British policing is having an identity crisis and the public are paying the price

Police don’t know what they should be focusing on, and the public haven’t been asked, writes Lizzie Dearden

An estimated third of police time is being used for non-police work (Getty)

As yet another damning report on the state of British policing is published, warning of criminals going free, plummeting public trust and poor oversight, focus is starting to shift from asking what is going wrong, to why.

The impact of years of austerity, which decimated both police officer numbers and the wider criminal justice system, is clear to see, and was implicitly acknowledged by Boris Johnson’s drive to rapidly recruit 20,000 new constables.

But what has been less widely recognised is an identity crisis at the heart of British policing, with confusion and contention mounting around the basic question of what officers should be doing.