Perhaps it’s not surprising that last August’s rioting in London got out of control so quickly. My colleague and former Metropolitan Police officer Peter Power wrote afterward in The Telegraph that changes in public expectation of what police should do reduced their abilities to respond properly. Peter wrote,

As P.J. Waddington says in his book ‘The Strong Arm of the Law’: ‘The legitimacy of the police in Britain has traditionally been founded not upon conformity to popular wishes, but upon impartiality.’ [T]he force is crippled by a devotion to community consent in a country that has become a patchwork of discrete and often intolerant communities. [A] dispirited police force… truly stopped being a force, preferring instead to now be a ‘service provider’.

A service provider is a vendor. Would you ever let a vendor put you in handcuffs? Or in jail? OK, I can hear the jokes already…

By Nathaniel Forbes, Forbes Calamity Prevention Pte Ltd, Singapore. Posted: 4 January 2012 at 3:37 pm (UTC +8 hours)