Give me a firm place to stand.........

 

Is policing better today than it was 50 years ago?  Is this even a valid question?  My answer to both is  straightforward: ‘I don’t know’.  I suspect that most things are better and some things have declined but generally it is the sort of question that can take up a lot of time and enough hot air to power a dirigible.  I really DON’T want to start a debate on this because what concerns me most is my own shifting perspective.  As a grumpy git I find the sight of scruffy police officers looking bored and staring at their telephones really annoying.  I don’t understand why wearing a traditional helmet is so difficult and I don’t like the rather lightweight approach to discipline.  On the other hand my professional dealings with police officers show me that modern officers are bright, caring, thoughtful and determined to do the right thing.  As events demonstrate there is no shortage of brave people in today’s service. The horrors of racism and misogyny still haunt the service but they are, thankfully,   but echoes of what they were.  I am a product of my own professional experience, of my age and political development.  In short I am an unreliable observer.  Therefore my message to anybody who reads anything I say about policing is that they should take everything with a pinch of salt.  Luckily only a very few people even pretend to read anything I produce.  This is both a disappointment and a relief.

Being interested in police history should give me a steady platform to comment on modern policing.  Policing often ignores the lessons of the past so a knowledge of history should help me have a greater understanding of context – I should know how, and maybe why, we are like we are.  Alas the complexity of police history is such that other than being able to challenge the myths about the past I am no better equipped than the next pensioner to measure the rate of improvement or decline in the standards of policing.

Social media has recently been full of adverse (and some positive) comment about a scene in the series 24 HOURS IN POLICE CUSTODY which shows an officer with a novel haircut.  I have only seen a screen shot and not the actual programme so I venture no observations about the officer who, may well represent many of the positive developments I have mentioned.  My immediate reaction to the haircut was to think of a picture I saw recently of a Scottish Chief Constable in 1914 (Dumbartonshire?) whose facial hair was so luxuriant as to be a distraction.   We don’t have a police force for young people and another for the old, or one for the middle classes and another for the poor. The same organisation has to meet the needs of all.  It is not surprising that there is a mismatch in expectations and aspirations.  We all see what we chose to look at and observe from an angle dictated by our standpoint.

                                                                    1914 v 2024?

This week I have been reading Police Review magazine for the year 1973.  When reading old newspapers and magazines I am easily diverted from the subject of my research which makes me a rather poor and a very slow amateur historian.

I have written elsewhere (i)  about the burden on the British Transport Police of managing terrorism in 1973.  As a schoolboy at the time I remember the constant disruption caused by the IRA technique of using the  telephone bomb threat as a weapon (rather than as a sort of warning as some suggest) and the regular discovery of improvised explosive devices.  Terrorism was to later dominate my own career.

I was struck by the issues that were under discussion in 1973.  Terrorism of course (it was the year of the Old Bailey bombing and a dreadful year in Northern Ireland).  The move towards recognising women as equal members of the service (a move that some would say has been glacial) comes up from time to time but the language of the 1970s tends to leave modern readers a little uncomfortable.  There are comments about poor pay and conditions, about ‘race relations’ (the police were in denial then as now), about shoplifting not being treated seriously and about the leniency of sentences.    There are plenty of letters from pensioners complaining about the decline in standards in the police service, including some from officers who had joined during the First World War.  There is an interesting letter from a Muslim officer talking about his faith and his role as a police officer and a report from the Isle of Man about a recent case in which youths had been sentenced to 4 strokes of the birch.

1973 was the 80^th anniversary of the first publication of Police Review (which continued until 2011) and it is full of retrospective articles and a few that seek to look forward as to the future.  The great C H Rolph (who retired from the City of London Police in 1947 and was still writing in the 1990s) wrote, rather reluctantly it seems, an article about the future.  He made several, tongue in cheek, predictions about what policing might look like in 2053:

 

“There will be direct entrants to the senior ranks, and much intermittent trouble about them, though it will be disguised in a variety of ways which will keep the ghost of Lord Trenchard quiet” 

              “Strange new crimes will have been developed in a highly automated society...”

              “All wages will be paid by cheque and Friday afternoon will be like any other afternoon”

              “All road vehicles will be battery driven and noiseless…..”

                                                                                                                   (Police Review 05 Jan 1973                                                                                                                         p11)

 

The same edition contains a look back at the changes in policing made since the first issue was published in 1893.  This piece was by another regular contributor to Police Review, William Gay, the Chief Constable of British Transport Police.  He pointed out that to read old copies of the magazine was “like a journey in a time machine that takes you back full circle to the place you started”. (Ibid)

Is 1973 recent history or was it another age?  The current President of the United States was a Senator in 1973 (a senior national political office) but our current Prime Minister was not yet born.

It is tempting to conclude by saying something like ‘somethings change and somethings stay the same’ or that the service ‘takes two steps forward and one step back’.  But such aphorisms seem rather trite and don’t help me get to grip with my own opinions about the state of the service.  Perhaps those of us interested in history need to look more closely at individual areas (crime reduction, equality, murder, community policing etc) of activity and try and discern the nature and rate of progress or retreat.  This is impossible without putting policing in its wider socio political context.  To do this we lean closer to academic historians and away from police history as a series of stories about the ‘good old days’.  I am now pondering whether police history has improved or declined over the last 20 years………….perhaps history isn’t what it used to be.

 

Phil Trendall

 

Notes

(i)                   Blog 13 July 2022:  transportpolicinghistory.blogspot.com

(ii)                 Police Review 5^th January 1973