Counting Shadows in the Fog

We’re constantly told that modern policing is all about efficiency now – targeting known offenders, analysing data, redeploying resources to hotspots. Very clever. Very 21st century. Except it rather misses the point that most people don’t want to read about policing, they want to see it.

For decades, we had that rare and curious creature known as the “bobby on the beat.” He wasn’t armed with a tablet, didn’t need predictive analytics, and couldn’t log into a dashboard showing you a heatmap of last Tuesday’s antisocial behaviour. What he did have was presence. A human one. Uniformed, visible, and often recognisable – usually by name, or by the fact he’d once bollocked you for scrumping apples and said he’d be “having a word with your mum,” who he probably knew.

But then came the shift. The emphasis moved from preventing crime through visibility, to invisibly solving crimes after they’ve been committed – with varied results. It’s a kind of retrospective reassurance, really: the idea that someone, somewhere, is poring over the grainy CCTV of your assault and will get back to you sometime between now and the heat death of the universe.

And here's the rub – there’s no spreadsheet in Whitehall that can show you how much crime that visibility actually prevented. You can’t log a mugging that didn’t happen because someone clocked the copper. You can’t put on a bar chart the neighbour dispute that never turned violent because it was quietly defused on the pavement, not through a crime number and a voicemail two days later.

The Home Office doesn’t like that kind of vagueness. They prefer things they can count – arrests, clear-up rates, call volumes. Prevention isn’t measurable. It’s like trying to count shadows in fog. And so we replaced the human deterrent with a statistical mirage. Policing became like the rest of public service under late-stage capitalism – optimised to death, run like a call centre, and quietly reoriented to serve those who can shout loudest or pay quickest.

And that’s the thing: the bloke on the street doesn’t care about shoplifting at Waitrose or a protest that upset Shell’s PR team. He cares about being robbed, stabbed, assaulted, threatened – the stuff that actually scars people. And what’s he told when he rings up in panic? “No officers available.” But glue yourself to a government minister’s Jag and half of Hampshire shows up in stab vests.

So has it actually got worse? Yes – and no. Back in the early 1960s, we had about 6 homicides per million people. By 2002, that had shot up to 15 per million. Now it's around 10 – better than it was, but still well above 1960s levels. Other violent crime followed a similar path: rising through the '80s and '90s, before starting to fall again in the 2010s. But that’s cold comfort if you’ve just been headbutted at a bus stop and no one comes.

And let’s not pretend these stats mean much to the average citizen. Because however the data is spun, what matters is how it feels. And it feels like no one’s watching anymore. The patrols are gone. Police stations shuttered. Community officers cut. Trust eroded. We’re told the system is working – but it’s not working for us.

The irony is, even the politicians have noticed. Starmer’s now promising 13,000 new neighbourhood officers by 2029, which is basically a tacit admission that taking them away was a disaster. Turns out that visible policing does matter – not just for catching villains, but for stopping people from becoming villains in the first place.

So yes – the statistics are complicated. Yes – the picture’s not uniformly bleak. But here’s the truth that no one in a ministerial office wants to hear: the bloke on the street doesn’t feel protected. He feels forgotten. Because the only people who seem to get immediate police attention are the ones with a hedge fund, a press officer, or a protest banner.

We’ve gone from patrolling to responding. From reassuring to data-mining. And in doing so, we’ve quietly swapped community presence for digital absence. It’s all terribly efficient. Until you actually need a copper – and find you’re on hold.