Most of policing can’t be learnt from books, but good luck trying to tell that to the current breed of university-educated police chiefs.
Common sense, the ability to engage with people from every strata of society, courage, and being able to anticipate what might happen next in any given situation, are all skills that you either possess or you don’t, and if you fall into the latter category, then trust me, frontline policing is not for you.
But don’t worry if these are not your strongpoints, for soon after joining you can escape the rough and tumble of the mean streets of Britain, and rapidly climb the greasy pole of promotion. In double-quick time you can become a senior officer, and maybe you’ll reach the heights of chief, with a huge salary and a knighthood or a damehood to go alongside that, and there’ll be a gold-plated pension awaiting you upon retirement.
Mind you, in order to enjoy all of this, you’ll need a degree, (a master's wouldn’t do you any harm), you’ll have to become familiar with the word-salad psychobabble garbage that police chiefs spout, and really enjoy life behind a desk. Oh yes, and buffets, lots of buffets, countless meetings and seminars where generally speaking, the square root of bugger all is achieved.
Of course, police chiefs themselves are responsible for getting policing into the catastrophic state that it is currently mired in, alongside their pretentiously named, ‘College of Policing’, but the actual universities that these senior officers went to, and the academics who taught them, also need to shoulder a huge amount of the blame. And their hugely damaging influence continues.
There are now forty-seven UK universities that will happily take your money and educate you into achieving a ‘Professional Policing’ degree, which for many police bosses remains the preferred way for recruits to learn the basics of policing. Some of the lecturers who lead the teaching of this material have never served a single day as a police officer. I can’t imagine surgeons are taught by people who have never wielded a scalpel.
With the number of these universities now matching the number of police services in the UK, I hope you can begin to appreciate the scale of the grip that academia has on policing.
The pathetic and dangerous effort to purge policing of confrontation is even worse than you think - Peter BleksleyGetty Images
And it gets worse. Only this week I sat down with a source who is closely connected to the thin blue line, who regaled me with tales of newcomers to the job being discouraged from using confrontational language and smart tactics during interviews with suspects, which is leading to clearly guilty criminals skipping freely out of police stations.
This pathetic and frankly dangerous effort to purge policing of confrontation, is also leading to the reduction of stop and searches that are being carried out, all whilst we are in the grip of a knife crime epidemic.
You might not be surprised to hear that these fluffy, flakey, woke and liberal attitudes are being propagated by some of their lecturers at university.
No wonder there’s a crime wave, and no wonder that certain idiotic police officers are arriving at the front doors of innocent people who have committed no crimes, but have merely written things on social media platforms that delicate souls have been offended by.
Yesterday I saw an amazing statue of the incredible writer George Orwell. His totemic book, ‘1984’, continues to sell in substantial quantities these days, nearly seventy years after it was first published, as fears of living under an increasingly totalitarian state grow day-by-day, and attacks on free speech endlessly proliferate, sometimes aided and abetted by dangerously ignorant, poorly trained and abysmally led police officers. I paused to read a quote from Orwell that had been inscribed alongside his towering bronze. It read: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Police officers of this once great nation please take note.
