TJF

“TJF.”

It’s a saying as old as policing time.

For the uninitiated, it stands for “The Job’s F**ked”.

It’s an observation about the state of policing. And PCs have been making it since 1829.

At times, it can be tempting to agree with them - and with the chorus of voices from outside policing wanting to tell us that “All Coppers Are Bastards.” After all, the evidence isn’t hard to find. 

But they’re wrong. Both the TJF people and the ACAB people.

Before I explain why though, it’s important to recognise that policing is currently in a desperately difficult place - undoubtedly the most challenging of my lifetime. And that’s for three specific reasons (here, I hope you’ll forgive the bluntness of my language, but I’m attempting to remain true to the subject of the piece):

1. The relentless ability for policing to f**k itself

Before it looks anywhere else, policing needs to look inward:s

• At it’s own people - and the capacity of a small number of them to commit crimes that defy comprehension
• At it’s own people - and the capacity of a greater number of them to behave unprofessionally in any number of different ways
• At the culture that has apparently gone unchallenged in too many parts of the organisation
• At it’s own leadership 
• At it’s own promotion systems
• At it’s own recruitment and training
• At it’s own vetting and professional standards
• At its own investment in its own people

We should never shy away from holding policing up to the light.

That said, the reasons for the current state of policing extend far beyond policing itself.

(2) The relentless capacity for politics (& politicians) to f**k policing

• It would be impossible to understate the damage done by politicians to policing in the last 13 years
• 44,000 officers and staff cut. Hundreds of police stations closed and sold. Specialist units disbanded. Neighbourhood policing run into the ground. Operational policing dangerously politicised. And so it has gone on.
• The people responsible for all of this were warned repeatedly about the consequences of what they were doing (by those who actually knew and understood what they were talking about), but they didn’t listen
• The combination of ideology, ignorance and gross incompetence on the part of those who were supposed to be in charge has, in my view, done more to f**k policing than anything else
• The damage caused by austerity (not only to policing) will take generations to mend - and the cost will be greatest for those least able to bear it
• I should add here that my concerns are not primarily about party. I have no interest in left and right, only in right and wrong. And I have as many concerns about the Labour-run City Hall as I do about the Conservative-run Home Office

But it isn’t only the politicians.

(3) The relentless capacity for the Press to f**k policing

• I’m not talking here about the real journalists
• I don’t ever want the real journalists to shy away from asking difficult questions of policing - from demanding more and better from the men and women in blue. I’m for more transparency and accountability, not less
• The real journalists aren’t part of the problem. They’re part of the solution
• The people I’m talking about here are the ones with an agenda - compromised by political connections or more concerned with likes and clicks than they are with balance or truth
• Because, for every story (rightly) told about policing done wrong, I could tell you a thousand involving the kind of humanity and heroism that would likely take your breath away

Because the fact is that The Job Isn’t F**ked.

And I say that with confidence because I know the Job. More importantly, I know the women and men who do the Job. And the overwhelming majority of them are about as extraordinary as people could ever be.

While you’re reading this, there are police officers out there:

• saving lives
• finding lost children
• safeguarding vulnerable adults
• arresting dangerous offenders
• dealing with crimes and car crashes and cot deaths and every other imaginable kind of catastrophe
• putting themselves in harm’s way in defence of complete strangers

Just a few weeks ago, Nottinghamshire Police Sergeant Graham Saville gave his life attempting to help a distressed man on a set of railway tracks. And greater love hath no one than that.

That’s how I know the “TJF” people and the “ACAB” people are wrong.

Because of Graham Saville - and the tens of thousands of women and men he served alongside.