JULY 7 -2006-
WHERE HAVE THE POLICE
GONE-DO THEY KNOW SOMETHING WE DO NOT KNOW?
*
A YEAR AGO, Britain’s
streets were swarming with POLICE. The great mystery of live is:
WHERE ARE THEY TODAY?
by
TOM UTLEY
*
Daily Mail
Friday, July7- 2006
I HAVE two vivid memories of
the aftermath of the London bombings, a year ago to day. One is the astonishing emptiness of the
Tube. For at least a week after the attacks, I often had an entire carriage to
myself, where before I had been squashed in like a pressed ham.
As the days passed, of
course, my fellow Londoners woke up to the fact that life had to go on - and
that the risk of being slaughtered on the Tube was only a little greater than
he chance of winning the Lottery jackpot. After a fortnight, my carriage was as
packed and sweaty as before.
But my other memory, and the
one that I want to write about is of a Capital absolutely swarming with
POLICE. I was amazed. Where had they
all sprung from?
Until July 7 last year I had
lived in South London suburb for nearly 20 years and I swear to you I had never
once-not once seen or heard a POLICEMAN walking up my street. Certainly, I had
seen dozens of officers swooshing up in their cars, usually a day or two after
a
BURGLARY or MUGGING
-they had come to
investigate.
BUT NO COPPERS ON FOOT.
NONE AT ALL.
That was before July 7.
A couple of days after the
atrocities, however, there were two police officers trudging up and down the
platforms of my local station, West Norwood. It was the same at every stop on
my way to work:
Tulse Hill, Herne Hill, Peckham Rye…oh, never mind.
Frightening
London Bridge, my terminus,
was positively heaving with officers-many of them wearing body armour and
carrying sub-machine guns. I will not pretend that their presence comforted me.
Armed police always look very
FOREIGN and FRIGHTENING to
ME.
But the sheer numbers of
them did make me think what an awful lot of
POLICE OFFCERS
-
there
are in the CAPITAL .
-
And
what on Earth do they do for the rest of the time when there isn’t a NATIONAL
EMERGENCY
-
-to
cope with?
I ate to sound like an old
bore, but I spent much of my childhood in a Berkshire village, now a small
town, where every single one of us knew the
LOCAL BOBBY
-and he knew
ALL OF US.
He was called PC Gutteridge,
and to us children he was both an authority figure and a bit of a joke.
He was a joke only because
all the young of Kintbury found his name terribly funny. Don’t ask me why.
Children are very cruel
-
and
I apologise immediately to any readers called Gutteridge, which I now realise
is a perfectly sensible name. But I remember collapsing in fits and giggles
every time I said to him:
-
‘Good
morning Mr Gutteridge.’
He would look at me
perplexedly and answer:
‘Good morning Tommy.’
(All right. In those days I was Tommy. Today I am strictly Tom)
I don’t know what Mr Gutteridge’s hours of work were, but he
always seemed to be around, from early morning to late at night. I can remember the tick of his bicycle
wheels, and the clump of his boots, lulling me to sleep at night
You didn’t have to look out of the window to know who it
was, pushing his bike up Kintbury High Street. There is no footfall in the
world that sounds quite like a
BOBBY ON THE BEAT.
If ever a crime was
committed in Kintbury - and in my idyllic childhood that was seldom- Mr
Gutteridge would know immediately who was guilty. Sometimes a cuff round the
ear would suffice. On rare occasions, there would be an arrest and a summons to
the
Magistrates’ Court in
Newbury.
WHY CAN’T WE HAVE POLICING
LIKE THAT ANY MORE?
I felt lie screaming with
frustration this week, when I read the story of
Detective Superintendent
John Fox
-
He
was the child protection officer, with an impeccable record, who had the
courage to confront a bunch of young hooligans who had thrown a stick at his
car. He seized one of them by the
collar - and, for his pains, he was arrested and made to wait 14 months for a
two-day trial, before JUSTICE was finally DONE and he was ACQUITED.
*
Sudden
But it is not only his
fatuous political correctness, which inhibits proper policing. Nor is it that
the POLICE are short of MANPOWER -
As witness the sudden
appearance of thousands of officers in Central London a year ago this week.
I looked up the figure only
yesterday, and the Metropolitan Police has no fewer than 31,000 on its payroll.
SO WHERE ARE THEY ALL?
They appeared in their
thousands after JULY 7
-But less than three weeks
later, they had melted away.
I know how to find a traffic
warden, in twenty seconds flat. All I have to do is dash into a dry-cleaner to
pick up my suit and a half-a-dozen of them are swarming all over my car.
BUT A POLICEMAN WHEN YOU
NEED HIM?
[The odds are greater than
winning a LOTTERY unless you use what they call inappropriate language and a
swarm of squad cars will take YOU -STRAIGHT to JAIL.]
The trouble is that so many
of them are sitting in patrol cars or helicopters, or staring at CCTV screens
or filling in forms at the POLICE STATION
-What is WRONG is THAT so
very FEW of THEM are on the BEAT.
In my time as a journalist,
I have endured more than 50 Party Conferences-
Conservative, Labour,
Liberal, Lib-Dem.
At every single one of them,
I have heard speakers-
Either on the platform or
the Conference fringe-demanding more
BOBBIES-ON-THE-BEAT.
Every speaker who uttered
those words has received a rapturous round of applause.
Well, it’s blindingly obvious, isn’t it?
You don’t have to be a
genius to work out that the very best way to tackle CRIME
-is to have a visible
[unshackled]
POLICE PRESENCE
-on every STREET in the LAND
AND YET NOTHING IS EVER
DONE.
*
Promise
When my children are mugged,
which has happened four times in the past five years, it is
impossible to raise the faintest spark of interest from the
POLICE.
Occasionally, when I make a
fuss, they turn up days later to take a Statement -
But only for the CRIME
STATISTICS, NOT because they plan to INVESTIGATE.
These things happen dozen of
times a day n CENTRAL LONDON.
-after all.
But I am not entirely
without HOPE.
As I have mentioned before,
I am a tribal Tory, and I am forever scratching around FOR SOMETHING to
ADMIRE about DAVID CAMERON.
He has let me down on
GRAMMER SCHOOLS
TAXATION
And the
PUBLIC SECTOR.
HE HAS LET ME DOWN
On his promise
to pull
Conservative EURO-MPs
OUT OF THE
European People’s Party.
An umbrella group of
Federalist Centre-Right
Parties
in
BRUSSELS
-the one PLEDGE that he had
it in his POWER to HONOUR’
-
As
an
-
OPPOSITION leader. [?]
But there is a SIMPLE idea
now bobbing around in the TORY think-tanks, which I earnestly hope will find
its way into Mr Cameron’s
MANIFESTO.
It comes from
AMERICA
-but despite that, it may
hold the key to beating CRIME over HERE.
The IDEA is that POLICE
CHIEFS, or SHERIFFS, should be accountable to
LOCAL VOTERS.
And
NOT
-to that farcical
organisation, the
HOME OFFICE
[Its name alone shows what
an inappropriate word to describe an organisation that has truly made our once
proud boast that
‘An Englishman’s Home is his Castle’
-
a
term which has been turned on its head with every subject-citizen doing their
darnest to turn his
-
HOME
into a CASTLE. ]
*
To return:
If that [simple idea]
happens, then the next time somebody breaks a
PROMISE
-to put more
BOBBIES on the BEAT
-we can just sack him- and
elect somebody else who will actually do it
I don’t pretend that this
will be the answer to
TERRORISM
I simply don’t understand
the workings of the ISLAMIC fundamentalist mind.
But I do know that every
household in the land would be happier and safer for he steady
CLUMP! - CLUMP! -CLUMP!
Of
MR Gutteridge’s
-BOOTS IN THE NIGHT.
* * *
[Before we leave this
sensible and proved solution to our problem to use a milder word for our
broken- down
Law and Order
-we wish to let you know
that the following essay was written a few days previously to outline the great
difficulties to which have been created in
BLAIRDOM
by
CONTROL.
As we have stated below
Blair and his cronies want everything controlled from
No 10
-as his almost completed
task of turning
OUR COUNTRY
-into a Collective in order
to fit in with his Continental Image.
He would hate to think that
local people should have the right to decide their needs and answers. What
would it lead too -the people might start to question why we are in a despotic
unaccountable POLICE
STATE
The European Union
-whose citizens Not as with
our subject -citizens - want everything decided for them and what would happen
if we had
BOBBIES on the BEAT
-throughout the land
-might this not lead to a
BAND of BROTHERS
-of FREE individuals as a
barrier to any further encroachments from
Authoritarian
BIG BROTHER.
in
BRUSSELS.
NO! - the Pro-European faction
in ALL the parties in Westminster would dread the effect of allowing LOCAL
people to decide their FUTURE.
* * *
[Font altered -bolding &
underlining used-comments in brackets]
JULY/6