This, the Government claims, offers bespoke protection for individuals while mitigating the risks presented by prison early-release schemes. Theoretically, offenders breaching the zones might face being returned to prison, giving peace of mind to victims of stalking, domestic violence and sexual offenses. It was reported on Sunday that restriction zones will start to appear in October.

Victims groups have welcomed the initiative. A spokeswoman for the Joanna Simpson Foundation, a domestic violence charity, declared the rollout of the zones “a much-needed change that has long been called for and is a powerful step forward”. Victims have for years complained that knowing abusers are free to roam their communities offers a constant source of pain and distress. I wonder, though, whether they will find themselves disappointed with the policy in practice; theoretical models of offender-control crack like eggs when dropped onto the pavement of reality. Incentives to not reoffend tend not to take into account many offenders’ irrational behavior, occasionally caused by substance abuse or mental health issues.

The Zones raise further questions too, about penal reform, justice and civil liberties — are our criminal justice elites trying to be too clever by half? Hunkered down in their brutalist eyrie, did Ministry of Justice mandarins imagine they’d square the circle of cost-cutting and placating the powerful penal reform lobby, which is generally skeptical about the concept of imprisonment? Now, rather than being locked up, violent offenders can instead be rehabilitated in communities, inside virtual-reality prisons. For now, the Zones are aimed at violent offenders, but what — or who — comes next? Would this model of control be considered for other types of offending, such as burglary or robbery too? Will the restriction zone model offer comfort to victims, or are they a window into a future of soft totalitarianism? And, crucially, will they ever really protect the public from violent criminals?

Towards the end of my police career, I worked for the UK Protected Persons Service (UKPPS). My duties involved what’s known as “witness protection”: that is, monitoring offenders who posed potential risks to vulnerable witnesses. As such, I often worked with the police teams responsible for delivering Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements [MAPPA] — the public protection world is laden with acronyms. These were locally-based officers responsible for the management of high-risk offenders. Their remit included yet another public protection acronym, MOSOVO, or “management of sexual or violent offenders”. None of these acronyms, however, are adequate in describing modern offender management in practice. In my experience, put-upon police and probation officers operate a system held together with optimism and duct-tape. Monitoring offenders is one thing — intercepting and managing them face-to-face is another.

In my experience, MAPPA fails to mitigate the underlying problem with offender management: the progressive-coded rehabilitative bias that affects criminal justice in general, and probation specifically. As the former police officer-turned-policy analyst Rory Geoghegan wrote: “The ideology centers the offender as a vulnerable individual with ‘criminogenic needs’ which the state must understand and address.”

This means that while a violent but newly-released rapist might be an ongoing threat to women and girls, he’s still an individual with “agency” and rights. How dare the authorities harass him? Which is what offender management is, really. Gently intrusive harassment, with a smile and a cup of tea. As ever, the carrots and sticks used by the police to protect the public are both in short supply. Sticks are surrendered to an administrative state in thrall to progressive dogma, carrots to accountants. Most police officers would agree that a sex offender held in a secure environment, with opportunities for rehabilitation, is more likely to protect victims than a GPS tag and harsh words. We used to refer to such places as prisons — hardly an appropriate word for the three-kilometer radius of an offender’s home address. Except the prisons have suffered the same death-by-parsimony as the rest of the criminal justice system. As, indeed, is the ever-struggling probation service.

The restriction zone project will rely on probation officers working with victims of crime to create bespoke safety plans, identifying where an offender might not be allowed to travel without breaching his or her virtual incarceration. The problem with this, of course, is the probation service’s questionable performance, not to mention the problematic relationship the private sector has enjoyed with monitoring prisoners at all. Scandals have concerned equipment and administrative failures, causing dangerous safety gaps for police and probation officers.

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Again we can discern the spirit of optimism and duct-tape lingers. One can imagine an operations room in a busy urban area, multiple lights bleeping on a map as dozens of “supervised” offenders probe the perimeters of their virtual cages. Who will assess risk? Send patrols to intercept rogue offenders? Will the police, still trying to extricate themselves from the burden of acting as mental health auxiliaries, find new work as ersatz prison warders too? Other areas of policing offer clues to the resource demands around monitoring or protecting individuals. A police close protection team might demand between six-to-eight officers to protect their “principal” for a 24-hour period. Three 10-strong mobile surveillance teams are necessary to covertly report on a human suspect’s movements over a similar period. Perhaps, one day, AI-controlled robots will patrol the Government’s invisible Temu gulags, but until then?

The reality of the restriction zone project, one unmentioned in any Ministry of Justice press release, is this: managing violent offenders in the community is, at best, a game of whack-a-mole. I once spoke with a detective on an east London borough where a team of four managed around 600 high-risk registered sex offenders. And London has 32 boroughs. Furthermore, officers working in offender management have a limited toolbox at their disposal. The hammers and nails involve sanctions when an offender breaches their license, meaning they might be returned to that same prison system that is so keen to release prisoners.

The rest of the time? The police compile reports on how offenders engage with the MAPPA regime. Their demeanor. Their life circumstances. Are they complying with probation? Have they tried to contact any victims? This is where struggling police forces interface with equally struggling probation services. Any system which creates more tagged offenders limited to strictly-defined geographical zones will add an extra burden to a system — the BBC reported that 32% of probation appointments with high-risk sex offenders, between 2023 and 2025, were missed due to workload issues. The success of the restriction zone project will come down to whether it can reduce in reoffending rates and prison returns. Sadly, the authorities have a poor record of anticipating, deterring and managing known risks. The cases of human time-bombs like Axel Rudakubana and Valdo Calocane show how knowing someone is dangerous is a completely different proposition from protecting the public from them. The themes, for Britain’s criminal-justice elites, are deeply uncomfortable: mental health, resources, human rights and race. Then there are questions of competence: why are police forces increasingly incapable of public protection?

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As a former policeman, I’m used to the consequences of second-order effects. No doubt this project will create new challenges for the officers charged with protecting us from predators such as the serial sex offender Simon Levy or the murderer Jordan McSweeney, both men who were known to be highly likely to reoffend. Sadly, the Ministry of Justice “proof of concept” turns on the lives of the innocent. Statistics suggest that in 2024, one murder a week was committed by offenders on probation. Then, when the optimism dies and the duct-tape breaks, those blamed for systems failure will be ordinary police and probation officers, their seniors lawyering-up for the inevitable public inquiries.

Instead, we have a cash-strapped civil service, one obliged to pay lip service to those theories of “criminogenic needs.” The Ministry of Justice have worked with the paltry resources at their disposal to offer geographic detention, monitored by outsourced technology and enforced by a shoestring police service. Meanwhile, policymakers and mandarins continue with the disestablishment of traditional criminal sanctions. To their minds, rapists and murderers can be managed via the penal equivalent of “20-minute neighborhoods” or planned parking zones. Turning offender management into a technical adjunct to town and country planning might sound novel, but I doubt it will work in practice.

What about the Home Office’s latest wheeze, offering asylum-seekers from developing countries pamphlets politely asking them not to commit sexual offenses? Perhaps that’s another window into our near-future of anarcho-tyranny, one where murderers overstepping invisible restriction zones receive a drone-delivered missive reminding them — gently ± not to rape or murder. Alternatively, of course, we could simply build better prisons, until the innate goodness of the human spirit so beloved of penal reformers finally manifests itself. Until that rapture, though, will they spare a thought for the rest of us?

The statement was laced with officialese: and Ogilvie is reportedly from Rathcoole, a predominantly Loyalist housing estate north of Belfast. Was the suspiciously polished family statement, many wondered, issued by the Government on the family’s behalf? And if so, why? Social media, unsurprisingly, decided “the State” dictated the Ogilvies’ response. Victims of controversial killings involving ethnic minorities, it was alleged, are manipulated by government spinners. And so the scene was set, digital barricades erected, culture warriors firing barbs across no-man’s-land. It’s hardly the favored territory of  officialdom, with police comms teams too often flailing in the septic tank of 24/7 social media. 

What, though, is the truth? Are families pressurized to give statements sympathetic to official narratives? How seriously does the Government take threats concerning racial tension? And, as Britain enters another potential summer of unrest, are police forces prepared?

First, the specifics of the family statement. Given the severity of Ogilvie’s injuries, a police family liaison officer — or FLO — would be assigned to support them throughout the investigation. Police FLOs are widely considered to be a success story, offering support to victims during distressing circumstances. Nonetheless, they are also detectives with a hotline to the Senior Investigating Officer. Furthermore, victims’ families do receive advice on issuing statements. Statements might be discussed over cups of tea, FLOs explaining how they might impact future criminal proceedings. All parties are likely to have been briefed by force comms officers, keen to dampen down contentious issues. Note how, for example, Henry Nowak’s father gave a full statement — one criticizing police actions around his son’s death — only after Vickrum Digwa’s trial. 

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It seems likely, then, that the Ogilvies’ statement would have been “managed” via the FLO and the wider PSNI. This is standard practice. Suggestions the security services might involve themselves in such matters, in my experience, are wide of the mark. Given the uniquely fraught circumstances Northern Irish officers operate under, not to mention the forthcoming marching season, any public statement would attract the interest of a three-ring circus of community and political groups. Added to this is the Sinn Féin majority administration’s pro-immigration policies, making the party vulnerable to allegations of being “soft” on issues of race. This is why John Boutcher, the (English) PSNI chief constable, tiptoes daily across a minefield of political sensitivities. This isn’t to say there wasn’t some authenticity to the Ogilvies’ statement, nor that the family’s contribution wasn’t heartfelt, but their words seem almost certain to have been polished.

Is the Ogilvie case, then, an example of comms management particular to post-Troubles Belfast? Or does the British government routinely control public sentiment in cases involving potential disorder? My experience working in counterterrorism suggests it does, albeit subtly, even if things have invariably evolved. Techniques pioneered to prevent post-terror attack riots are deployed against vaccine-skeptics and those on the “radical Right.” The Government clearly is spooked: only this week, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, declared the Government would urgently seek to update the Online Safety Act so that it requires services “to take quicker action to remove illegal content circulating during times of crisis.”

Even during my police service, I witnessed how genuinely petrified senior police officers and civil servants are of wide-scale public disorder. The 2001 Oldham riots, involving three nights of racially motivated violence, focused their minds. The context, by 9/11 that September, was that of Muslim communities targeted by the far-Right after any terrorist incident. During the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, working in counterterrorism intelligence, I saw police commanders repeatedly ask the same question: how do we stop Muslim communities from going up in flames? How do we stop another Oldham? Liberal-minded officers, such as Brian Paddick, were accused of cravenness. Others sounded like colonial governors, fretting over restless natives. That was then. Now, we have pro-Gaza independent MPs exercising de facto control over police operations.

Central government is painfully aware of these problems. The United Kingdom, were it a car, would be a Cold War-era Trabant, its engine spluttering as an era draws inexorably to a close. This isn’t to say the powers-that-be haven’t mounted a spirited defense, updating the creaking two-stroke engine with a digital-management system. Post 7/7, the Government established the Research, Information and Communications unit, known as RICU. A relatively small unit, independent of the security services, RICU works with local authorities and media contractors to create and disseminate content. To counter Islamist narratives, RICU’s communications aim to “effect behavioral and attitudinal change.” These techniques are also employed elsewhere, as was evident during the Covid pandemic and in the aftermath of last summer’s anti-immigration protests. Now, though, public information and sentiment strategies intended to combat Islamist terrorism have been targeted at those threatening official narratives around “diversity” and “community cohesion”. During the same protests, the “National Security and Online Information Team”, a body within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, asked online platforms to moderate content critical of government narratives. 

Then, after the post-Southport riots, came the Home Office’s awful “rapid analytical sprint” report. Only 18 months old, the “sprint” has aged like milk. It posited a new offense of communications that inflict “psychological harm”, demonstrating Labour’s ongoing obsession with controlling language. It urged the police to increase their use of since-abandoned Non-Crime Hate Incidents. Perhaps most telling of all, though, is RICU’s use of “controlled spontaneity” after terrorist incidents — the kind of tactics the Home Office are likely to use in order to counter anti-immigration sentiment. In that vein, a veteran contingency planner told Middle East Eye that “this job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there? A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.” Controlled spontaneity involves bussing in peace-preaching imams. Putting up posters in railway stations. Facilitating vigils. The panoply of “Don’t look back in anger” theatre, inspired by the public’s (genuine) response to the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Admittedly, controlled spontaneity sounds a tall order in a city like Belfast, yet the mindset remains similar. Seize the initiative. Frame narratives. Control. But official narratives have become suspect, especially in racially sensitive cases. For the Government, the potential for widespread disorder explains the urgency of its internet-control agenda. Why? The alternative is unthinkable. Due to austerity, UK police forces are short of personnel, training, and equipment, with the consequence that their ability to keep order has been seriously diminished. For example, after the Stephen Ogilvie stabbing, the PSNI was forced to fly in 200 extra officers from the mainland to support its operations. At the recent pro-Palestine and Right-wing “Unite the Kingdom” demonstrations in London, the Metropolitan Police fielded 4,000 officers, but only with reinforcements from as far afield as Wales. Luckily for the Met, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. 

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This, ultimately, is why the Government devotes so much of its political bandwidth to messaging, communications and sentiment management: its capability to police public disorder has atrophied. An officer with a Home Counties force recently told me how senior officers are currently “wargaming” their response to any repeat of Southport-style unrest this summer. “We aren’t the Met, we don’t have dedicated public order officers,” he said. “We’ll be relying on PCs taken from other duties, guys with only basic shield training.” And the mood music in police HQ command floors? “Grim. They’ve run out of money. They simply don’t have enough people available.” His message was clear: if England “kicks off”, it’s every force for itself. As they head off on holiday this summer, this will prey on the minds of chief officers and Home Office mandarins. All this after the performance of Hampshire police during bushfire demonstrations in Southampton was mixed. 

The UK’s police “mutual aid” arrangements, as seen at the London demonstrations earlier this year, assume supporting one or two major incidents. Multiple outbreaks of serious public disorder would almost certainly collapse the system. “Basically,” said the officer, less prosaically, “we’d be fucked.” And what, I asked, of the last resort? Calling in the army? He laughed. “They haven’t got enough people either, have they?”

This, in the end, clarifies the relative importance of subtler measures. British governments pride themselves on their ability to negotiate. To parley their way out of problems, while assuming the UK remains a high-trust society. A society with a functioning social contract, the glue keeping the Trabant of state legitimacy on the road. This is why, when cuts are required, legislators axe the state’s more coercive arms — the military and policing. 

Yet now that public trust has eroded, along with the social contract, legitimacy is surely next. The Government, though, will continue with its displacement activity, fretting over internet misinformation and polishing statements made by grieving families. A frontline consisting of internet monitors and family liaison officers, armies of “performative spontaneity” coordinators urging us not to “look back in anger”.

The Trabant that is the UK state trundles along, held together with little more than duct-tape and good intentions. Such apathy typifies the mindsets of senior police and civil servants, until the predictable happens. With luck, next time, disorder will again be contained. Reviews will be commissioned and public inquiries launched. Lessons will, allegedly, be learned. And, somewhere, another violent man will cross a border unchallenged. Then another statement will be burnished, until the Trabant’s engine finally sputters and dies for good. 

Now, though, detectives now face the political and procedural struggles of a high-profile criminal investigation. Hints of this came early, as Defence Secretary John Healey patrolled the Sunday morning news shows, offering lawyerly answers to questions around crime and extremism. Behind the scenes, however, the Government will be wary. The public mood is febrile, and all this before a strategy on “the way forward” is even announced. Leading the inquiry are the 5,000-strong BTP, responsible for investigating all offenses committed on Britain’s mainland railway network.

They are sometimes criticized for slow response times — other forces joke that “BTP” stands for “Be There Presently” — and this is the likeliest reason that the arresting officers came from Cambridgeshire Police. Yet BTP is genuinely stretched, a truly national force responsible for the railways from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End. Furthermore, many of its specialist resources are focused on major termini, leaving smaller stations relatively unpoliced. Even so, BTP has strengths. Its officers, for instance, are specially trained in evidence-gathering on the railways. Railway infrastructure is a surprisingly complex and occasionally dangerous environment for investigators. Evidence, for example, might end up on live railway tracks. It goes without saying, here, that closing a line to facilitate police work is far from simple, especially a major East Coast route like this one.

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BTP has concluded there is currently no evidence of terrorism. How and why? The answer lies in both the circumstances of the offense and a fast-time intelligence response, in this case aided by police Counter Terrorism Units. Presumably the suspect didn’t featured on any Security Service or criminal-intelligence databases. The suspect’s home, once identified, will have been searched, and his electronic devices checked. Officers will also have investigated his associates, vehicles, financial records and any criminal history. They will further have sought an urgent interview with the suspect himself, possibly even before the arrival of his legal representatives. We can only speculate what information police gleaned beyond “no comment”.

Does this, then, establish irrefutable evidence there was no terrorist angle to the stabbings? Not completely. All the same, I would suggest the BTP’s assessment was made in good faith. After all, someone very senior put their name to such a conclusion. And given trust in the police and government is already frayed, a bad judgment on such a serious matter would be disastrous. Given the number of scandals around governmental candor, and the Prime Minister’s dire personal polling, this investigation will only get bigger — or “grow arms and legs” as officers say.

This still leaves the thorny question of motive. Social media provides, as ever, a vortex of misinformation, speculation: and outright fantasy. Investigators, on the other hand, will focus on the facts. Once terrorism and extremism are discounted, few alternatives remain. Was this a mental health incident? Now that we know there’s only one suspect — a second man was arrested before being released without charge — that’s the most likely explanation: especially as the alleged assailant apparently ranted about the devil, and asked to be killed as the police approached. Whatever the truth, and as with all such crimes, the details offer hearty meat and drink to conspiracy theorists. To counter them, police will need to tread a fine line between offering fact-based public assurances while protecting the integrity of court proceedings.

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In all this, senior officers are crucial. Lucy D’Orsi, the BTP’s chief constable, was extremely ambitious while working at the Met. She may still covet the Commissioner’s job and will certainly understand the pressure to be seen to “do something”. This highlights another important cog in Britain’s steam-driven policing. The BTP is a “Ministry Force”: meaning it falls under the remit of the Department of Transport rather than the Home Office. What Whitehall battles will be fought as civil servants mark their turf and cover their behinds? For the general public, disasters are to be endured. For senior police officers and civil servants, disasters might be awful too, but they also provide opportunities for politicking.

Beyond the specifics of the Huntingdon case, officers and civil servants will also be conscious of the broader implications for public order. The autumn months are among the most challenging of the policing calendar, partly a function of darker evenings, but also because of public events like Bonfire Night and Remembrance Sunday. Then comes the run-up to the festive season, with its Christmas markets, concerts and parties.

All weigh heavily on the rail network, with BTP almost certainly bidding for significant support for “public reassurance” operations. Expect to see temporary knife-arches at high-profile transport hubs and known crime hotspots. Expect facial recognition teams too, as well as the now-ubiquitous armed police patrols. BTP have already trialed joint patrols with the Royal Military Police, with “Redcaps” occasionally seen patrolling Waterloo Station. We may not see troops patrolling the streets this Christmas, but in his interviews yesterday Healey was strikingly reluctant to rule out extra checks.

Whatever the efficacy of these measures, and whatever the attack’s ultimate cause, they won’t address the broader issues. Anyone can buy a ticket and hop on a train, and as Robert Jenrick famously pointed out, it’s also easy to avoid paying. Nor will tougher security fix the broader public mood. The public discourse around such incidents grows ever more bitter. Exhortations not to “look back in anger”, or publicity posters urging unity, are increasingly dismissed as something approaching Soviet propaganda. Cynicism is now commonplace; the Government’s armory of vigils and nudge units is fast running out of ammunition. Online, certainly, the message is increasingly one of: “Yes, let’s look back in anger.” Such frustration feeds resentment and disorder, creating a societal doom-loop.

In a sense, the police themselves are trapped here. Because of Huntingdon and similar outrages, officers are compelled to engage in expensive, kneejerk responses — rather than preventing crime to start with. Meanwhile, the disgruntled and disillusioned will project their grievances onto this whole awful affair, the facts secondary to fevered narratives. All this means the police will continue doing more with less, with varying degrees of success. Yes, emergency responses can be impressive, but in many ways policing is becoming like the NHS. It’s perfectly capable of getting a patient to A&E in extremis — but after triage? Like treating a chronic health condition with an endless waiting list, the morass of legislative and financial constraints on forces risks being ignored, though whether this changes during this month’s Budget will be interesting to observe.

We properly expect the police to respond promptly to violence. Yet “reassurance patrols” also divert resources from core duties and, crucially, from deterring crime in the first place. Officers become jaded and exhausted by the continued distractions from duty, and the canceled rest days. The public, for its part, has realized what’s happening too — short-termism and “sticking plaster” policing rather than meaningful strategies to tackle the root causes of violence. All the while, politicians will stick their fingers in their ears and hum, or back initiatives to sell blunt-ended kitchen knives. And so, like a stone dropped into a pool, the ramifications of the Huntingdon stabbings will make waves long after the headlines fade and the trains begin running once more.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

Behind the scenes, though, these operations are actually far closer to movie-making. The terrorists are the actors, albeit unaware of their starring roles. Like a real-life Truman Show, their performances are watched, tracked and analyzed by a small army of detectives, surveillance operatives, technical specialists and intelligence officers. Finally, the director calls “Action!” and armed officers blow doors off hinges. Surprised-looking suspects are bundled into police vans. Then, because no bombs exploded, and no civilians died, we switch off. Keep scrolling. Continue with our lives. Which is as it should be.

Over the weekend, police held seven Iranian nationals in a textbook operation. The arrests were for offenses under the Terrorism Act and the new National Security Act (2023). Though the suspects were split into two unspecified groups, reports suggest they were only “hours away” from launching an attack. The target? Sources suggest it was possibly a synagogue. Or, given Tehran’s propensity to pursue dissidents abroad, a member of the Iranian diaspora. Whatever the truth, the potential for state-sponsored terrorism presents a sophisticated challenge for Britain’s security services — especially when balanced with so many other threats, and when internal instability only continues to soar.

On and off, I worked in counterterrorism policing and counterextremism for over a decade. And as a single cog in a vast machine, I witnessed firsthand how the threat evolves, from the IRA to Al-Qaeda. I’ve also seen how our security apparatus occasionally behaves like First World War generals: fixated on fighting the last war. After all, mass casualty, cell-based Islamist terrorism differs markedly from the lone-wolves of more recent times. Then there are the loose cannons, neo-Nazis like David Copeland or internet-radicalized killers like Axel Rudakabana. The latter, especially, now consumes much of counterterrorism’s operational bandwidth. Yet CT policing is also expected to deal with them all, like a chef asked to prepare sushi one minute and a Baked Alaska the next.

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It’s no wonder, sometimes, that they hanker after signature dishes. Is the flavor of the month now state-sponsored terrorism, possibly involving the infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? If so, they may be in for a struggle, not least in the way it could herald the rise of asymmetrical warfare on Britain’s streets. Sometimes known as “grey zone” operations, it inevitably means espionage and paramilitary activities blend into policing. My very first operation was a stark reminder of how blurred things can become, as I watched paramedics working on the body of an IRA man shot dead by police.

Later, I witnessed the challenges of investigating state-sponsored criminality during the Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry. Wider political and diplomatic considerations impact on operational decision-making. Noses are tapped. Leads are declared “not in the public interest”. We can see this already, with the Foreign Office arguing the IRGC shouldn’t be proscribed as a terrorist organization (even though it unambiguously is). Our diplomats view the well-connected IRGC as an influential conduit into the Iranian regime. The politics, given Labour’s attempts to tread a fine diplomatic and political line over Gaza, are extremely sensitive for the Starmer government — a government, its critics allege, which is strategically over-reliant on Muslim votes.

To be fair, not all foreign spies possess the efficiency of Bond movie villains. As I discovered during the Litvinenko case, the Russian FSB were slapdash, operating flashily in plain sight. We hardly made it difficult for them; London in the 2000s was a sordid playground for dirty Russian money. MI5, preoccupied with mass-casualty Islamists, also took its eye off the Russian threat. Nonetheless, Litvinenko’s killers were hardly discreet, leaving traces of radioactive poison on an airliner and in a hotel room. Then there were the Russian military intelligence operatives who, as a cover story, declared an improbable interest in the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. In fact, they were trying to poison the defector Sergei Skripal, as open-source intelligence quickly proved. A recent trial of a Russian-sponsored spy ring consisting of Bulgarian agents was similarly amateurish. The hapless agents were nicknamed “Minions” by their handlers, after characters from the children’s movie Despicable Me.

Sadly for British intelligence officers, Iran poses a more substantial challenge than the GRU or FSB. The Iranians are, arguably, more disciplined and committed. There’s also a significant diaspora community in the UK. And though many British-Iranians are implacably opposed to the Mullahs, cover opportunities for agents are easier to find. The current legality of the ICRG also means regime front organizations can operate with relative impunity. No doubt the Home Office will be squaring up to ever-obdurate Foreign Office mandarins, seeking to pursue diplomacy whatever the cost.

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Then there’s the issue of motive and proportionality; the Russians, although shameless, intuit a line in the sand when murdering their own abroad. They are reckless, as they were when they released poison into the hotel where they met Alexander Litvinenko, but their targets are usually strategic. Though Putin is happy to crush potential turncoats, I suspect he wouldn’t back mass-casualty terror. The Iranians have no such qualms, considering themselves at perpetual war with the West and particularly Britain: the “Little Satan” to America’s plus-sized version. Jews are another target. Iranian-backed terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85. I therefore find myself unsurprised to learn the regime is suspected of trying something similar in the UK, with MI5 publicly warning of hostile Iranian intelligence activity in this country.

The authorities face another challenge too. Terrorism — and counterterrorism — is a destabilizing issue in our increasingly Balkanized society. Countering state-sponsored threats involves a rapidly evolving kind of hybrid conflict. It’s a shadowy, difficult and sometimes controversial arena for the police and security services to operate in. Human rights laws and “proportionality” will be tested to their limits. Mistakes, as happened at Stockwell, will inevitably happen. Politics, usually of the grubbier variety, will be engaged. And, tragically, innocents will die if terrorists succeed. As the IRA famously said of their attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life, the police have to be lucky every time. The terrorists? They only have to be lucky once.

Such terrorism, especially when linked as it is to religion, also has a knock-on effect to what we used to optimistically call “community cohesion”. The truth is that there are many in Britain who would be equivocal about an attack on the country’s Jews. Some would even support it. Chief constables, politicians and the Home Office are acutely aware how an attack might well provoke public disorder, as it did in the summer of 2024. As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum has warned: “There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or change shape in terms of what is being targeted.”

No wonder, then, that radicalization and extremism will continue to flourish on all sides. Are the police ready for these grim consequences? Of allegations of two-tier policing? As I’ve written before, if the “Prevent” program is anything to go by, I doubt it. As it is, I would suggest we’re in an early-Seventies scenario, one where the situation in Gaza replaces Vietnam in helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. Only a tiny proportion need to convert their anger to violence to prompt widespread societal disruption.

Even worse, mainstream British policing is in a sorry state. Counterterrorism is well-funded, but draws its personnel directly from existing forces. Labour’s plans to create a national counterterrorism force doesn’t change the fact it will continue to recruit from the same pool of demoralized, inexperienced and poorly-led officers. Specialist officers aside, the societal impact of terrorism — such as the public disorder, which terrifies senior police and politicians — is still dealt with by conventional police officers using conventional methods. Counterterrorism and extremism is a broad, interconnected spectrum. To continue the movie comparison I made earlier, if an operation was a Hollywood movie, the hard yards of counter-extremism intelligence are a niche BBC 4 documentary, and even the biggest studios can only film so many epics at once.

If my experience is anything to go by, anyway, there’ll be barely time for the production team to enjoy a beer before they’re summoned to work on one sequel, and then another. Each time, there’ll be new stars. New plots. New locations. The directors and producers will have unrealistic expectations and deadlines, cursing the studio’s endless and contradictory demands. Meanwhile, the production team will follow their unsuspecting stars through viewfinders or rifle sights. They’ll listen to covert signals intelligence. They’ll meet in backrooms with nervy informants. And they’ll all be thinking the same thing: will we be lucky this time, or will they?

And so the counterterrorism show will trundle on, from the CCTV trawls to the criminal trails at the Old Bailey. Yet on the streets, and on the internet, angry voices will amplify, and the causes of extremism will only persist. The overlooked police and intelligence service officers who deal with it are the runners and extras of counterterrorism. And we should wish them luck too: over the years ahead, they’re surely going to need it.

Focused on extremism and counter-terrorism (CT), the government’s plans potentially mean UK forces finally adopting a continental-style model, one encompassing tiers of municipal, regional and national units. If nothing else, that could mean centralized, government-directed police bodies. Combined with the looming return of ID cards, there are reasons to worry. He may not mean to, but there’s a real chance that Sir Keir Starmer could yet establish a de facto secret police force — with ominous consequences for everyone in Britain.

According to the National Police Chief’s Council’s official report into the future of CT policing, our current policing model will last until at least 2030. But speaking to The Guardian, an official government source stated counter-terrorism policing units would now gain independence from local forces, becoming part of a new force and sitting in a newly minted “national center for policing”.

The issues this raises, not least in terms of accountability, are stark. The UK’s counter-terrorist policing network is vast, involving everything from the surveillance of Islamists to so-called “domestic extremism” — both of the far-Right and law-breaking protest group variety. The controversial Prevent programme is also part of its remit, even as CT policing works closely with MI5. The spooks, used to running rings around the police in Whitehall, will undoubtedly have their own views on this hefty-looking competitor.

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This isn’t to say reform is necessarily a bad thing. Having worked on several high-profile terrorist investigations, I understand the value of effective CT policing. Yet in the aftermath of the riots last summer, I fear an illiberal ghost in the machine. I suspect the hastily rejected Home Office “sprint report” — dismissing discussions of two-tier policing as “far-Right talking points” — has left an impression. The report may have had a stake hammered through its heart, with Security Minister Dan Jarvis insisting it contained no “new policy”. But does its spirit live on? I think it’s possible. After all, we have a Prime Minister whose views on the subject largely seem influenced by Netflix.

Why, then, this sudden change of direction for CT policing, especially when rumours of a national CT regime have clung to New Scotland Yard for years? Think again to the aftermath of the 2024 riots. Sir Keir, shaken by his inauspicious debut, acted tough with rioters and those accused of online incitement. Intriguingly, he also suggested the formation of a national public order force to quell future disturbances. A cynic might note that Labour has never been a keen advocate of public-order policing. Certainly, the party appeared to recuse itself over the contested pro-Palestine marches that have dogged London. Before last summer’s disturbances, indeed, the Labour seemed most worried about disorder in… 1984. Shortly after the last election, Labour committed itself to a public inquiry into the disturbances at Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike, red meat to the party’s restless Left.

Starmer’s proposed “gendarmerie” was short-lived. After all, a standing force of 2,000-plus riot cops would mean significant costs to cash-strapped constabularies. Instead, existing “mutual aid” arrangements, whereby forces lend each other personnel, will be rehauled. Nonetheless, the proposal offers a clue to government thinking: its ongoing desire for a centralized force it can direct and influence, if not control directly. Politicians will strenuously deny it, but this is as true now as it was in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when Tony Blair bewailed a lack of joined-up policing during disputes over petrol and farmers.

What, then, of the specifics? As it stands, National CT policing is headquartered with the Met in London. Its officers work on regional counterterrorism units, seconded from their home police forces. This causes issues around employment regulations: sometimes officers are forced to transfer forces completely to take a CT role on. These are legitimate concerns, which might say more about inflexible police regulations than the efficacy of the CT network. Nonetheless, CT is chronically short of experienced detectives. Why? Because it draws them from austerity-hit local police forces, which themselves suffer acute shortages of qualified investigators.

In short, CT doesn’t exist in isolation from mainstream policing: it’s umbilically attached to it. But does that mean Starmer craves a British version of the FBI, with its own directly recruited staff? This is where the vicious politicking between senior law enforcers and spooks comes in, not least in the form of the National Crime Agency (NCA). Formerly the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), the NCA was a Blairite attempt to create a national force, liberated from the tedious bonds of police control, scrutiny or accountability.

Rising from the ashes of the old National Crime Squad, the wonky phoenix was still riven by turf wars between former police and customs investigators. The NCA is now colloquially known as either “No Coppers Allowed” or the “National Chaos Agency”, with its officers drawn predominantly from the civil service. Essentially there to fight organized crime, it’s not been a tremendous success. This isn’t simply sour grapes from a former copper either. I’ve spoken to serving officers, and they bemoan its risk-averse and sluggish culture. The NCA also has accountability issues. After all, the NCA answers to central government. Its “agents” can simultaneously hold the powers of police, immigration and customs officers (something they’ll proudly tell you).

The NCA, which initially couldn’t decide if it was an intelligence or law-enforcement body, was once cruelly mocked as “MI7” by the real spooks. Yet that hasn’t stopped the Government from airing another idea: “brigading” national CT policing with the NCA. That’d create a veritable super-agency, one responsible for terrorists, gangsters — and, er, incels.

The NCA will undoubtedly be salivating at the prospect: CT is the jewel in the policing crown, offering prestige, promotions, influence and funding, and will finally condemn those “MI7” jibes to history. Indeed, this internecine struggle is as important to some senior officers and civil servants as catching terrorists. That’s unsurprising: a national CT body would, at last, be genuinely comparable to a British FBI. More alarmingly, it might even be a prosecutorial version of MI5, a powerful, European-style secret police, of the sort Britain has traditionally shied away from. After all, the existing Security Service shares similar thematic responsibilities, but has no powers of arrest. Though it has primacy over CT intelligence, it doesn’t over any reactive investigations.

How would this new all-powerful CT agency fit into existing British law enforcement? It’s not hard to imagine a national body, some 10,000 officers strong, eventually flexing its muscles and rebelling against the spies. MI5 won’t take this lying down, possibly leading to a dilution of the CT model, dysfunction — or, given the current British state, both. On the other hand, MI5 might be told to concentrate on its pre-9/11 counterintelligence role, focusing on catching foreign spies on British soil. Certainly, there’s ample evidence of Russian and Chinese spooks operating in our towns and cities.

What about the operational issues at stake? In my experience, one of the British CT model’s strengths is precisely that umbilical connection to local forces I mentioned earlier. A detective with SO15, the Met’s counterterrorist command, can pick up a phone and talk directly to a community PC in a London borough. The detective might even have worked on the same beat. Local knowledge was immediate and easily available. Having experienced liaison between the Met’s intelligence bureau and the NCA, I cringe at what the future might look like. Sure, there will be the usual hot air about integrated local liaison, which too often means coalface officers grafting while specialists take the credit. I can anyway imagine local goodwill towards a national unit evaporating fast. CT operations can also only work if officers are flexible. Intelligence gathering — managing sources, analyzing reports, surveillance — is generally less resource-intensive than post-crime investigation. The latter usually involves literally hundreds of “boots on the ground” as detectives gather evidence, take statements and trawl CCTV footage. The current arrangement, with forces supporting operations on their own patches, therefore makes sense.

My real concern, though, is proportionality. As we saw with the Home Office’s notorious sprint report, an illiberal aura emanates from the department’s mandarins. Our political elites are obsessed with online “harms” and discourse, desperate to determine what constitutes “disinformation”. If you doubt how much police officers mimic the concerns of their political masters, consider this recent bulletin from the Prevent program to parents, prompted by none other than Adolescence. To quote the scheme’s coordinator, the fictional drama has prompted some “incredibly important” discussion, not so different from the Prime Minister’s own take.

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This week also saw more devils, more details, and potentially more unintended consequences: ID cards. A group of Blue Labour MPs aligned to Morgan McSweeney are rolling the turf for mandatory digital identification. This is another piece of reheated Blairism, adding credence to theories the former PM still wields considerable influence. An implicit justification for the move is surely illegal immigration — but, interestingly, Starmer would rather make us all carry papers than simply leave the ECHR.

I’ll leave the contradictions in the Prime Minister’s blend of human rights and authoritarianism for political commentators. Suffice it to say, a national CT force would be strongly in favor of universal digital ID. It would make tracking us all, for whatever reason, much easier. And never mind the ocean of contradictions. The average Labour MP usually has plenty to say about stop and search and racial profiling. Add identity cards to the mix? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

As I mentioned earlier, all this feels strangely European, oddly French, where every government department gets its own spooks to spy on each other. Britain has traditionally thumbed its nose at continental models of hapless municipal coppers, gendarmes and secret policemen.

That, it seems, is about to change. Most fair-minded people will agree the police must be as effective as possible, especially when protecting us from terrorism. But reasonableness and accountability matter too, things we largely took for granted when dealing with our cops in the past. We need to be confident officers are focused on the real threats to our safety, especially around Islamic extremism, and not get distracted by political hobby-horses. I’d therefore say this to our political class: be careful what you wish for. Especially given modern Britain’s grim record on free speech, I’m reluctant to trust what might well become Starmer’s secret police.

The place he’s talking about isn’t Turkish — nor is it much of a hairdresser. But it is almost certainly laundering drug money. Most UK high streets have similar barbershops, or nail bars, or mysteriously diner-free restaurants. Speaking under a pseudonym, Liam meets me not on a gritty housing estate, but in rural Hampshire, in a village with a green and a coaching inn. It’s hard to think of a better example of modern British drug dealing, of county lines stretching right across the nation.

The phenomenon has usually been depicted as an invasion of urban street gangs, trafficking narcotics to far-flung provinces. These days, though, the model has evolved, “growing arms and legs” as we used to say on the force. Dealers once ran drugs from their city redoubts. Now they’ve moved the business model into local communities. With the dealers, of course, comes misery: eye-watering violence, yes, but also innocents pressured by gangs into ruining their lives. It demonstrates how buyers are complicit in the suffering of others — and how even law-abiding Brits now struggle to escape the chaos, as disorder creeps from London estates to the leafy Home Counties.

The most obvious way of understanding Britain’s drug problem is by the numbers. Official statistics put the annual value of the country’s narcotics market at £10 billion, even as drug-related crime costs about the same again. This is before you consider the wider culture of drugs. Our national appetite for narcotics is insatiable. Gak. White. Chop. Chisel. Luca. Drugs permeate our society, like needles in an addict’s arm. A new Danny Dyer movie is called Marching Powder, for fuck’s sake. Apparently it’s a romantic comedy.

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Then there are the gangs themselves, bewildering in their variety. Somali gangs from southeast London traditionally ran drugs down to Kent, from Mogadishu to Margate if you will. All the while, Albanian and Turkish gangs from north and east London work Hertfordshire and Essex; west Londoners, mainly Afro-Caribbean, take Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey. As those Home Counties names imply, this is a business that long ago transcended its urban roots. One year, a detective told me, the biggest post-Carnival party happened in that famous west London neighborhood — Basingstoke.

Given this ubiquity, across the southeast and beyond, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Britain’s drug trade happens more or less openly, clear enough when I swing by that barbershop in Hampshire. It’s a sepia-colored, dusty sort of place. Quiet. The sign looks amateurish. A young woman appears in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and checking her phone. She looks up and down the street, then disappears back inside.

The obviousness of the façade is almost comical, even as these places are the terminus of the whole business. Cash-only, high turnover businesses like barbershops are ideal places for laundering money. Some of the proceeds of drug-dealing enters the cash register dirty, coming out the other end as clean as a head of freshly washed hair. They are quickly set up and closed as necessary. And, in quiet rural communities, they can hide in plain sight.

At the other end of the funnel are mostly North African and Albanian mafias, importing drugs through corruption-addled ports like Rotterdam and Le Havre. Drugs are smuggled in lorries, cars and even body-packed. They come in on cargo ships, yachts and barges. The ingenuity of the smugglers is driven by profit and demand. These networks are violent and determined, prepared to murder judges, journalists and politicians. Parts of the Low Countries increasingly resemble soggier analogues of Juarez.

Then there’s the middle-market, the retailers, who brazenly use social media to plug their wares. They offer cheap drugs as tasters, to get users hooked. They also offer ubiquity and ease of supply. Cocaine dealers will always promise the best stuff, even though it’s often heavily cut.

For low-level dealers and for many users, this is basically victimless crime. The punters crave and the market provides. They’re wrong. Liam mentions an operation where a teenage runner kept hassling him to score cannabis. Liam wasn’t interested — he was after Class A drugs — but made the buy to get the kid off his back. When the police raided the teen’s house, they found a Kalashnikov in his bedroom. “People fail to appreciate how young they are,” one officer tells me. “These kids literally have nothing. They join gangs for a new pair of sneakers.” The lines have swallowed an entire generation of underclass children, lost boys and girls disappearing into an underbelly of near-Victorian squalor.

If you know where to look, there’s even worse here too. Another detective once told me about a North London drugs line operating in semi-rural Scotland. A local dealer “skanked” the gang out of £200. To set an example, London gang members forced him to have sex with a dog. At gunpoint. This isn’t an Irvine Welsh novel. This is real life.

All the while, dealers and runners bully vulnerable people into surrendering their homes to use as bases of operations — a practice known as “cuckooing”. This remains a hidden crime, far from the stereotypical Top Boy world of street gangs, zombie knives and drill music. It is, however, as crucial to the whole business model as those deserted rural barbers. Among other things, cuckooing offers cheap, discreet accommodation. It also provides a steady source of slave labor.

To understand how cuckooing works, I visit Catalyst Support. A charity supporting victims, it’s based in Woking, a commuter town off the M25. Hardly the hood — but Surrey is county lines turf now. Nick, a veteran caseworker, has the air of a man who’s seen and heard it all.

“We had one client coerced into moving county line gang members into his elderly parent’s house,” he tells me. “They ended up using the place to store and deal drugs.” Age seems to be no barrier to falling victim to cuckooing. In fact, middle-aged and older people, especially those with learning difficulties, are especially vulnerable.

Catalyst Support can offer assistance, but one theme is grimly familiar. As Nick says of another cuckooing case, which took place in a small English village, “it was obvious. A vulnerable person, living alone, suddenly has loads of new visitors? Yet none of the neighbors said a thing.” I can’t help but think of Liam’s barbershop, and how drugs are a “crime accelerator” prompting other types of offending. I’m thinking here of a spate of cashpoint thefts plaguing quiet service stations, gangs using gas tanks to blast ATMs from garage walls.

There are victories. The charity assisted the Home Office and other public bodies to formulate legislation that will make cuckooing a specific criminal offense. That’s progress, especially when victims are sometimes offenders too. Making it a specific crime, the charity suggests, helps clarify the status of cuckooing victims. Still, issues remain. Cuts often hit preventative services like Catalyst Support. Then there’s the perennial bane of third-sector organizations: performance indicators used to justify funding. Whitehall targets are often aimed at eye-catching problems like knife crime, rather than the hard yards of crimes like cuckooing.

The police have responded too: mapping gangs, markets and trafficking routes. In law enforcement vernacular, this is “Level Two” cross-border crime under the National Intelligence Model. Chief officers love theoretical models. They offer an illusion of control, despite highlighting the essentially parochial nature of UK forces. Criminals, it goes without saying, don’t recognize borders. But the cops? The border between Orpington and Swanley — marking where the Met gives way to Kent Police — once resembled the 38th Parallel.

This was a weakness gangs took advantage of, until police changed tactics. They formed cross-border task forces, to proactively target offenders. Even so, austerity-decimated local constabularies often found operations too time-consuming and resource-intensive. By the time they caught up, the lines were dug in. To be fair, officers tell me, support from the center has improved significantly. That’s especially true around identifying offenders from communications data.

Yet all the while, organized criminal groups have multiplied. This is partly due immigration patterns. For example, gangs from Sub-Saharan Africa are slowly replacing the Somalis who dominated southeast London a decade ago. Then there are settled ethnic gangs from Eastern Europe, who’ve been in the UK for decades. Criminals also rely on refugees from war-torn nations: young men used to chaotic lifestyles involving violence. And, crucially, these gangs quickly cross-pollinate with local, white criminal groups in provinces outside the big cities. The county lines are a truly multinational, multicultural enterprise.

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These new criminals are offering new products too. After the Taliban stymied heroin production in Afghanistan, the street price in America rocketed, leading to an increase in highly dangerous synthetic opioids from China. According to investigators, drugs like Nitazenes are the next big thing. Cheap to produce, and offering a fuzzy, heroin-like high, they offer a huge return on investment. If misused, they can also be very dangerous — Nitazenes can be 800 times as potent as the equivalent dose of morphine.

What hasn’t changed is the young age of offenders, both dealers and runners alike. Once ensnared, and subject to violence and sexual abuse, some became dealers themselves. “The question I’d ask,” one officer wonders, “is how did we get to this point? There’s a massive failure of parenting and education in the US.”

I’m soon tempted to ask myself the same question. In another semi-rural town, this time in Surrey, I see another barbershop. Two kids in hoodies loiter outside a convenience store, like meerkats, their eyes scanning the streets for trouble. An Audi SUV is parked nearby, cannabis smoke bleeding from the semi-open, blacked-out windows. I’m not even looking for this stuff, but here it is. I wonder what the kids are thinking. In their minds, is this pretty village their corner? Their ends?

It’s impossible not to see this as a symptom of full-spectrum societal failure — and those kids are just the start. I’m reminded of the familiar argument: if you saw how meat pies were made, you’d never eat one. Perhaps well-heeled Surrey commuters, ordering their weekend baggies of poorly-cut cocaine, should set foot in a traphouse or watch a teenage runner bleed out on the pavement. In the lines business, that’s exactly how the pie is made. Yet this weekend alone, nearly 50 kilos of dirty powder are destined to hit America’s collective septum. For some reason, our opinion-forming and media classes rarely protest about that particular drug. Then again, they’ve probably never been cuckooed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

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There are two main reasons why race remains such a potent factor in police decision-making, The first is the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism. Ever since the late Eighties, successive governments have baked antiracism into law. The reasoning here was essentially benign: nobody would deny racism has long dogged British policing, from the bungled investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder to concerns over stop and search.

Yet given the scale of the rape gang scandal, is it now unreasonable to ask if any babies were chucked out with the bathwater? I think they were. I describe it as “Tsunami Policing” — where the solution to a policing problem is, initially, like a gentle offshore wave. Then, as it rushes towards the landmass of reality, urged on by opinion formers and politicians and grasping police managers, it becomes a monstrosity. This describes the post-Macpherson Met’s obsession with race, whereby Scotland Yard played “trendy vicar” one minute, Torquemada the next. By the mid-2000s, any ambitious officer unwilling to play nice still was unlikely to make National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) rank, the policing equivalent to army brigadiers and above. This quickly shaped decision-making at senior levels across the country: what happens in London soon spreads to provincial forces.

With so many incentives to toe the line, no wonder more free-thinking coppers stayed away, with the remainder grimly susceptible to groupthink. We used to call it “having the CD Rom inserted” — whereby a reasonably competent copper would morph into a pound-shop commissar to achieve the next rank. The next time you watch a press conference with a senior officer, play “bullshit bingo” with the language they use, usually involving words like community, proportionality and diversity. Meanwhile, away from the TV cameras, thousands of young girls were raped, abused and treated like chattel in their own hometowns.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

Given the Government’s unwillingness to launch a full public inquiry, we’re sadly unlikely to see a candid account of the informal “corridor conferences” held at force HQs, let alone the “Gold Group” decision-making meetings held by senior officers. Instead, under-trained and under-resourced constables, working in child protection, will be used as scapegoats. Far better, instead, to boost transparency at the highest levels: wouldn’t it be glorious if officers at Gold Group meetings were forced to wear body-worn video cameras?

Of course, a lack of accountability infects every corner of the British state: see the public inquiries into Royal Mail or Covid. Yet, to my mind, this gives the police even less of an excuse. We expect the police to be better, to be held to a higher standard. There’s an old saying in the job: the public get the police they deserve. Except they don’t. The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.

A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees: the panacea of multi-agency working, with police units moving into town halls and going native with their social worker colleagues. Suspects became “clients” and cases were viewed through the prism of equity rather than justice. Beard-stroking and hand-wringing became the order of the day, freeing officers to attend development courses and conferences while they planned their next promotion.

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Of course, race wasn’t the only issue. Investigations into the rape gangs disaster have discovered the usual witches brew of public sector failure, from parlous resourcing to recruitment, training and retention. Yet all this surely raises one more question: what can be done? If nothing else, we need the same enthusiasm for reform as we saw in the Nineties, when a laddish “canteen culture” was rightly expunged, even as their technocratic replacements just made the same mistakes in reverse. As for more specific changes, there are currently far too many forces, leading to inconsistencies in operational practices and decision-making. Another problem involves a lack of proper oversight; far better to replace the disastrous Police and Crime Commissioner experiment with non-partisan local police boards. The post-Blair mass of ill-considered law needs to go too. On that last point, the police should find some courage, finally calling bullshit on time-wasters like Non-Crime Hate Incidents.

In the meanwhile? The centre cannot hold. The rape gangs scandal is the quintessence of two-tier policing, which is probably why the Government is more comfortable with public inquiries into ancient history like the Miners’ Strike. Whatever the answer, it requires moral courage. I hope, somewhere inside the policing machine, a new generation of coppers is prepared to show some minerals, to shake the tree, to remember why they joined in the first place. To police, in short, without fear or favour — because who wants to live in a society that stands by while children are raped?

Roving bands of career burglars stalk the area. “They come every day whether you’re inside or not,” explains one local man from behind his wheelie bin. “They don’t seem to care.” Everything is up for grabs, the man tells me, from Amazon packages in doorways to the Lexus in the drive.

Brazenness is hardly surprising. Hadley Wood is one of countless British communities effectively abandoned by the protective arm of the state. In 2018, the area suffered 65 break-ins, a criminal romp that nonetheless failed to stir the short arm of the law. Such an experience now marks suburban life in the capital, with the Met failing to solve a single crime in 160 residential areas of London over the last three years. “The police gave up on this area years ago,” one shrugging resident explains.

Such is the national mood. Trust in the police is at an historic low, with crime recently surging to the fourth-biggest issue in the country. Yet in this vacuum of order, Hadley Wood offers one potential solution. For £100 a month per household, a firm called My Local Bobby will be your private police force, patrolling the lanes and back alleys, responding in 30 seconds to a break-in and even picking your wife up from the station in the dark. I spotted them myself, crawling by in patrol cars as I strolled the empty streets. Behind them, meanwhile, is a team that’ll privately prosecute criminals through the courts, with a conviction rate of 100%, a service recently used by Reform UK after the alleged assault of a police officer at Manchester Airport.

Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where the state increasingly struggles to carry out its basic functions, and where private players now rush to fill the void. Nor, of course, is this merely a function of law and order. Rather, the phenomenon of My Local Bobby represents the loose thread of a fraying social contract. When the state is no longer capable of carrying out its basic functions, after all, why wouldn’t Britain’s narrowing band of middle-class taxpayers plump for something better?

The recent budget offered a grim reminder of this future zero-sum reality facing public service funding in England. Much of the tax revenue raised over the next few years, alongside additional borrowing, will be geared towards funding the NHS: a short-term spending splurge ahead of promised reform that’ll anyway peter out by 2025. This, it seems, is already happening at the expense of other public services. Despite Labour’s mission to “take back the streets”, the Met is set to lose another 2,000 officers amid yet another budget cut. That’s off the back of a decade in which police funding has already fallen by 20% in real terms.

Between the squeezed belts and the unsolved crime, it’s little wonder post-austerity Britain has conjured an alternative: My Local Bobby. Run by David McKelvey, the erstwhile detective’s career in the Met ended after a mob boss put a bounty on his head. These days, the man described by a former colleague “as a force of nature” runs Britain’s most successful private policing force from an Essex office. “There is demand for our services on a daily basis” right across the country, McKelvey tells me. When his team meets with prospective clients, he reports “a general sense that crime and anti-social behaviour is out of control and no one is doing anything about it”.

McKelvey claims to provide an “old fashioned” alternative to modern British policing, and one now being promised by the home secretary. In the busy streets of West London, where his team has its most established presence, he says his officers now respond to incidents before the police nine times in 10.

This is a style of policing that deliberately harks back to the foundational principles of Robert Peel, all the while shunning the odd mix of desk-bound surveillance and bureaucratic inertia that bogs down officers in the 21st-century public sector. My Local Bobby uses officers on the beat and local eyes and ears to provide intimate knowledge of the streets around them. That helps them catch shoplifters, seize drugs, break up fights and even prevent knife-wielding men from attacking the public — all armed with just body cameras and the training to conduct a citizen’s arrest.

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“Most people just want a uniformed presence back on the street that gathers intelligence and catches criminals,” says McKelvey. “It’s not rocket science.” It’s certainly an approach that’s popular: British businesses and residents will soon spend £10 billion on private security, even as the Home Secretary has promised “a named officer for every community”. It nonetheless seems beyond the present capabilities of the public sector. In Devon and Cornwall, for instance, it recently cost £1 million to pay mostly overtime officers to patrol a crime hotspot for just 15 minutes once every three days.

That surely begs a question: why is it now so hard for the police to perform their most basic functions? For McKelvey, alongside the many other former and serving officers I spoke to, the answer amounts to an unprecedented institutional crisis. Between low morale, a defunding of specialist units, and a generational loss of talent, to say nothing of a “Spanish Inquisition” culture that leaves officers now “afraid to arrest suspects”. A worrying focus on “low hanging fruit” around communication offences hardly helps either, bemoaned one serving officer, even as they lament leadership that wanted to “solve societal ills” instead of busting criminals.

“Small teams [are] given autonomy and allowed to solve problems,” adds Dominic Adler, a former detective constable who now writes excoriating critiques of modern British policing on his Substack. “That’s the police I joined, not the bizarre bureaucratic behemoth that couldn’t find its arse with a map that exists.” Indeed, Adler continues, the current crisis is about more than staffing or austerity. “The post-Blair legal consensus was the knife that went into the police,” he says. “Theresa May and austerity twisted the knife and killed it.”

The upshot? A day-to-day experience of working in the police that Adler compares to Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil: leaving the station to arrest people involves satisfying a dizzying number of rules, regulations and procedures. This, Adler adds, has cultivated a procedurally obsessed management that resembles a “colonial police force made up of elite imperial seniors leading baffled local levies who can’t be arsed to point out the emperor is naked”.

For Carl, a former policeman who now runs My Local Bobby’s patrols in North London, this reality only struck him once he’d left the force. After spotting a man with a number plate down his trousers in North London, he and his team spent a week surveilling a burglary team across the South East. “We were watching them as they were breaking into houses,” Carl says, “phoning the police and saying, ‘look they’re going in now, you’ve got to come!’”

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When the police eventually arrived, the burglars got away. Now outside the force, Carl’s freedom to pursue ground intelligence across North London has resulted in the arrest of numerous burglary teams, in partnership with the police. But this is essentially a privately-funded outsourcing of the Met’s old operation, which for its part has all but defunded its burglary investigation teams across London.

Beyond Hadley Wood, and back towards London’s inner suburbs, community WhatsApp groups abound with rumours of the help available to more affluent neighbours. Yet if these private efforts are successful on their own terms — My Local Bobby helped cut vehicle crime in Hadley Wood by 38% — communally financing can be tough, even humiliating, for those who can’t afford it. One man in Fulham describes how a neighbour, who chose not to pay for the road’s private security team, discovered that they were contractually obliged to stand by as his house was robbed.

Paul in Shoreditch has a similar anxiety. He describes how the end of his road has turned into a “hotspot for crack addicts and drug dealers” that left residents afraid to venture out after dark. What followed was a three-month struggle that saw him deal with the council, write to the Met Commissioner, and eventually enquire about the services of a company called Shoreditch Security: which ultimately gave residents a quote of £1,000 a week. At the time, this proved too much. “We all pay taxes and extensive council tax,” Paul says. “We should at a basic level already feel protected.”

And if that raises the ominous prospect of a nation wracked by two-tier policing — with some describing My Local Bobby as a return to the 18th century tradition of “thief-takers” hired expressly by the wealthy victims of crime — there are other fears too. Many private officers are veterans of the Metropolitan Police, but Londoners have occasionally worried about the blurred lines around who can legally use force. Certainly, some private guards seem happy to throw their weight around. In 2023, for instance, an anti-Ulez protester was allegedly run over by a man hired to defend the controversial cameras.

Of course, none of this would matter if the actual police worked as intended. If it did, even by McKelvey’s own admission, outfits like My Local Bobby wouldn’t have a market. Yet speaking to one officer of 20 years, now on the verge of leaving, reform seems unlikely. “We’ve lost sight of who and what policing is for,” he tells me. “Its present state appeals to a tiny elite minority who only understand how bad it is until they get their car stolen. We need to start again. A total root-and-branch redrawing so we can return to the original reason it was set up: to gather intelligence locally and nick people.”

Back in Hadley Wood, locals now seem blissfully unaware of the growing tensions of the 21st-century English social contract they’ve managed to leave behind. For the world beyond Hadley Wood, however, officers predict something far grimmer: a growing mix of private security alongside failing institutional forces and an appetite for public vigilantism. “There’ll be a situation where the police really lose the streets,” Adler warns, “and the public will look at the Government and say, ‘what the fuck’s actually going on here?’” In Hadley Wood, and other suburbs of North London, a quieter form of that reckoning has already begun.

The incident was not unusual. Last year, 244 people were murdered with knives in Britain, an 8% jump from 2022. That’s shadowed by countless private tragedies. In August, two 12-year-old boys were convicted of killing Shawn Seesahai with a machete at a park in Wolverhampton. The 19 year old was struck with such force that the blade almost passed through his body. 

Days earlier, 15-year-old Daejaun Campbell was stabbed to death with a zombie knife in the London suburb of Woolwich. Turning on the news recently, I saw Dr Olumide Wole-Madariola, whose son Malcolm was stabbed to death with a blade outside Clapham South tube station in November 2018. I remember the incident well: I passed the taped-up crime scene a few hours after the tragedy. 

Our country, in short, is suffering a plague, an orgy, of knife crime. Yet if the violence feels pointless, a howl of bloodstained nihilism, stabbings in Britain are far from incomprehensible. From shuttered police stations to culture to health, our current emergency has causes. If our political class has the will or ability to do anything about them are different questions altogether. 

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When locals heard the chaos on Sunday morning — the revving cars, the screaming men — the police would have responded to their 999 calls almost instantly. Lavender Hill Police Station is on the very same Wandsworth Road where the violence kicked off, and thus minutes away from the crime scene. 

Somehow, Lavender Hill nick has managed to survive a cull that’s seen the number of police stations in the capital plummet from 160 in 2008 to just 36 today, despite covering a city of nine million people. You don’t need a calculator to figure out that something doesn’t add up here. If the powers-that-be get their way, moreover, the plan is to whittle this down to just 32 stations, or one per London borough. Across England, more than two-thirds of stations have closed in recent years. 

Talk to any copper of the old school and they’ll tell you that the closure of police stations, and the loss of bobbies on the beat, has had a major impact on local intelligence gathering and police visibility. The inexperience of young officers hardly helps either: as one officer complained to me recently, new recruits can’t navigate without the assistance of Google. Bobbies, like black cab drivers, once did this all from memory. 

Dovetail all this with the numbers, and you have a plausible argument that fewer police stations means more crime. According to the Office for National Statistics, after all, the year to December 2023 witnessed almost 50,000 violent and sexual offences involving a knife or sharp instrument nationwide. That’s a rise of nearly 14,000 from March 2011, even as stabbings have soared in London too. While Sadiq Khan is habitually blamed here, recall too that Boris Johnson ran the capital before him, and that both mayors were anyway hamstrung by years of Whitehall austerity.

Yet if the mass closure of police stations over the last 15 years clearly hasn’t improved the crime stats, we also shouldn’t exaggerate. For one thing, it’s easy to romanticise policing as something out of Dixon of Dock Green when, for decades, many in Britain saw the police as an army of occupation, their stations were fortresses, and the Met was a “force” not a “service”. As one veteran cop told me: “I’m not there to ‘serve’ the public, I’m there to enforce the law and fucking nick bad guys.”

And if you examine the numbers in detail, our straightforward tale of austerity and cuts becomes rather more complex. As the largest police force in the country, the Met currently employs 33,631 officers — nearly a quarter of all coppers in England and Wales — and gobbles up 25% of the nation’s police budget. As senior figures such as Mike Cunningham, former chief executive of the College of Policing, have pointed out, boots on the ground aren’t a panacea here. Quite aside from the fact that the law and order budget for England and Wales actually rose last year, jumping by more than £550 million, the nature of crime is changing. From targeting violent criminals ahead of large-scale events like the Notting Hill Carnival, to diverting social spending to vulnerable neighbourhoods, policing in modern Britain is about far more than foot patrols. 

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More to the point, I think focusing purely on numbers misdiagnoses a problem that’s multigenerational and systemic. Let me put it differently. What both sides of the knife debate fail to understand, whether that’s the Tory press or liberal anti-violence activists, is that carrying a knife has become so much more than the cliched “fashion accessory” or even misguided means of self-defence: it’s morphed into a weapon of urban destruction. 

I know because I’ve been there, done that, made noise, and yet seen nothing change. Knife culture, after all, is part of a lore that stretches back decades: through subcultures and ethnic groups, as well as via gangland brawls and “lone wolf” terrorism. And yet, I’m sad to say, our old friend political correctness dictates that those worst affected by the fear, stigma and brutal reality of knife crime are often too afraid to speak in the media about it. Why? Because being accused of “airing our dirty washing in public” — or fuelling the far-Right’s rhetoric around race and crime — makes it, for too many, a fool’s errand.

To that extent, then, Labour’s recent promise to cut knife crime in half feels totally delusional, especially when you recall that we’ve had the same debate for decades. Twenty years ago, I presented a BBC documentary series called The Trouble With Black Men, which explored the myriad racial stereotypes faced by Afro-Caribbean men. Ranging from lawyers and schoolchildren to reformed criminals and advertising executives, contributors emphasised that these stereotypes — in attitudes, behaviour and culture — were sometimes self-perpetuated. 

To say the show was controversial would be an understatement. The title alone was enough to send a vocal minority of self-appointed “community leaders” into a spin. I was accused of “internalised racism” and being an “excellent gift to the BNP”. By failing to produce yet another diatribe on race and racism, I had somehow put myself in the camp occupied by the likes of Tony Sewell or Shaun Bailey, two examples of compliant black men ennobled in recent years for toeing the Conservative Party line on race.

Undoubtedly, and as my show explained, black men have long been a national bogeyman. Just as I did in my documentary, I could cite numerous reasons for our pariah status — the overwhelming majority of which are wholly unjustified and, yes, racist. Yet it’s also true that a disproportionate number of black men are languishing in jail for knife crimes, and not all because they’ve been “set up” or faced stiffer sentencing than their white counterparts.   

That’s indisputable when you consider the numbers. In some of Britain’s most deprived inner-city estates, more black males wind up in prison than university. In 2022, the London Assembly found that despite making up only 13% of the capital’s population, black Londoners accounted for 45% of London’s knife murder victims and 61% of its perpetrators. Across England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics reports that black people are four times more likely to be murdered than white people, a disparity that has worsened in the past decade. In the three years to March 2022, there were 39.7 black murder victims per one million people. That’s compared to just 8.9 white victims per million. 

A welter of academic researchers, including my old friend and mentor Professor Lorraine Gamman, are unequivocal about the correlation between poverty and crime — regardless of race. There’s certainly enough crime in poor white areas to support that point, and enough “white-on-white” violence to back the theory that poor white males are in crisis, too. And before anyone “whatabouts” me, yes, rich people also commit all sorts of crimes — they just tend not to stab each other or random strangers to death with zombie knives

Yet my focus, perhaps inevitably given my background, is the sort of internecine violence among young black men that points to a multifactorial problem, notably around culture, that the Labour government doesn’t seem willing to address. Mental health, for its part, is surely an under-explored issue here too, as is self-medicating and drug dealing, to say nothing of the added dearth of knowledge, opportunity, aspiration, family, and hope. Add the toxic wasteland that is social media, and personal attacks on those trying to address violent crime within corners of the black community are just as common now as they were when I made The Trouble With Black Men. 

Likewise, liberal voices such as Idris Elba, who has thrown his considerable weight behind Labour’s anti-knife crime agenda, or Martin Griffiths, the surgeon waging his own war against knife crime, have generally proved strikingly reticent about drawing any attention to the link between rising knife crime and ethnicity. And who can blame them? If you highlight the disproportionality of knife crime among sections of the black community because you actually give a shit you get called a “sellout”. But if you say nothing, or speak in general cultural terms, you stand accused of “lacking solutions”. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Whatever disingenuous critics say, I put it to the Labour government that unless it’s prepared to get its hands dirty and confront knife crime in all its complexity — rather than air inoffensive but ultimately pointless soundbites — the epidemic we face will cease to merely be a marginalised or poorly addressed “black problem”. It’ll be Britain’s problem. 

Except where I live. Where I live, in Alameda County, California, the DA is Pamela Price, who says she sees herself as “minister of justice”, not “prosecutor”. Fair enough. America’s DAs could maybe exhibit less single-minded focus on winning convictions (and blocking bad convictions from being overturned), and more interest in simple justice. But Price has made her sharp turn away from prosecuting criminal offenders when crime is making a sharp turn upwards, especially in the county’s largest city, Oakland. For this reason, local groups are working to force a “recall” election, hopeful that crime-weary Oaklanders will vote her out.

This recall threat may have been why she staged a public event called “Know Your District Attorney” in late November. If so, how she staged this is extremely interesting. You’d think a DA under pressure for being soft on crime would make some gesture in the other direction, reassure her constituents that she does care about rising crime and its growing population of victims. Perhaps she’d have a high-ranking police officer on stage with her, a handful of crime victims supporting her as she empathises with them, an American flag somewhere in the background, because doesn’t everyone respect the flag, deep down?

But Price had no police officer enhancing her aura of toughness, nor victims on stage with her. Crime victims were in the building, but they were in the audience, and frowning. Two of them, whom Price made a point of ignoring, wore hoodies bearing an iron-on picture of a young relative who’d been murdered. Nor was there an American flag anywhere visible, which is notable, as American police and prosecutors traditionally have a flag in the frame when they face the public. Instead, as a photographer named Thomas Hawk documented on X: “The event started out with a cultural dance presentation and then a prayer to our ancestors where for some reason a Poinsettia plant was watered in front of the crowd while we bowed our heads in prayer.” Following this, according to Hawk: “We got a panel lecture from some of the non-profits advocating for her brand of progressiveness while complaining about more moderate district attorney’s [sic] in the past.”

This latter detail calls to mind the Oakland teacher’s strike I wrote about last June, when, in a high-stakes political moment, the teachers’ union’s progressive leadership pressed a seemingly impolitic slate of extreme demands having little to do with teacher pay or working conditions. This posture sent a revealing mix of signals into the political environment — close affinity with other progressive organisations and a sort of bold indifference toward school parents, traditionally a key constituency. Like the radical leaders of the teachers’ union, Pamela Price is responding to a moment of political challenge not by looking to the broader electorate for support but by turning to the activist NGOs that sit with her on the ideological fringe.

These cases are symptoms of a political phenomenon that my fellow Californian Matthew Crawford calls the “Party State”, which he describes in a pair of typically trenchant essays from last August. California is a Party State in that it is so dominated by the Democratic Party that political actors worry less about the mass of voters, who will vote Democratic even if they’re ideologically moderate themselves, and more about nodes of influence within the Democratic Party. These tend to be highly organised and ideologically extreme NGOs, issue groups that also exert a mimetic influence on each other that makes them both more similar and more radical. This logic is doubly powerful in those parts of the state — such as Alameda County — where Democratic dominance is even more lopsided and the activist NGOs even more extreme. If officials in a city like Oakland can seem strangely indifferent towards voters, in other words, that’s because they are. Their most valued constituents aren’t voters. They’re well-organised ideologues who staff and lead activist organisations, whose most valued constituents, in turn, are each other, the bunch of them locked in a bidding war of moral purity.

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The Party State is a powerful concept. It helps explain why not just conservative but moderate and merely liberal Californians sometimes feel like they’re governed by a tuned-out aristocracy of lunatics. It’s no small thing to gain some insight into such a predicament, but I’d like to examine another aspect of the theatrics of the Pamela Price event — the odd ceremony by which it was baptised, via a a potted pointsettia, from a plastic bottle.

This sort of ad hoc ceremony has become a staple of political theatre in progressive circles in North America. In less official or governmental modes it has the familiar character of the “privilege check”, people securing their authority to work or speak on sensitive matters through an appearance of grovelling. You’re only worthy of having opinions about marginalised communities if you proclaim that you’re not worthy of having opinions about marginalised communities, because of your privilege. After that, you can have opinions (but only some opinions). Likewise, you’re not worthy of living in a house or having a college or running a fancy boutique on land where native tribes once lived unless you post a sign or put some text on a website announcing this fact of pre-colonial history. This is the increasingly popular “land acknowledgment”, which imbues the privilege check with spiritual meaning through the conjuring of other people’s ancestors.

But, as the Pamela Price event shows, this progressive spiritualism shows up in governmental settings as well, and when it does it takes on political meaning that is, in fact, profound and consequential. When Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao was sworn into office in early 2023, this civic event began with an elaborate quasi-indigenous dance ceremony — conducted in Spanish — and of course a land acknowledgement. Such gestures serve the political convenience of progressive officials while conveying a novel message about the broader legitimacy of the authority they’re elected to wield.

Thao has a job that traditionally involves supporting the police in the sometimes violent and controversial conduct of their jobs. Price’s office requires her to use the testimony and evidence police officers provide her to send people to prison for committing felonies. Unavoidably, then, Price and Thao are implicated in some ugly and troubling things. Arrests involving bodily force, even when both the arrest and the force are obviously justified, are un-nerving to see. A citizen being killed by police fire, even a violent citizen holding a gun and threatening others, is a shocking event. Owing in part to the violence of American society, in part to the insular and sometimes lawless culture of American police departments, in part to questionable practices being official procedure throughout American law enforcement, American police forces bear some pretty bad reputations for some pretty good reasons. And the local jails to which DAs ask judges to remand criminal suspects, and the prisons to which they work to send criminal defendants, are typically hideous places. For these reasons, the moral and political legitimacy of the entire apparatus of public safety in America is always unresolved, and, in progressive cities with large black populations, it generally rests on a knife’s edge.

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But all DAs and mayors in American cities with volatile racial politics and serious crime face this challenge. They usually handle it by standing up after an incident of police misconduct or a controversial police shooting, often with the Chief of Police at their side and an American flag somewhere in the frame, and conceding that improving police conduct is an ongoing project while also insisting that most cops are good cops and the work they do is indispensable. But the movement Oakland’s Mayor and DA emerged from is deeply rooted in the anti-police protests of the last decade, in which police reform has been largely displaced as an organising focus by police defunding and abolition. This movement has had to invent an entirely new set of crime-fighting methods — often based on the assumption that police cause crime and that social workers, therapists, and other unarmed helpers can do a better job of preventing it. It wants nothing to do with police and policing, in other words, except to agitate against them.

And yet sometimes activists from this movement get elected as mayors and DAs of cities that have not yet conquered crime by defunding and abolishing their police departments. The police are all they have for tackling crime, and crime — especially the wild and brazen daylight crime Oakland has experienced over the last year — is one area where progressive leaders must pay almost as much attention to unhappy voters as they do to progressive NGOs. They have to support the arrest and imprisonment of some people at least, sometimes, but in doing so they are tainted by association with institutions they made their political names by execrating. To remove this taint they enact ceremonies from traditions, real or invented, originating far outside the national traditions to which policing belongs. By publicly blessing themselves with the holy practices of America’s historic victims, they create a hygienic distance between themselves and the dirty institutions of American order they were elected to lead.

They’re also advancing a new mythos, an alternative official story of the American state and American nationhood. And this, potentially, is a big deal. As Benedict Anderson portrays them in Imagined Communities, his magnificent study of nationalism, national stories typically reflect and impose an aggressive presentism. In them the basic legitimacy of the nation-state in its present form is taken as unquestionable, and the history of massive violence and expropriation underlying that form is treated with a sort of useful incoherence — which Anderson calls “memory and forgetting”. The historical parts and constituent groups of a given nation, whose defining encounter may have been conquest or civil war or ethnic cleansing, are remembered in national myth as primordially bound, their bloody encounter the playing out of some deeper, indeed fraternal, unity.

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Consider Anderson’s treatment of the “old Norman predator” whom British children learn to call “William the Conqueror”. Hearing this name an impertinent child might ask, “Conqueror of what?” The obvious historical answer is “Conqueror of the English”, but that would put William, whose people stuck around and became an important part of the English nation, in the company of enemies such as Napoleon and Hitler, which won’t do. “Hence”, Anderson writes, “’the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”. The mythic result of this mix of memory and forgetting is that “Norman William and Saxon Harold… meet on the battlefield of Hastings, if not as dancing partners, at least as brothers”.

The American national myth reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which America’s vicious Civil War was a “war of brothers”; in which the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood; and in which indigenous peoples America called “Indians” as it took over their continent are honoured as primordial brothers of the land, fearsome role models for its greatest frontiersmen, and thus worthy of having countless sports teams named after them. Such national stories are obviously ridiculous in their substance, but the fact that they persist despite this merely highlights the gravity of their purpose. Given the feared alternative — in which the fault lines erased in the myth are redrawn, the old hatreds refreshed into new ones, the old violence given new life — tellers and hearers of national stories have adapted themselves to their incoherence, committed themselves to forgetting as they remember. The feared alternative is quite bad enough, and the nation and state in their present workings are just good enough, to justify this strange commitment.

The new generation of governing progressives, and the curators of the new progressive mythos influential in American media and education, are fixing to test these assumptions. They can’t abide the unifying stories of America not just because they’re incoherent and historically dubious but because they’re unifying. The present regime they help justify should not in fact be justified. It is, after all, maintained in its semblance of public order by the police. And the only thing one should do with the police is work to abolish them, and, should one come in contact with their impurities in the course of one’s public duties, use certain prescribed rituals to remove the taint. As a way to reassure one’s progressive friends in the Party State, this effort of political storytelling and moral hygiene should work pretty well. How it works as a way to govern violent cities is different question.

No longer. When my wife recently accidentally left one of our two new cats outside overnight — she found it mewing pitiably at the kitchen door in the morning — she was racked with guilt. I hunt the house to make sure they are safely indoors before turning in of an evening. My mind roams to images of my cats being torn to bits by the urban foxes that slink along the fence, of their being scragged after accidentally invading the territory of a local tom (that happened to my old cat, and the vet’s bills were horrendous), or… of worse.

Our digital culture is saturated with cat adoration — the small portion of the internet not devoted to pornography or political hate-speech is mostly taken up with pictures of cats. But it’s also blooming, like squid-ink, with a related anxiety — that of cats as the objects of malice and cruelty. Rather than being independent creatures, cats now occupy a peculiar position in our minds: we think of them as (God help us) “floofs” and “fur-babies”, cuddly creatures utterly dependent on us for protection; but also as being hard to protect because, well, they’re cats. Unlike dogs, they go where they like and do what they like. It’s a recipe for paranoia.

And where there’s paranoia, there’s a buck to be made feeding it. ITV’s recent How To Catch A Cat Killer told the story — an easy heartstring-tugger for the likes of me — of a spate of cats being stabbed in a quiet close in Brighton, and of the Facebook group of local cat-lovers which was set up to warn other owners of the danger, and even ended up helping to track down the culprit. Where vigilantes, in the traditional Hollywood account of it, tend to be flint-faced, damaged, solitary men with gravelly voices and an unsmiling sense of purpose (think Charles Bronson, Jack Reacher, Batman, Rorschach or The Punisher), the acceptable real-life face of them is now a mildly out-of-shape middle-aged cat lover in a sensible jumper, specs illuminated by the glow of a last-generation laptop.

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Audiences eat this stuff up. This show was very obviously a low-stakes UK reprise of 2019’s surprise Netflix hit Don’t F*** With Cats, which followed an ad hoc group of Facebook friends tracking down a sicko who posted a video of himself suffocating a pair of kittens to death. Their collective digital sleuthing — every pixel was combed for clues as to the killer’s location, from soft furnishings to plug sockets — closed in on a Walter Mitty character called Luka Magnotta, a Canadian porn actor and wannabe model who had created an online persona for himself as fabulous as it was fictitious. Far from being a harmless weirdo, though, Magnotta showed all the signs of psychopathy — and went on to kill a human being before the police caught up with him.

The villain of ITV’s show had a bit less of Tom Ripley about him. He was a nightclub bouncer known to his colleagues as “Creepy Steve”, and though he stolidly denied the cat-killings in the face of all the evidence, he didn’t show any great flair as a master-criminal. He was clearly caught on CCTV, pretty early on, stabbing a cat. He had a knife in his flat contaminated with cat hair and blood. His mobile phone placed him at the location of 14 of the attacks. And his internet search history was full of things like “Dog killing cat”, which in the context is the sort of thing that tends to raise the long eyebrow of the law. Moriarty, at least, would have known how to use Safesearch Mode while planning his next heist.

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Still, a happy ending in both cases for the cat-loving forces of good. The online vigilantes in both these documentaries showed every sign of being responsible and cautious about what they did: they did everything they could to get the police involved. And their discoveries were in some cases genuinely helpful. It took a Brighton cat-lover to obtain the CCTV footage of Creepy Steve by following a trail of blood back to the scene of the killing; something that hadn’t apparently occurred to the police (busy as they no doubt were solving “proper” crimes). Funny, though, that we’re more inclined to give vigilantes a free pass when it comes to cats. Going after cat-killers online, fine: going after child-molesters, not so much (let’s not forget the innocent paediatrician hounded out of his house by concerned parents a few years back).

Pet cruelty seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s at once deeply emotive and, for the most part, below the level of the sort of thing that the police take an urgent interest in. Cats are low-level crime — in the Brighton case, the cat-killer had to be prosecuted for offences against property rather than cruelty to animals because there’s a far higher possible custodial sentence for the former than the latter. The law, literally, cares more about cats qua property than qua living beings. So why not get citizen detectives involved?

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The grisly history of serial killers might be one reason why not. Many if not most of them start out by torturing animals. Luka Magnotta was a classic example: like Ed Gein, he started on cats and moved on to people. Magnotta identified and threatened one of his principal pursuers, Deanna Thompson: he posted taunting videos of the casino where she worked. That is a bit yikes, as they say online. Creating fresh crimes, and making more work for your overstretched local bobby, by getting yourself killed is not anyone’s vigilante dream.

And there, again, we return to what documentaries like these say about our collective anxiety about cats. The stakes are at once low, and high. We infantilise them, much against their own nature. We pour into them — into their free-roaming nature and their vulnerability — our fears of an outside world that is more dangerous than our keyboard-tethered selves would quite like to look at face-on. And we fantasise, too, about being able to reach out and right wrongs in that outside world from the safety of our laptops. Prevention is better than cure, and documentaries be damned. Let’s lock the doors at night, and make sure the cats are in.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”

In one, a white supremacist shot anti-racism protesters in cold blood, and was acquitted because of his skin colour. In the other, a teenager tried to defend a community from violence, and ended up shooting two criminal lunatics in self-defence.

But why are these stories so irreconcilable? It’s a good rule of thumb that where people find it impossible to agree, it’s usually because there’s a fundamental difference in their assumptions about the world.

The Rittenhouse argument is just such a case. It’s powered by a profound disagreement about human nature: one that fuels many of the most intractable modern culture wars, from Mumsnet bunfights about babycare to arguments about classroom discipline and what the police force is for.

Are humans naturally good given the right circumstances? Or are we flawed and in need of threats and guidelines to keep us on the straight and narrow? The split is a legacy of radical ideas stretching back to the revolutionary 18^th century.

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Perhaps the most famous proponent of intrinsic human goodness is Rousseau, who claimed in Emile (1762) that children are born virtuous. As Rousseau sees it, we only need freedom, love and the right environment to spontaneously come to an understanding of what’s right.

When Emile was first published, it stood in stark challenge to the then-dominant view, emerging from the Christian tradition, that humans are tainted by ‘original sin’. From this vantage point, we’re naturally flawed, and must always struggle against our less virtuous instincts. Rousseau’s claim so appalled adherents of this then-dominant view that copies of his book were burned in the street.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The high-status view among contemporary elites is unmistakeably Team Rousseau.

At the tiniest scale, it’s expressed in the school of parenting that believes it’s wrong or even cruel to teach children how to live. I’ve written before about the currently popular ideas of ‘attachment parenting’ and ‘gentle parenting’, which emphasise self-discovery in a loving environment over routine, authority or punishment — and about how these views skew wealthy and liberal.

In education settings, the same idea appears as ‘child-centred pedagogy’, an approach that emphasises individual pathways and discovery over rote learning and teachers as authority figures. And at the biggest scale, it crops up as the claim that all the root causes of crime are external to humans: poverty, trauma, discrimination and so on. From this perspective, if we could only replace policing with tailored community services that eliminated these root causes, there would no longer be any crime.

Even outbreaks of mass public disorder are treated by Team Rousseau as an unfortunate-yet-understandable response to bad governance: when BLM protesters in Baltimore toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus last year, the Democrat politician Nanci Pelosi responded by shrugging it off as a natural expression of that community’s wishes. If the community doesn’t want the statue, she said, “the statue shouldn’t be there”. From this vantage point, public unrest is something akin to the weather: a naturally-occurring phenomenon in which leaders must strive to create the conditions for goodness, or else “people will do what they do”.

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If angry 18^th century moralists burned Rousseau’s book on education, today the moral majority is more likely to dogpile people who disagree with the belief that we’re all born good. Katherine Birbalsingh, headteacher of ‘Britain’s strictest school’, Michaela Community School in London, recently faced demands that she be fired after she referenced ‘original sin’ in the context of teaching. From the Team Original Sin perspective, as Michaela’s deputy head Jonathan Porter argued last year, providing empathy and interesting lessons won’t guarantee you good classroom behaviour. To Porter, children aren’t so much naturally good as capable of being habituated to the good. But that, he suggests, means making clear statements about what you believe to be good, setting rules on that basis, and enforcing them consistently.

This might be doable within a single school with a strong leader, such as Michaela. What happens, though, when a sizeable proportion of the ruling class think this approach is not just misguided but immoral?

Last summer, rioting broke out first in America and then worldwide —prompting US Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that order was important in and of itself and suggesting the army should be deployed to quell the riots. The ensuing shouting-match between Team Original Sin and Team Rousseau ended the career of the NYT’s comment editor.

Implicitly, then, for Team Rousseau, disorder is understandable when people are oppressed, while order is a nice-to-have, and only attainable if you create the right conditions to draw out people’s natural goodness. In schools, we can only expect pupils to behave if the teacher’s doing it right. And in the public square, we can only expect people not to riot if we abolish systemic oppression.

Applying this model to policing means diverting resources from enforcing order to addressing social issues. San Francisco, for example, voted last year to redirect $120m of funding from policing to community projects, with the aim of eliminating the causes of crime rather than simply punishing criminals.

But there’s always the nagging worry: what do you do with people who persistently refuse to have their natural goodness drawn out? And here, perhaps, we find a clue as to why Team Rousseau tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.

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As a child, Rousseau himself wasn’t allowed to play with other children. And it’s conceivable that more daily rough-and-tumble with his peers might have tempered the rosy view of natural childish virtue presented in Emile. When people who have led sheltered lives apply Team Rousseau beliefs in less rarefied settings, the result isn’t always as salutary as hoped. Even innocent experiments and self-discovery can impact negatively on others — especially where the experiment (innocent or otherwise) is in how far you can push one of your classmates.

For Team Original Sin, Birbalsingh advocates dealing with such schoolyard conflicts by imposing norms of public order: that is, ‘tight behaviour systems’ and ‘high expectations’. For Team Rousseau, though, it’s less clear what to do.

Research suggests that empathy-based ‘restorative justice’ approaches to school discipline yield mixed results at best. And when applied to law and order, Team Rousseau likewise runs aground on the problem of those who refuse to be rehabilitated. In San Francisco, as the focus of law and order has shifted to rehabilitation, incidences of burglary are rocketing — a fact that seems down to a minority of repeat offenders.

What can be done about this, especially where police no longer get involved? One plausible consequence is rising vigilantism. We can’t know definitively what motivated one teenager with an assault rifle to travel to a riot zone; perhaps he really was just attracted to the mayhem, and looking for a reason to join in. Or perhaps he thought he was making a last, heroic stand for order and in defence of those unable to defend themselves.

For when public norms of order collapse, or are undermined in the name of empathy, the only law that remains is that of brute strength. In San Francisco, even previously committed opponents of gun ownership are now responding to the disintegration of public order with talk of buying weapons.

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Most of the Rittenhouse culture war boils down to an argument over whether Rittenhouse was the bully, or the one who stands up to bullies. But what this argument ignores is the fate of those who are neither bully nor challenger. The weak, the old, the frightened or otherwise defenceless.

Perhaps the empathetic elites of Team Rousseau are simply secure enough in their leafy suburbs or gated compounds to ignore any unfortunate side-effects of treating order as secondary to freedom. But this raises the troubling possibility that sacrificing public order for empathy and individual freedom is, in practice, less high-minded than a dereliction of care to those that can’t defend themselves.

Worse still, the lesson from Michaela is that at root this isn’t really about scruples at all. It’s about a crippling lack of moral self-confidence. For you can’t set clear rules and form habits unless you have a clear idea of the good — and it’s this vision of the good that is the true missing piece.

Team Rousseau insists that human goodness is natural rather than ordered and enforced, and this in turn affords its believers the right to withhold judgement, and avoid making clear statements about the good. In practice, then, this amounts to an elite right — a duty, in fact — to shirk the central responsibility of elites since time immemorial: moral leadership.

And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold.

But Theresa May has sparked something of an outcry by suggesting that it’s not as simple as that. Police numbers have gone down during her tenures as home secretary and prime minister, and – in recent years – some forms of violent crime appear to have gone up. But, May says, there is “no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers”.

Inevitably there’s been a backlash. The papers have been full of knife crime lately – two teenagers have been murdered, and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme said that statistics show a 93% increase in the number of under-16s stabbed in the past five years. People need someone to blame, and falling police numbers are an obvious choice.

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But – and I don’t get to say this very often – Theresa May has a point. There is a link between police numbers and crime rates, but it appears to be weaker for violent crimes. Also, in general, the link is fairly weak and hard to tease out, and it’s likely that it’s not the most important factor here.

That said, it doesn’t let her off the hook.

First, it’s worth noting that any study of the links between crime and police is tricky. For one thing, the interaction is complex. If crime is going up, it makes sense for the government to employ more police, and vice versa. Then eventually the crime rate will start to fall again. So the data will show that increasing police numbers is followed by a fall in crime rates, but they’re not causing the fall: it’s just regression to the mean.

Worse than that, there are a million different factors behind crime rates, of which policing is only one, so it’s very hard to tease out the relationship at all.

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Crime has, in general, been going down for the last two decades or so. That’s true in the UK and in most of the world. The ONS’s Crime Survey for England and Wales says that there were a little over 6 million crimes (not including computer misuse) in the year to October 2018, down from a peak of almost 20 million in 1995. Violent crime has gone from a peak of about 4.5 million, again in 1995, to about 1.4 million.

But it’s levelled off in the last couple of years. And what the ONS calls “lower volume but higher harm” crimes, such as homicide and offences involving knives or sharp instruments, have gone up: there’s only been data on knife crime since 2011, but in that time it’s gone up from about 30,000 to about 40,000.

When you’re dealing with rare events like this – 40,000 incidents in a year, in a population of 70 million, is a vanishingly tiny number – I’m tempted to ask whether there’s anything to explain at all. Sometimes numbers go up and down.

In the case of the 93% increase in under-16s getting stabbed, which is I think taken from hospital statistics, the statistics that Dispatches used aren’t available, but the most recent stats show a jump from 95 in 2012/13 to 163 last year, a rise of 72%. The year the Coalition Government came to power, before police numbers were cut, there were 159 under-16 stabbings. It hardly needs explaining; the numbers jump around a lot.

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But Prof Will Jennings, a political scientist at the University of Southampton, and Prof Tom Kirchmaier, who lectures on crime and policing at the LSE, both tell me that the increase in knife crime is probably real. What they don’t say is that falling police numbers are necessarily the major factor behind it.

To be clear: they do both think that police numbers affect crime rates. Kirchmaier in particular points to a clever 2008 study by his LSE colleagues which looked at crime rates in inner-London boroughs in the weeks after the 2005 terror attacks. As it’s difficult to tease out cause and effect when it comes to crime, the idea was that in the wake of the atrocities, when police numbers in inner London were hugely increased but in the outer boroughs remained normal, there was a natural experiment. And it showed that crime went down when there were more police around.

Most studies find something like this. A review of the literature in 2011 looked at 13 studies, including the one mentioned above, and most of them reported a negative correlation between police numbers and crime rates. But the review is wary of drawing firm conclusions – it says that none of the studies on their own proves a causal link, and points out that most of the studies look at large, sudden increases in police presence, often in the wake of an atrocity, which are very visible.

Reductions, and therefore fewer patrols than normal, might not be noticed. The impact of police cuts and police increases could be “asymmetric”, the review says, and smaller, incremental changes may not have an effect. Cautiously, though, it suggests that there probably is a causal link.

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Yet there are two things worth noting. First, the link isn’t huge – an “elasticity” of about -0.3, which is to say you get a 3% reduction in crime for every 10% increase in policing. That’s not insignificant, but police numbers in England and Wales have only gone down by about 15% since 2010, so it’s no use if you want to explain a 33% rise in knife crime since 2011.

Second, the review of the literature found that increasing your police force had different effects on different crimes. Property crime went down most – which makes sense, as some of those crimes are presumably carried out by people who are weighing the potential risks and benefits, and that calculation will be affected by seeing more police around.

But, the review said, violent crime was much less affected – which again makes sense. “Much violent crime … is conducted in the heat of the moment in pubs or on the street, or behind closed doors in the home”, it notes, so one would not “expect consideration or even awareness of potential police attention to come into play”.

So police numbers probably are important, but May still has a point if she’s saying that it’s not the dominant factor in the increase in knife crime. You could even argue that reducing police numbers was the right thing to do, given that crime was falling.

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Let’s look at what the dominant factors could be. Some of them are out of the government’s hands: for instance, socioeconomic shocks often lead to crime, and although we didn’t see that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Jennings thinks it could be having a delayed effect.

But others are firmly in the government’s hands. Both Kirchmaier and Jennings said that a decade of cuts to social services and youth centres have probably contributed (although, again, it’s hard to tease out). Welfare cuts have led to a growth in youth homelessness, which makes young people more at risk of joining gangs.

And the Government’s continued cowardice over drugs leaves a huge industry in the hands of violent criminals – with gangs now recruiting “across county lines”, away from urban centres, and seeking new markets. A former Metropolitan Police chief has partly blamed school exclusions, driven by Government educational policy, for the rise in knife crime.

Theresa May has been either the home secretary or the prime minister for the last nine years. She’s probably right to say that the rise in knife crime isn’t clearly or directly linked to her cuts to police numbers. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t her responsibility.