In far too many countries, the word ‘police’ is not a reassuring one.
Even in civilised European nations the police are regarded by many law-abiding citizens with dislike and mistrust. In less happy lands, corruption and brutality are horrifyingly normal among police officers.
However, the police of this country have been different from the start because Britain was slow to allow the creation of a police force at all.
Many in Parliament had looked across the Channel and saw gendarmes as an army of oppressors, a force to impose the will of the State. It was only the brilliance of Sir Robert Peel which persuaded citizens to change their minds.
He devised a wholly new sort of police. They were to be unarmed and unassuming, their uniforms non-militaristic. Their job was to prevent crime and disorder.
Their methods were persuasion and the cultivation of public confidence, so that an alliance formed between the public and their police force.
Peel’s 1829 principles were codified by Charles Reith in his 1948 history of our police. They advise officers ‘to recognise always that the power to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour’.
They urge them ‘to maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public the police’.
Helen Jones (pictured) called for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday
Helen Jones discovered officers had been ringing her doorbell after she criticised local councillors – the moment was captured in doorcam footage on February 18
For, as Peel pointed out, the police are only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which every citizen should perform when he or she can.
A large part of these rules can be summed up by saying the police are paid to serve us, not to boss us about.
Yet today there are far too many instances of police nationwide departing from these principles. For example, citizens who might struggle to get police attention for a crime who then find officers on their doorstep because of something they have said on social media.
And in the extraordinary case which The Mail on Sunday reports today, a Manchester woman called Helen Jones discovered officers had been ringing her doorbell after she criticised local councillors for their involvement in the disreputable, offensive WhatsApp group this newspaper disclosed two weeks ago.
The odious exchanges between some members of this group caused the sacking of Labour MP Andrew Gwynne from his ministerial post. A second Labour MP, Oliver Ryan, was suspended.
It is surely perfectly legitimate for Ms Jones, who lives in the area represented politically by such people, to be critical of them within the usual rules against defamation (which is a civil matter).
It would be interesting to ask locals how swiftly the same police have responded to any calls for help against burglary and anti-social behaviour.
In such egregious but increasingly common cases, police have forgotten their job and invented new tasks which the public rightly suspect of being mistaken and oppressive.
The time may have come for a new Royal Commission on the police, the first since 1962, so they can be guided back to the path that Robert Peel wisely set for them.
