Why do the British hate the police? When PC Bluestone killed his wife and two of his four children, cries of horror and anguish went up. But between the lines of the reports and editorials, there emerged, undeniably, an "I told you so" attitude to the tragedy: it confirmed our view of the cop as a loose cannon rather than a crime-stopper.
We have the Hamiltons' allegations that the police informed the media, before they informed the couple themselves, that they would be charged in connection with a sexual assault; the reports that black and Asian youths are being stopped by police at three times the rate of their white peers; calls from David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, for the police force to ditch its "outmoded attitudes". Thus the police have become yet another profession we like to pillory.
Like teachers, coppers nowadays find themselves the victims of government fudging - remember when Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, inflated the number of bobbies on the beat he could deliver? - and bureaucratic red tape (a typical Met officer will spend 11 hours a week filling forms). They are denigrated on the Today programme and made the targets of damning, well-publicised documents such as the Macpherson report. And they are the focus of media scrutiny: before the Notting Hill Carnival last month, there was much excited speculation about just how vicious the police would prove in dealing with the predominantly black revellers.
Once upon a time, a policeman was much admired, and a bobby on the beat meant you could sleep easy at night. Hollywood lionised coppers, television sentimentalised them, and any number of youths aspired to become one of the boys in blue. Policing was a respectable profession: you were risking your life for your countrymen's right to be free of fear. The cop was seen as pitting his brains and brawn against the thief, the murderer, the rapist and the perv.
Those who saw the cop as a politicised pawn who helped prop up the establishment - and they included union members, Northern Ireland nationalists and political extremists on both right and left - found many sympathisers during the Sixties, when Vietnam and student protests turned the cop into the pig. But, on the whole, we stood by our police force, and saw the police officer as one of us in uniform, rather than an agent of the state.
In the white community, that is. Among blacks and Asians, the police were always suspected of bigotry and of allowing prejudice to interfere with their work. Well before the Macpherson report blew the whistle on the "institutionalised racism" of the Met, leaders in ethnic communities saw the police as "them" against "us".
This minority view has now gained currency. Neither a liberal government nor the liberal media can afford to support, in any way, an institution that has been fingered as racist. And no government, of any political persuasion, likes the messengers who bear grim tidings. Teachers who point to ill-disciplined and increasingly inattentive children, nurses who talk of long waiting lists, policemen who quote soaring crime figures - all are equally unpopular and, as a result, perfect scapegoats for a campaign of mis-representation. The latest Home Office exercise in mud-slinging took place early this summer, when spin-doctors branded the police service inadequate, inefficient and rife with Spanish practices. Blunkett also condemned the "police early-retirement scam" - which provoked the wife of a serving Met officer to write an incensed letter to the Guardian describing how her husband had been threatened with a rifle, stopped by two men who had a handgun, and subjected to verbal and physical assaults.
No wonder the Met is having to offer free psychiatric services to its officers to counter a rising tide of depression. And no wonder police forces across the country are finding that recruitment drives are fruitless.
