Bobbies in Trouble

When constabulary duty's to be done, The policeman's lot is not a happy one.

-- The Pirates of Penzance

To the U.S. tourist driving on the right but wrong side of the road, or hopelessly demanding a drink at midnight, the London police seem paragons of patience. Whether breaking up a race riot or gingerly plucking anti-nuclear squatters from the pavement, the brawny, pink-cheeked bobby almost never resorts to the panicky brutality of the French flic or the officious zeal of the German Polizist. Britain's police, armed only with a night stick, still believe in pounding a beat. Its streets and parks after dark are among the world's safest; and while an English householder is away on vacation, likely as not the bobbies will keep an eye on his front door. But in recent years, and particularly since the Profumo-Keeler-Ward scandals, Britons have come to suspect that their police are not only markedly less proficient at keeping the Queen's Peace than of old, but may also have become less scrupulous in upholding the traditionally high standards of British justice.

Smarter Crooks. When it comes to solving crime, it is still elementary to call in Scotland Yard. Last week, led by such wise old bluebottles as Commander George Hatherill, 65, the Yard's dean of sleuths, who speaks eight languages and has solved 17 murders, Yard men investigating the Great Buckinghamshire Train Robbery succeeded in rounding up nine suspects, recovered $761,367 of the $7,000,000 loot. Also on hand were Ernest Millen, boss of the Flying Squad, alias the Heavy Mob, whose 100-odd sleuths know more about the underworld than Dante; and the Terrible Twins, top Detectives Tom Butler and Peter Vibart, who have cracked many a big case together. Yet, so far at least, the gang's ringleaders were still at large. Even without such humiliations at the hands of master crooks, the lot of Britain's 76,530 policemen is an increasingly unhappy one.

The nation's police forces are critically undermanned (authorized strength: 82,313), sadly underpaid (sergeant's pay averages $3,000 a year) and, in many critics' eyes, undereducated. In recent years, police recruits have included not a single university graduate; only about 10% of all new bobbies have the equivalent of a high school diploma. British criminals, by contrast, are becoming more imaginative and technically proficient every year. As for Scotland Yard, even its staunchest admirers admit that the legend tends to overshadow performance. Of a record number of crimes reported in London last year, fewer than 25% were solved; police have recovered none of the $700,000 stolen in four major robberies from one bank during the past three years.

No Separation. As for the Profumo case, though an official inquiry into its security aspects is nearly complete, the government has given little assurance that it will lessen what the Economist recently called "the already cumbrous weight of suspicion that there is something nasty in the woodshed." Last week the Labor Party's "shadow" Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, called for a royal commission to investigate the roles played throughout by the government, judiciary and police.

Among other hints of nastiness in the woodshed, or the police station, Britons were perturbed by recent charges that Scotland Yard had browbeaten a convicted prostitute into testifying against Ward (she later recanted), and by speculation that police deliberately failed to produce a defense witness at the trial of "Lucky" Gordon, the Jamaican singer who was imprisoned on charges of beating Christine Keeler, and later mysteriously freed. Since there is no watertight separation of executive, judicial and legislative powers* in Britain's unwritten constitution, the disquieting implication to many Britons was that, in its embarrassment over the Profumo scandal, the government had exerted extraordinary pressure to put Ward behind bars. If such suspicions are unfair, there was little likelihood that they would ever be fully investigated, let alone refuted.

Danger to Democracy? Like many other legacies of 19th century Britain, the law enforcement system seems almost to have been designed not to work. To some extent, it was. Sir Robert Peel, who in 1829 organized the first modern force (and gave the bobbies his name), admitted to grave misgivings that it might be used as an instrument of tyranny. Unlike a soldier or civil servant, the British policeman is not a "servant of the Crown" but has the ambiguous legal status of a uniformed civilian who is merely paid to do what every citizen should do on his own.

Even to this day, many Britons believe that a strong, unified police force could lead to a police state. As a result, they have 158 separate local forces whose chief constables are accountable only to themselves. When a royal commission in 1962 recommended continuation of this system, Commission Member A. L. Goodhart--an eminent U.S. jurist who was then Master of Oxford's University College--objected that a single, centrally controlled police network would be infinitely more efficient, and more democratic, than the "empty velvet glove" with which Britain is now trying to defeat organized crime. "The danger in a democracy," said he, "does not lie in a central police that is too strong but in local police forces that are too weak." In day-to-day police work, the lack of liaison between forces--more than 50% have fewer than 350 men--inevitably helps the criminal. Another boon to careful crooks: a law by which police are only allowed to file fingerprints of convicted criminals, not of suspects.

Buckinghamshire's chief constable, Brigadier John Cheny Cheney (Eton, Sandhurst, India), did not even bother to enlist Scotland Yard's help in the train robbery until nearly a day after it happened. What worries many experts is that such built-in inefficiency can only cost Britain's bobbies what remains of their old prestige. As it is, they are fighting the greatest crime wave in the nation's history with insufficient manpower and inadequate coordination, amid deepening public distrust that suggests their lot will be unhappier yet.

* The Lord High Chancellor, a Cabinet member who earns $5,600 a year more than the Prime Minister, serves simultaneously as the government's chief legal adviser, the nation's senior judge, titular head of the legal profession and Speaker of the House of Lords.

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