The police are not our ‘mates’

‘I don’t think you have, mate.’ These were the words of the unidentified policeman who disbelieved the dying Henry Nowak when the boy told him that he had been stabbed. Every innocent word when added to the others is vile, but for me the ‘mate’ stands out – there’s the whole stinking world of contemptuous DEI-fuelled murderous smugness in it. 

Not since Sadiq Khan’s ‘Say Maaate To A Mate’ campaign of 2023 has this pleasant, everyday word sounded so atrociously inauthentic. You remember that one. If one young man says something sexist / sexy (shades of Spinal Tap’s poor bemused Nigel), then it’s the social responsibility of his ‘maaates’ to call him out on it. Along with this went untold public money spent on posters informing the innocent Tube-taker that cat-calling is an offence and that ‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and will not be tolerated’. There were even sexy – sorry, old habits die hard – plain-clothes policewomen allegedly spotted in Redbridge, Surrey, hoping to ‘finger’ any louts daft enough to call them darlin’. And where has all this look-after-our-laydees palaver led us to? A judge letting three teenage gang-rapists go free last month, after telling them how well they had behaved – in court, if not towards the terrified girls, aged 14 and 15, whose lives they ruined.

But the ‘mate’ directed at Henry Nowak was a whole other level of wrong – sinister, not silly. We knew that the whole ruling regime was rotten. Even despite the endless policing of, arresting over and jailing for social-media posts, some of us free-speech maniacs had maintained a belief that the police force, being mostly of working-class origin, hadn’t really swallowed the excrement of wokeness. Now it appears that like a lot of hirelings of feudal lords, they’re even keener to carry out orders than their masters are to issue them. After all, what is the modern police force but muscle to protect the liberal establishment? Hence their frequent lack of anything approaching interest in solving crimes that happen to ordinary people.

Of course, some people join the police because they want to help people, and to see justice done. It’s important to say that a lot of us, including me, would never have the guts for this career. But increasingly one feels that the kind who wanted to wear scary uniforms and have the power to push others around are coming to the fore. This has always been the situation as regards sexual perverts, I’d guess. Met officer David Carrick committed 48 rapes over 17 years, while Wayne Couzens, killer of Sarah Everard, was affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ by his Civil Nuclear Constabulary colleagues prior to being hired by the Met.

But these were old-fashioned monsters. With the new kind of callous functionary, wokeness (sorry, but there’s no better word) gives them the cloak of invisibility, whether it’s ‘protecting’ transvestites from feminists whose faces got in the way of their meaty fists or ‘protecting’ bogus victims of racism, like Vickrum Digwa, who played the race card to deflect from his murder of young Henry.

Once more that quote from Huxley’s Crome Yellow comes to mind, as it does with increasing frequency:

‘The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour “righteous indignation” – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.’

It’s funny to think of what those nutters who want to abolish the police – the ‘anti-carceral’ lot – must be feeling now. Quite confused, I’d wager. Are the police their friends now that they’ve adopted the crazed woke idea that being colourblind is wrong, and that the pure-hearted POC should always be believed over the inherently evil gammon? Or are the cops still lackeys of the ruling class? My own feelings about them change on a regular basis; personal experience generally good, high-profile cases jaw-droppingly generally awful. Like the old joke about prison food, they’re rubbish – and there’s not enough of them.

The police seem such an integral part of society that it’s strange to think that they’ve only existed for a relatively short time as we know them. In the 18th century, communities policed themselves with constables and night watchmen. No doubt the anti-carceral mob would consider this a desirable state of affairs, but it seems even more open to corruption than the current arrangement.

Who can forget the creepy alliance between the police and local mosques when ‘community leaders’ appeared to be calling the tune in Stoke-on-Trent in 2024, as a video emerged showing a police liaison officer telling a group of recently rioting young Muslims:

‘If there are any weapons or anything like that, then what I would do is discard them at the mosque. Don’t give anybody any reason to have any interaction with police. So if there are any weapons, get rid of them and we won’t have to arrest anyone.’

Letting ‘elders’ call the tune seems a sure way to mayhem – and imagine if white people tried it! ‘Okay boys, stand at ease – the Bowls Team have got the white youngsters calmed down. Nothing to see here!’

Then there was the time that a creepy West Midlands policeman insisted on opening and closing his address to offended Muslims with Arabic phrases. I do hope one of them takes the trouble to learn a few words of Hebrew next time the Jewish community are genuinely terrified. Probably not, though, the Jews being so well behaved. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. Or in this case, the oily copper.

Oh, for the old days before DEI, when cut-purses and grave-robbers roamed the land, and public executions were a regular weekend entertainment! Even by the start of the 19th century the population of London – one and a half million – were policed by 450 constables and 4,500 night watchmen. Then came the home secretary Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 and the police force as we know it was born. We’ve been through a few changes since then; the ones in popular culture are interesting. From the avuncular Dixon of Dock Green to the hard rotters of The Sweeney, we’ve somehow managed to keep believing that the British police are ‘the best in the world’ – an actual line from the Tom Robinson Band’s ‘Glad To Be Gay’ sung ironically, going on to detail how the British bobby is keen on ‘raiding our pubs for no reason at all / Lining the customers up by the wall / Picking out people, knocking them down / Resisting arrest as they’re kicked on the ground / Searching their houses, calling them queer.’

How much life has changed since the 1970s! Now, police dance gaily with barely-clothed fetish gimps at Pride parades, looking askance at any women who complain about children being present – and ‘queer’ is a compliment, one that many straight people adopt in an effort to appear cool. But of course this cleaving to queerness on the part of the police may well yet pose comical problems when it comes up against their slavish behaviour towards Islam, as detailed above and also seen both in the arresting of a man for being ‘openly Jewish’ and therefore potentially upsetting to a pro-Palestinian march, and in fabricating evidence against Maccabi Tel Aviv in order to ban their fans from Birmingham – the West Midlands police chief later blaming AI, of all the pathetic excuses.

And of course the terrible rapes of thousands of teenage children and girls by gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, which took place with the collusion of numerous police forces, some of whom ignored their horrific complaints and wrote them off as ‘slags’. White working-class girls are slags, white working-class boys are ‘mate’ – but they still count for nothing when the chance to get DEI brownie-points comes along. That Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world suggests that the fuzz are limbering up to serve their next masters as they see the power of the stale, pale kind receding. With such divided loyalties between the ‘queer community’ and Islamism, it would be amusing to see whose side they took now, should the incident from 2006 take place when Sir Iqbal Sacranie opined that homosexuality was a sin, and was promptly investigated by the cops.

What’s the worst crime that can be committed in the cause of DEI? The judge who let off the Traveller rapists of those teenagers was streets ahead when it came to who could win a prize for the most vile behaviour in the name of brotherly love. But those police officers who treated a dying young man like a lying nuisance in the name of being anti-racist are perhaps even worse – and calling him ‘mate’ as they did so was the chef’s kiss of utter and complete moral degradation on behalf of those who should have been helping him. Never mind, though – there’s bound to be something even worse a short way down the road, as the Danse Macabre of identity politics leads us towards something that looks very much like a civil war.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.