The police are unconvinced by Boris Johnson’s pledge for more officers. You can’t blame them

Editorial: Austerity has ruined what used to be a fruitful relationship between the Tories and the thin blue line

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It is in the nature of those at the top of our public services to complain about lack of resources. Indeed, it is an important role for them as no one else will do it so expertly or with such authority.

So when senior figures in policing warn, as they now do, that the government’s plans to boost policing numbers are inadequate and insufficient to the task, it might in the past have been easy to simply dismiss them.

No longer. Policing in Britain is in crisis, and a politically driven target for recruiting police officers is unlikely to solve it.

Recent tragic events illustrate more powerfully than any speech by a chief constable or press release from a politician what has been going wrong.

The first job of any administration is to ensure the safety of its citizens from threats from home and abroad. We have reached a point where the police cannot even defend themselves from assault. The thugs know that the forces of law and order are stretched, that the back-up help available to an officer on call-out is too far away, that detection rates are in any case low, and that muggers, burglars, street dealers and thieves have a chance of getting away with it – if they manage to flee the scene and evade arrest.

The statistics also bear this out – there are more attacks on officers and a rising proportion are serious. More worrying still is an alienation from the police in some places, perhaps in part a lasting legacy of the 2011 riots, and the collapse in neighbourhood policing efforts. Too many people stand by or even join in when a police officer is being kicked around on the ground.

Boris Johnson may be sincere in his promise to make the streets safe, but he is going about it the wrong way, it would seem. Recruiting new officers to walk around our cities and villages may not in fact be the best way to spend the billions that are suddenly now being found in what looks suspiciously like a pre-election stunt.

In a digital age where evidence is “virtual” and internet-based fraud is growing, the need is more for better detectives – detection rates have also been falling. Knife crime and street attacks command the headlines, and will need physical, fast-moving forces to tackle them. But once the perpetrators and gang leaders are in custody, painstaking work needs to be done to gather evidence to disrupt their wider networks and activities. That takes time, skills and software, as well as brain power and physical fitness.

Today the police are employing methods more suited to a 1960s bank blag than a 21st-century hacking of personal data and bank accounts. The Hatton Garden heist, the most famous in recent years, was a throwback executed by pensioners who weren’t too hot on how mobile phones, CCTV and ANPR work. The younger crowd are more tech savvy.

The police also need more back-office staff as well as uniformed officers and detectives, again something absent from Mr Johnson’s schemes. Indeed, there is no apparent plan for how the regional and county constabularies will divide up the new personnel. Does the rural crime boom and the county lines phenomenon mean north Wales and Norfolk will get more than the hard-pressed Met or Greater Manchester? And what about the national crime agency and counterterrorism?

It also takes time and money to train and equip officers. With so many stations now closed, there may not be anywhere to put them. They need more than a uniform, a pair of Doc Martens and a truncheon: they need software, body cams, tablets, cars and vans, forensics labs, modern comms and competent prosecutors to take the evidence into court for a conviction. All are lacking, all still awaiting a plan. At best it will take most of the next decade to make good on Mr Johnson’s promise.

Perhaps the most grievous loss in recent years has not been so much the staffing and expertise among detectives and senior officers in leadership roles – none easily replaced – so much as the loss of neighbourhood policing and the intelligence gathering that goes with it. This work, local and unglamorous, never finds its way into the TV dramas, and was always underrated. It found itself far too easily ditched in the years of austerity. It ruptured the alliance between residents and police, made intimidation of informers more easy and thus detection and anticipation harder. That too will need more than tougher stop and search laws and longer sentences to put right.

The curious thing is how the natural party of law and order, the Conservatives, fell out of love with the thin blue line, and vice versa. In the past, as in the 1930s or 1980s, Tory governments protected police pay and numbers, even when cutting the armed forces. They had one eye on the effects of economic hardship on crime and disorder. Then after 2010 Theresa May and George Osborne – united for once – spied huge savings from a supposedly bloated and inefficient force. The police were treated like some archaic vested interest. The hostility was cordially returned.

Times have changed and high-profile bravery in incidents from terror attacks to burglary and traffic offences has made the Tories think again. Public opinion and sympathy has shifted markedly, and rightly so. After a long struggle, the coppers have finally nicked their slippery Tory tormentors. Mr Johnson may want to rebuild trust with the police, but he shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t go easy on him.