effectively on “strike”, refusing to engage in the prevention or intervention of dangerous situations because they were concerned about being blamed for bad results? Something similar had happened in Baltimore after the uprising that followed Freddie Gray’s death. But maybe other problems contributed too, such as rising rents or the difficulty of accessing health services during the pandemic.

The lack of clarity has allowed anyone, with any agenda, to speculate publicly about why homicide rates are climbing. For the head of the police union, it’s because the police force is underfunded and under-appreciated by the community. For conservatives, it’s because of broken families and lack of personal responsibility or because authorities are soft on criminals. For liberals, it’s the lack of gun control laws or poverty.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as effective policy lies somewhere between anti-police activism and an unquestioningly pro-police stance. Crime rates aren’t predictable or easy to change, as local leaders across America are discovering. To pretend otherwise is to fail its victims.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

On Monday 25 May 2020, in Minneapolis, a man named George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Video footage of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. One of those to watch it was T.J. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. “I thought it was disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. “You don’t do that to somebody. That’s just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years and years. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other places.”

The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer since 1998. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and had subdued a lot of people. “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”

Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to get immediate medical care. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasise once they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical attention,” he says. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the right thing. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical? If I have water on me, do you want some water?”

But any potential differences between the police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the city in the late spring of 2020. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night, 29 May, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Matthew Kruse was among the cops standing guard. “We go down there, and we’re in the riot gear, and people were pleasant,” he says. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with people.” After 10 o’clock, though, the mood shifted. “People were throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “They were starting to shine flashlights in our face.”

On Saturday, the crowds grew destructive. Groups of protesters shattered windows up and down the retail corridors of downtown and emptied many of the stores of their merchandise. Some of those in the crowd torched police cruisers parked outside of the Nordstrom flagship store at Pine Street and 6th Avenue. Protesters also pulled firearms, including M4 rifles, out of the abandoned vehicles. Mike Magan, a robbery detective who had been on the force for over three decades, was home that evening, watching the mayhem on a screen. “I was beside myself,” he says. He recognised the abandoned van of a co-worker, whom he phoned. The colleague, a forensics video specialist, answered in a whisper and said that he and other colleagues were taking shelter in the Nordstrom’s and videotaping what they could of the violence outside.

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The following morning, Magan got called into the office to start investigations of 30 to 40 people who’d been arrested for crimes such as trespass, burglary and property destruction. Five or six hours in, he began to suspect they’d given the police false names. But there was no point looking into it further. “We found out they’d all been released from custody prior to even being questioned,” he says.

The bedlam in Seattle caused police leaders to institute a so-called “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that officers had to work 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week. Christopher Young, a detective in the investigative support unit (previously named the criminal intelligence unit), who has been on the force since 1994 and never experienced such a schedule, calls June 2020 “the most stressful month of my life”. Young found himself working 16-hour days for weeks straight. “Even our homicide detectives were sitting at their desks working their cases in battle dress uniforms with their helmets ready to run outside to protect their own office building,” he says, adding that an eight-hour day is already demanding in the world of policing, where split-second decisions are the norm. “There’s been plenty of criticism of how we handled it, but people don’t realise how stressful it was just from the sleep deprivation alone.”

Of the hundreds of businesses that reported being damaged or looted over the weekend, Nordstrom’s flagship store was the most prominent. There had been an attempt by someone to set it aflame. On 1 June, Mike Magan and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the jewellery cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the makeup was gone. Shoes were gone — bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on them.”

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That night, Magan, who had been out of uniform for decades, had to don riot gear to guard the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Demonstrations began peacefully but changed after dark. “We were getting pelted with bricks, rocks, frozen water bottles,” says Magan. “There were shots fired. Here I am, 33 or 34 years on the department and I’m like: why am I on the front line here?”

The 12-hour shifts exhausted everyone, including the younger officers. Matthew Kruse was working from 7pm to 7am, mostly on his feet, and if he was out on patrol he had to have riot gear with him in the car in case he was needed for crowd control. Once a week or fortnight, he’d get a day off and spend it all sleeping. “Some nights I slept at the police station,” he says. “And I remember at least a couple of times I just slept in my car, because I was like, if I try to drive home I’m going to kill myself or someone else.”

J.D. Smith, stationed at the West Precinct near the turmoil, was spared a direct confrontation with the violence. His job at the time was to process online crime reports, which were now rolling in faster than ever. But he could see the toll being taken on his coworkers when they returned to the station from the protest sites day after day. “The looks on their faces — it just reminded me of the Gulf War,” he says.

When the protests grew violent, police officers began to use various non-lethal weapons to control the crowd, including pepper spray and tear gas. This led to complaints, lawsuits, and stinging condemnation in the local press. On 5 June, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, declared that officers “do not need to be using tear gas at protests as a crowd management tool” and banned the use of it for 30 days. Many officers felt they were being asked to maintain order in violent crowds while surrendering all of their crowd-control tools. “People were throwing bottles and rocks, and we had to split this thing up. God forbid after multiple, multiple, multiple warnings that we’re gonna throw gas, guys, you better disperse, we throw gas,” says J.D. Smith. “So then what? Oh, Seattle PD, look how heavy-handed they are.”

Seattle has never been as police-friendly as some other cities, but outright hostility to law enforcement had until 2020 been confined to a minority of residents. Lots of officers on the force had even been accustomed to positive public attention. T.J. San Miguel and her German Shepherd, Pele — named after the goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii, San Miguel’s native home — had been featured on “America’s Top Dog,” a series putting dogs through obstacle courses, and had cheery write-ups for her work. Mike Magan received regular cards from people he’d helped and, when Covid hit, even a crate of cleaning supplies from one grateful Vietnamese-American family whose jewellery store he had saved when he tracked down four robbers and got all of the stolen goods returned. J.D. Smith became a brief celebrity in 2016, when while off-duty he pulled over on a mountain pass on Interstate 90 to rescue an unconscious woman from a flaming car. All of the cops could point to times when they’d helped save a victim from a bad guy.

Prior to the summer of 2020 the department had been receiving encouraging communications from the mayor’s office, and city officials were planning to ask the federal government to lift a consent decree that had been imposed on the Seattle police in 2012. In 2016, Barack Obama had even invited the department’s then-chief, Kathleen O’Toole, to the State of the Union, and a federal judge had ruled in 2018 that the city was in “full and effective compliance” with the decree. T.J. San Miguel expected that city officials would take a moment to let the worst of the public anger pass and then speak up for their police force. “I’m like, okay, it was horrible and people absolutely need to say what they need to say,” she says. “So we’re going to give it a minute here in our department, but then our city is going to say: Hey, that was horrible. It was disgusting. It was bad. And guess what? You’ll never see that in the Seattle Police Department.”

That statement did not come. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on 3 June that the city would no longer seek to lift the consent decree. Seattle city council member Teresa Mosqueda vowed to lead an “inquest” into the budget of the Seattle police and said she wanted to cut funding by half, a view echoed by fellow council members Tammy Morales and Kshama Sawant. City Council president Lorena Gonzáles blamed the police response to the protests for turning “our densest neighbourhoods” into a “complete war zone”.

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“In May of 2020, our political leadership considered us a necessary evil,” says Chris Young. “In June of 2020, they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural institution in the city turned on the police.” That included educational institutions. In early June, Young, as a parent of children in Seattle Public Schools, was one of thousands of recipients of an email from school superintendent Denise Juneau announcing that cooperation with the police would be suspended in light of “the perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers across our country, [and] the violence displayed by some law enforcement officers here in Seattle”.

The perspective was palpable on the streets, too. T.J. San Miguel would hear jeers out of open windows on Capitol Hill. “You have people in an apartment several stories high just yelling and screaming at you as you’re out there walking down the block,” she says. In one case, a crime victim had called for police help, only to start showering the responding officers with anti-cop abuse when they arrived. “It was very shocking,” she says. “And it’s just like: Okay, bye, have a nice night.”

“We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were literally hated overnight.”

On Sunday 8 June, Matthew Kruse and coworkers from the North Precinct got an order to go down and help back up his colleagues in the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. The plan, he says, was to let crowds march past the precinct unimpeded, unless there was criminal activity, and Kruse and his colleagues were stationed a couple of blocks away, watching the area on camera. No one was trying to break into the precinct, says Kruse, but people started to pitch tents near it. At that point, according to Kruse, a police captain went over to talk to the protesters. “He started talking to protesters and telling them, hey, you guys have got to move along, and they got in a verbal altercation,” says Kruse. “Then they [senior officers] came back to us and said we’re just going to let them stay there and do their thing.” The East Precinct, already boarded up, was now abandoned.

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News of the surrender of the East Precinct hit cops hard. “I just felt sick,” says Chris Young. “It was humiliating.”  Matthew Kruse found the about-face on holding the fort versus leaving it insulting. “At first they had said: no, we’re not going to let them take the precinct,” says Kruse. “The next day it’s being cleared out.” J.D. Smith remains incredulous. “I’m still embarrassed,” Smith says. “We gave away a precinct.”

What followed for the next few weeks was an impromptu test site for improvised maintenance of public order in what came to be called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A few days into the CHAZ, the New York Times described it as “an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune.” Donald Trump weighed in from the Oval Office to condemn it. “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,” he tweeted. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded, “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism.” Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo how long the CHAZ would last, Durkan quipped, “I don’t know. We could have the summer of love.”

For police stationed out of the East Precinct, there was no base of operations anymore. “They couldn’t deploy from there,” says Matthew Kruse. “They had to deploy from the West Precinct or North or South or Southwest or any other precinct. So response times got slower, and that affects everyone from a shop owner to a person who lives there.”

Where some observers saw a harmless street fair others saw something more menacing. “All these businesses are failing and they’re asking for help,” recalls J.D. Smith. “There is nothing, and I mean zero, we can do because the mayor is saying summer of love.” Chris Young says that officers received an email instructing them not to enter the six-block zone of the CHAZ, although he made his way into the off-limits area after some unsuccessful arson attempts against the precinct building. “I was sent with a fancy camera to take pictures of the crime scene of where they tried to burn it down,” says Young. “You had to go by a checkpoint with guards, and God knows what they’d do with me if they found out I was a cop. I had to basically go undercover to sneak in and look at my own precinct.”

On Saturday 20 June, about 12 days after the East Precinct was vacated, T.J. San Miguel got called in to respond to a shooting of two men in the CHAZ, one of whom was now in a serious condition. “So everybody just goes rolls down there and then, you know, they have to come up with a plan,” she says. “Like, how are we going to get in there?”

By the time a group of officers made it into the CHAZ, they were told the most endangered victim was already being taken to the hospital by activists on the scene. Over the radio in her car outside the CHAZ, San Miguel heard that the victim was being driven in a plain white van toward the Harborview Medical Center, and she happened to look up. “There’s this van driving just crazy,” she says. “The back doors are open and swinging. There’s a bunch of people in the back of the van working, I guess, on this person that was just shot, and I’m just like, oh my god.” San Miguel decided to alert Harborview and escort the van there. “I just jumped ahead of it, lights and sirens,” she says, “and I blocked all the intersections as it went, so it safely got there and no other cars got in the way of it.” In the end, the victim, 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, made it to Harborview but didn’t survive.

The CHAZ lasted another ten days after that, until Wednesday 1 July, when officers reclaimed the precinct without a struggle. In the meantime, a 17-year-old had been shot in the arm on 21 June, a 30-year-old male shot and wounded on 23 June, and two black teenagers, 14 and 16, shot and wounded on 29 June as they drove into the CHAZ. The older of the two, Antonio Mays Jr., died of his wounds. Witnesses have stated that members of CHAZ security were the ones who opened fire on them, but police have never tracked down the responsible parties.

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Despite the retaking of the East Precinct, the city continued to be racked by protest and strife throughout July, with further vandalism and looting by a subset of the protesters, few of whom ever faced charges. City officials continued to direct their ire toward the police department instead, and on 10 August the Seattle City council voted to cut the pay of senior police staff, including Chief Carmen Best, who enjoyed widespread respect from officers on the force, including all of those interviewed for this article. “It was demoralising,” says Chris Young. “She was a great chief and a very progressive leader who happens to be black. But she still got run out of town on a rail because she wouldn’t agree that her department needed to be abolished.”

Carmen Best immediately announced her resignation. At that time, T.J. San Miguel, who calls Best “excellent, just excellent,” was already deep into looking for an exit. A move like that, when she’d spent years to secure the job of her dreams, working in the K-9 unit, would have been unthinkable in the recent past. She considered herself one of the biggest cheerleaders of the department. But the hostility from the city in June and July changed her outlook. “I realised I could do everything completely right, and if the optics aren’t good, then they’re going to hang me out to dry,” she says. “Once I came to that realisation, it was like a bad breakup where you just shut somebody off.” San Miguel left the force when Best did.

A change in public safety began to be noticeable across the city, not just in protest zones. Seattle’s city attorney, Pete Holmes, and King County’s prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, had always taken a lenient approach to so-called quality-of-life crimes, but after June 2020 they began to ease up across the board toward a range of other offences. Most of those who committed vandalism or looting during the protests escaped any punishment. Matthew Kruse said that storeowners would call the police about shoplifters, not realising that prosecutions of that offence had effectively ceased. On one occasion Kruse and his partner watched a man walk into a store, shoplift about $20 in goods, and walk out. “He was like, what are you guys going to do — arrest me?” says Kruse. “And we knew we weren’t going to arrest him, because with any misdemeanour stuff, we had to go through the prosecutor, and stuff like that wasn’t going to get prosecuted. You could I.D. the suspect and could get a full confession, and they were going be like, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

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One case in which prosecutors did take action proved to be the last straw for Matthew Kruse’s partner. It involved a shooting that, according to Kruse, everyone involved in investigating believed to be obvious self-defence. A 40-something white Seattle male with no criminal record had shot a homeless Hispanic male who had attacked him in a parking lot at night. The directive from the prosecutors’ office was to jail the man in preparation for pressing murder charges, Kruse recalls, “because of the optics.” Kruse says the case went to trial and ended in swift acquittal, but Kruse’s partner, disgusted by what he viewed as politicised decision-making, quit his job.

With an incentive structure that made officers feel they had little to gain and much to lose from taking the initiative on crime prevention, cops began a dramatic — and some would say resentful — pullback in enforcement. Patrol officers no longer drove or walked about looking for suspicious behaviour like someone climbing a fence but stayed put and responded after the fact. Mike Magan said that one of his colleagues got investigated and punished for responding to a call of shots fired without logging into his computer first. “It was like we were biting our own necks, and you began to see that a lot of these officers would go park their cars at certain location and not go out and patrol,” he says. “You could track the cars and you could see that these officers were parking in parking garages.”

Kruse wanted to keep patrolling, even if it was in a more low-key way, but one day his supervisor advised him to avoid it. “I was told straight to my face: don’t leave the precinct unless you’re going to a call,” Kruse recalls. “He says: I’m looking out for you, still fresh in your career. I don’t want you to get in trouble for doing the right thing.” Kruse says a lot of his coworkers began to rely on an imaginary colleague they dubbed “Officer Time,” so named because most criminal behavior stops on its own after a while. “If it’s a shoplift, the building is going to close, or if it’s someone that’s just trespassing, they’re eventually going to leave,” says Kruse. “So just let them off and let Officer Time handle it.” Kruse quit in October of 2020. The following month, the city council voted to cut the budget of the department by 20%.

For Mike Magan, the pullback in enforcement spread even to his fellow detectives, causing him to hit breaking point. “One of the robbery squads just decided they weren’t going to work anymore,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave the office, they wouldn’t help you on search warrants, they wouldn’t come out and conduct interviews with you. They wouldn’t come out and track video. It was heartbreaking.” Magan couldn’t stand it and decided to retire early. He had banked eight months of sick leave that he intended to exhaust prior to his official departure date, but his ordinary work hours ended after February of 2021.

An exodus of officers led to a manpower shortage that prompted J.D. Smith to quit as well. As someone whose interactions with the public were mostly online at this point in his career, Smith was relatively cushioned from classic hazards of the job. The severe shortage of officers, however, made him certain that he’d be put back into uniform and on street patrol, which he believed spelled trouble for someone out of practice. “It’s tough even when you’re out there every day,” he says. “But you take somebody who has been off the streets for 10 years — they’re rusty.” Returning to the work of chasing down violent criminals in a time of hostile public scrutiny seemed untenable. Smith picked April Fool’s Day of 2021 as his date of retirement. “I had eight more years,” he says. “I needed to stay, financially, but I decided no, I’m going to quit.”

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The departing officers left a severely diminished department. Even before the unrest of 2020, the number of officers in the Seattle Police Department was low by the standard of other cities. With about 1,400 police officers in 2019, or 18.5 officers for every 10,000 residents, policing in Seattle could never be as comprehensive as in New York City, where the ratio is 43.6 officers for every 10,000 residents, or Washington, D.C. where it is 54 per 10,000. But with 186 separations from the department in 2020, nearly three times the historical annual average, and another 150 or so in 2021, Seattle started 2022 with well under 1,000 deployable officers department-wide.

Almost all of the officers spoken to for this article seemed to be in low-key mourning over their alienation from the city they served. “I loved going to work every day, and I had a fantastic career,” says Mike Magan. “It’s a beautiful city, but I watched it go from really good to really bad.”

“The mayor and the city council were telling us, basically, that we’re the bad guy,” says J.D. Smith. “The truth is 99% plus of us are amazing people that are only there for the reason that I was there: I don’t like people in fear, and I don’t like people in pain.”

“I’m actually a Left-wing guy on just about every issue,” says Chris Young. “I want the United States to be a Scandinavian-style welfare state. So I’m very sympathetic to people’s concerns.” Forming a complementary department of 100 people comprising community service officers, social workers and others who could do the sort of enforcement that doesn’t require a gun would have been a worthy experiment, Young feels. “But they didn’t do that,” he says. “They just demonised the police and chased good people out of town. It was, let’s slash budgets and hope something good happens.”

Today, T.J. San Miguel works for the police department of Marysville, a town about 30 miles north of Seattle. She had to take a $10-an-hour pay cut, she says, and abandon her work with Pele, starting over as a patrol officer once more. (She did get to keep living with Pele, who is now a full-time pet. “She’s fat and happy,” San Miguel reports.) But the first day of patrol among Marysville residents was a revelation. “People told me face-to-face: We love you. We support you. Thank you for doing your job,” she says. “People were waving. You couldn’t buy your own coffee.”

Matthew Kruse found a job in the police department of Lynnwood, a suburb about 15 miles north of Seattle. Like San Miguel, Kruse was astonished by the contrast between his new workplace and the one he left. In Lynnwood, he says, cops crack down on illegal drug paraphernalia. When someone gets a warrant to show up in court and fails to show, police will arrest the person for ignoring the warrant. When someone shoplifts, that person gets arrested and charged. “I ask people when I catch them shoplifting up here in Lynnwood, ‘What are you doing up here?’” he says.

J.D. Smith moved to Idaho, near Priest River, not far from the Washington border. “It’s affordable, and it got me out of the area,” he says. “I have a chance to start a new life and not be a police officer anymore. I’m hanging the badge up.”

Mike Magan moved to Bozeman, Montana, where he is building a house. In the months that followed his departure from the office, he continued to show up whenever he was needed to wrap up a serious case and make sure the perpetrators were prosecuted. But most of that work has wound down. “I look forward to the transition,” he says. “But I do miss it.”

Remaining on the force is Chris Young, who has seen repeated changes of role as more and more of his colleagues leave. “A few months ago I was just a detective. Now I’m a permanent acting sergeant,” he says. “Half the people in my unit are gone.” Any lull in enforcement that might have existed in the fall of 2020 has long since been replaced by a frantic rush from call to call, as ever fewer officers confront ever higher numbers of crimes.

Part of Young’s job now is to keep more people from leaving, even as the city steps up efforts to repopulate the force. Last October, as vaccine mandates caused even more officers to leave, the mayor put in place an emergency order offering $25,000 bonuses to new hires. But the mindset of the city seems to have mattered just as much to the officers in this story as financial considerations. “My young rockstar detectives are sniffing around these other departments where they’ll get treated like royalty,” Young says. “How do I compete with that?” The answer to that may depend on how much Seattle cares.

It’s easy to see why the images of the debris, a very pandemic-era combination of online shopping and urban lawlessness, received heavy play on local news and spread far and wide across the web. So bad was the litter problem — caused by systematic robbery, with criminal groups pilfering packages, ripping them open and running off with the most valuable goods — that a cargo train had derailed just a few days before Newsom’s late-January visit. And so here was the state governor, in jeans and a t-shirt (and a cloth mask outdoors) in a litter-picking photo-op: an irresistible visual to add to the thick dossier on Democratic misrule in California.

But the bluntness of Newsom’s reaction — as well as comparing his own state to a third-world country, he explicitly blamed organised criminals — was a revealing sign of this safely Democratic state’s changed political landscape.

Put simply, such statements might have been a political headache for a California Democrat only 18 months earlier. With the country in the throes of its post-George Floyd “reckoning” — dominated by a mood of hypersensitivity around anything relating to crime, policing, race and any combination of the three — references to the third world, as well as daring to be seen to be tough on crime, might not have gone down well. But Newsom received only fringe pushback.

In California’s two biggest cities, the signs of progressive retreat are everywhere. The extent of that retreat, and the question of exactly what comes after years of Leftwards shift, will define the political future of America’s most populous state.

In the past two years, London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco, has performed a dramatic about-turn on crime and policing. In 2020, the city chief cut $120 million from the budget of the San Francisco police department. Yet a year later, she asked for emergency extra funding for the police and announced a crackdown on crime in the Tenderloin, the city’s most lawless neighborhood which operates as an open-air drug market. It was time, said Breed, to end the “bullshit”. Now she is doing battle with the city’s progressive forces to deliver on what, anywhere other than San Francisco, would be considered a reasonably common-sense clampdown given the scale of the city’s drug overdose and crime problems.

And she is far from alone. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive prosecutor whose short time in office has been a disaster, was started by a group of local activists and quickly developed serious momentum. Campaigners secured enough signatures to force a citywide vote, which is scheduled for June, and look increasingly likely to triumph. A mid-February survey found that 68% of San Francisco voters planned to vote Boudin out of office. (That in a city where just 6.7% are registered Republicans.)

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Campaigners in another recall push in the city found success last month when voters ousted three members of San Francisco’s school board. 70% of voters opted to ditch officials who seemed more interested in what to rename the city’s schools than figuring out how to reopen safely during the pandemic. (Among the names they hoped to erase from the San Francisco schools: George Washington, sitting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Robert Louis Stevenson.) As part of her tack towards the center, Breed has supported the recall campaign.

A few hundred miles to the south, a group of Angelenos have taken inspiration from the anti-Boudin campaign and hope to oust LA’s head prosecutor. The move to recall George Gascón is in its early stages, with campaigners recently given the all-clear to start collecting signatures. But things don’t look good for Gascón, who is cut from a similar, hyperprogessive cloth to Boudin. Like Boudin, he has overseen a lethal slide towards lawlessness. And, like Boudin, he faces a furious internal revolt from his prosecutors. In a recently published internal survey by Los Angeles Association for Deputy District Attorneys, nine in ten prosecutors supported the recall effort. “Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the legal code,” said its vice-president Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment needs to end.”

Even before a single vote has been counted, the anti-Gascón campaign has already changed policy in the city. In an effort to fend off the backlash, he has reversed two of his landmark policies: a ban on trying juveniles as adults and on seeking life without parole.

Meanwhile, in the crowded race to replace Eric Garcetti as the mayor of Los Angeles — Joe Biden has appointed him as the US ambassador to India — the mood is unmistakably moderate. Homelessness, crime and the cost of living dominate the debate. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and the pick of the city’s Democratic machine, has swerved Rightwards, with a policy platform that features clearing homeless encampments as a prominent promise. This has dismayed the city’s progressives, who complain that she is “pandering to affluent Westside and Valley voters at the expense of black, Latinx and working-class ones”, as two Black Lives Matter activists put it in a recent column. (Needless to say, LA’s working-class voters, whatever their race, are by no means as on board with a far-Left approach to criminal justice as the authors claim.)

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Meanwhile, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican, has thrown his hat into the ring. Caruso, a shopping mall developer, is a big beast in LA civic life: he is a trustee at the University of Southern California and has been a member of the city’s Police Commission. In a statement confirming his switch from Independent to Democrat, he said that he “won’t be a typical Democrat… I’ll be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.” Caruso has backed the Gascón recall campaign. (Bass has not.)

The counterrevolution in California’s cities may seem fairly mild by national standards: a shift in tone among the same class of Democratic politicians. But the backlash on America’s left coast demonstrates the outer limits of tolerance for radical progressivism in American politics. As the novelist Wallace Stegner noted, California is like “America, only more so”.

When it comes to experiments in far-Left urban politics in recent years, that has undoubtedly been the case. Now the question is whether Californian Democrats have learned anything but the most shallow lessons from the last few years. It is one thing to acknowledge that “Defund the Police” is political kryptonite and nudge public safety spending back up. It is another to face up to the grave problems facing your city.

Voters are watching closely as the likes of Breed, or whoever is chosen to replace Garcetti, try to clean things up. A nod to the centre might be enough to spare short-term political disaster. But it will likely take more than that to actually solve the problems that have voters so frustrated.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

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But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

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When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

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But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

So when Townsend, who has been outspoken in her not unusual opinion that “women are adult human females”, was elected into the role in May, few were surprised. A few months later, she became the first PCC to give an interview denouncing Stonewall’s influence on policing policies.

But while her constituents greeted her comments with admiration, the reception from other quarters was hostile: she has faced calls for her resignation, an inquiry by Surrey Police and Crime Panel (PCP) and a slew of anonymous threats to her life. After receiving over forty formal complaints, in October Surrey PCP finally cleared Townsend of “any breach of public conduct”.

Now, four months on, she’s set to be dragged through the process again — this time at the behest of a fellow Conservative: Crispin Blunt MP.

Blunt, who is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ rights, is one of a small number of politicians within the Conservative Party who fervently supports Stonewall and their stance on gender self-identification: he believes that it is discriminatory to exclude those who are male but identify as trans from women’s services and spaces. His constituency, Reigate, sits within Townsend’s jurisdiction as PCC.

Townsend sighs when I ask her about her latest battle: “I know I’ve done nothing wrong. But it’s the process itself which feels like the punishment — it’s exhausting.

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“Crispin called me after I first went public with my views on Stonewall. He put his case and I listened. I thought we’d agreed to disagree and was content to move on. Then I retweeted something by JK Rowling before Christmas and he called me again.”

The post in question was neither incendiary nor ill-informed: all Rowling did was highlight the absurdity of a policy introduced by the Scottish police which allows male rapists to self-identify as women. To Rowling’s tweet she added her own words: “It’s not a ‘niche’ issue, it’s not hysterical for women to be taking to the streets about it. We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women, or from those who enable them.”

Blunt clearly disagreed. “He called again and effectively told me to stop speaking out. I explained that I wasn’t prepared to do that. I reminded him that I have a duty to defend women’s right to access single-sex refuges, hospital wards and prisons — not just because it matters to me, but because it matters to many of the people I represent.

“He responded with something that sounded like a threat. He said something along the lines of: ‘well, in that case I’m sorry for what I’m about to do’. And then the call was ended.”

Townsend is used to weathering the slings and arrows of politics, but nonetheless, Blunt’s comment left her unnerved. “More than anything, I felt sad because, as a young woman, I used to work for Crispin in Parliament. We’ve known each other for a very long time. When I stood for election as PCC, he was incredibly supportive and there are definitely areas where Crispin and I have shared goals.”

A week after the ominous phone call, Townsend was informed that Blunt had submitted a complaint about her tweet to the PCP. In a lengthy formal letter, Blunt complained bitterly that his attempts to “counsel” Townsend had been rebuffed and that “she remains absolutely determined to take part in this most contentious of public debates”. Blunt argued that Townsend’s “messaging propagates dangerous myths that trans women represent a physical threat to cisgender [non transgender] women”.

Echoing criticism levied at Townsend by Pride in Surrey, he added that by expressing her opinions on the topic, “Lisa Townsend is in breach of her personal obligations under public sector equality duty” and that “tweets like these are an abuse of her position as an elected official whose duty is to oversee the police service under the law”.

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Townsend, who has two law degrees, refutes the allegation that by expressing her opinion she is in breach of her legal duties. “If people disagree with me and want to stand against me that’s fine — that’s democracy. But I am tired of being told not to talk about this because it is really important. For Crispin this is clearly just a trans issue. For me, it is a women’s safety issue.

“At present, we’ve got a situation where, thanks to the lobbying of Stonewall, anyone who decides they identify as a woman must be allowed into female spaces. I cannot see anything more misogynistic than a policy that insists that the feelings of a male legally, morally, ethically trump the rights and safety of women and children.

“I absolutely support the right of trans people to live in the way that makes them feel comfortable; to dress, live and love as they want. But everybody’s needs and feelings deserve to be considered. It is wrong to prioritise one group above another. As an elected official it is my duty to speak up for those who Stonewall and their supporters too readily forget.”

What do those “forgotten” constituents make of her campaign? Well, behind her desk is a noticeboard with scores of thank you cards pinned to it; when her staff logged correspondence in the weeks following the interview, they found that 90% were supportive. “I was overwhelmed by support, and was sent cards, chocolates and even a bouquet in the colours of the suffragettes; people were so grateful that I’d used my position to amplify their concerns.”

Likewise, many within the Conservative Party have applauded Townsend. Nearby Guildford MP Angela Richardson thanked Townsend and urged Surrey Constabulary to record offences by sex rather gender identity (in this she is supported by Home Secretary Priti Patel). Townsend also has the backing of other PCCs, including chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) Marc Jones.

Throughout the Tories more broadly, Townsend believes “the overwhelming majority of grassroots members and elected politicians recognise that women’s safety is compromised by gender self-identification”.

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Yet it was the support of the heads of domestic abuse refuges and women’s organisations in Surrey, women who had previously kept quiet on the issue, that most inspired Townsend. “I read every single card I received. Some of those who wrote to me were women who had needed the support of refuges and rape crisis centres. Others were desperate parents, worried that their children were being forced to use mixed sex facilities in schools which had been advised by Stonewall. They didn’t feel able to share their views openly due to the potentially career-ending accusations of transphobia.

“So many women who’ve got in touch have told me they’re ‘politically homeless’, that they’d probably never vote Tory but were fed-up by the failure of other parties to acknowledge their concerns.”

Despite Blunt’s attempts to censure her, Townsend maintains that the Tory party is a broad church where debate is actively encouraged. As such, she says she feels “frustrated” by attempts by a minority within her own party to shut down debate, and that this is “both un-Conservative and undemocratic”.

She adds: “It just wouldn’t occur to me to complain about another person, let alone another elected conservative politician, because they’d said something with which I’d disagreed. And it’s telling that more widely, nearly all of those who’ve told me to stop talking about this, or who have complained, are men. This issue has really brought home to me just how many men feel threatened by women with opinions.”

And it’s an issue that isn’t going disappear soon — not least within a Conservative Party that could soon find itself in the throes of a leadership election. The sexual politics of transgenderism span far beyond the borders of Surrey, and Townsend is confident that future politicians will be asked for their views on sex-based rights. “It’s an issue every politician has been contacted about,” she says, “and I’m afraid anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“At some point, whether it’s weeks, months or years, the Conservative Party will select a new leader. As a member of the Conservative Party, I will have a vote. And I can tell you now, I will be looking very closely at the candidates who put themselves forward. I will want to know what their view is on single-sex spaces and how they define ‘woman’. And I will vote accordingly.”

Life in Calais is an endless cycle of displacement, followed by disappointment. I arrived here in July 2016. I didn’t have much choice: back in Afghanistan, the insurgent Taliban had put out a warrant for my capture, incensed that I had supported the US military. So I left my family and friends. I fled.

Shortly before I arrived, the notorious ‘Jungle’ had been evacuated following clashes with riot police: thousands of displaced migrants were displaced once again. They have been trying to find shelter in several places in and around the city ever since.

Often they seek refuge in abandoned barracks or wooded areas, finding shelter in makeshift tents covered with tarpaulins. There isn’t much point in building anything sturdier, since the police launch eviction raids every 48 hours. The camps aren’t hard to find: they constantly smell of burning wood, mixed with the odour of waste that the local authorities refuse to collect. When the evictions take place, people do not always have time to collect their personal belongings, leaving the ground littered with blankets, wet clothes, and children’s toys.

Following several large-scale evictions in the past year, the authorities have destroyed the bushes and forests where the displaced were sheltering. Huddled people have been replaced by fences, concrete walls, and surveillance cameras that carry a simple message: you must not return. Much of Calais is like a war zone, with people surviving under the fear of the police, the evictions, and the violence that can arise between the different communities. It is difficult to access food, water, and medical services. And then winter sets in; every day, rain and wind flood and destroy makeshift shelters and lives.

Most of the people waiting here have fled countries scarred by war. Among the 1,500 people here are Afghans, Sudanese, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kuwaitis. Most of them are single men, but there are also families with children and single women. All of them see at the 30km expanse that separates Calais from England as a source of hope.

They all have different reasons for wanting to get across. Some have family waiting over there; some are left with little choice by the Dublin Regulation system, which could send them back the way they came. Given that the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, the beaches of Kent seem an enticing prospect.

For those wary of crossing in the winter months, there are some accommodation options in Calais — the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES) are partly financed by the British authorities. But they are not particularly suitable for those people who only intend to pass through. They are in towns far from Calais without public transport — not ideal if you want to try a boat-crossing and need to be available immediately if the weather is good.

When I arrived in Calais, I didn’t know where I wanted to go: perhaps to the UK, or even Germany. The decision was made for me. Within a few months, I met an Afghan friend in exile who invited me to stay with him in his flat in Toulouse, while a friend of a friend helped me negotiate the asylum process and secure accommodation in Paris. Within two years, I had refugee status, and frequently returned to Calais to document the migrant crisis with my camera.

Every visit is more difficult; every story is more haunting. Since September last year, the prefecture has issued more than a dozen decrees to prevent organisations not mandated by the state from distributing water and food in the Calais town centre. When, last October, a hundred volunteers tried to prevent an eviction from a camp in Calais in a peaceful manner, the police responded with tear gas.

But it’s not just the police who have created this tragedy. The main funder of the aid providers in Calais, Choose Love, has actually hindered their work in recent months. In May, it forbade the NGOs it funds from distributing leaflets that provide basic “safety at sea” lifesaving information. Organisations were told they had to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” promising not to “carry out activities which risk breaching [UK immigration] law” — or risk having their funding pulled. Last month, Choose Love announced its withdrawal from Northern France, presumably under pressure from the Home Office.

Choose love, they say, as long as you’re not in Calais.

The tragedy continues to unfurl in Calais. Without support from the French Government or British NGOs, the situation has become increasingly desperate. Although the Franco-British border has always been deadly — at least 336 deaths since 1999 — the last few months have been particularly grim. On 24 November, 27 displaced people, including children, drowned while trying to cross the Channel.

The week before, I had met several shipwrecked victims in Grande-Synthe, a town about 20km from Calais. Kazhall Ahmad was from Iraqi Kurdistan and was alone with her three children. She was exhausted; the police had evicted their camp that morning without allowing them to collect their belongings, and she had spent the past month desperately searching for water for her children. Despite their grim situation, the children were hopeful for their lives in England, dreaming of becoming barbers or art teachers. Whether they get there is a different question.

The shocking drowning in November of so many — the worst the Channel has seen since records began in 2014 — turned the spotlight back on Calais. It was the first time I had seen so many journalists in the area. The displaced people I spoke to took heart from this, hopeful that the media attention and the shock it has caused among politicians could make things better.

But if the past years have taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to meaningful action, don’t hold your breath. Over the past month, both French and British politicians have talked up the existence of legal routes and opportunities for visas. But this is nothing more than a distraction. Freedom of movement is a right for Western white people, not for those who are displaced like me.

On both sides of the Channel, governments accuse smugglers of being entirely to blame for the deaths of innocent people. In truth, it’s mostly the lack of legal and safe access routes to the United Kingdom that contributes to the development of these smuggling networks. The smugglers are a key part of the problem: they use people’s distress to make money; they put people in danger by overloading the boats; they lie to people about the crossing being safe; and when migrants refuse to take the boat, they are threatened and abused.

Such facts are inconvenient, though. It’s far easier for the French government to invest thousands upon thousands of euros strengthening border control systems and deploying a Frontex aircraft over the Channel. This militarisation of the border serves no purpose. It will not deter people from trying to cross. They have no other choice; they will continue to pass, but in a more dangerous and clandestine way.

And the smugglers will win, those who are displaced will lose, and the political class will look the other way.