Many British institutions, from the BBC to HM Prisons and Probation Service, are in the process of destroying long-held reputations for reliability, competence and fair dealing. But none, arguably, are running down their account at the bank of historic prestige quite so quickly and recklessly as the police.

In numerous parts of the country, there is almost no point in reporting domestic burglary or theft. Even if you can persuade the police to actually investigate, the clear-up rates are appalling, sometimes below 10%. And yet at the same time, the police appear to have plentiful resources available when it comes to the monitoring of private citizens’ speech and opinions.

It was reported over the weekend that a retired special constable was visited by his local police because of comments he made on Facebook. Officers searched his bookshelves, remarking on “very Brexity things” and describing one book as “very odd” — highly sinister and inappropriate comments in a supposedly free country. Although the police have since apologised, this is hardly an isolated case: just last year, the prominent journalist Allison Pearson was questioned at her home about her political opinions.

How did we get here? It’s easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles, of course. British policing has always had its problems, with corruption rife towards the end of the last century. But the recent enthusiasm for authoritarian monitoring of opinions and speech — and the obsession with political objectives — is a genuine departure from history and custom.

This process started in earnest around the turn of the century. One of the earliest instances of police officers acting as enforcers of state dogma, rather than impartially upholding the law, was the Harry Hammond case in 2001, in which an eccentric but harmless street preacher who was attacked by an indignant crowd found himself being arrested, charged and prosecuted. Then in 1999 came the Macpherson Report, a hugely radical document which rejected colour-blind policing and thereby explicitly repudiated the Peelite principle that British police should operate “without fear or favour”.

The politicisation of the police has only accelerated since then, helped no doubt by the retirement or sidelining of the last of the old-fashioned senior officers. In 2012 — under a Tory government, naturally — the College of Policing was created. The CoP acts as a conduit for the spread of progressive ideology into policing, notably being responsible for the introduction of the “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI), a deeply illiberal innovation. The CoP is also behind the current push to make policing an all-graduate profession, and is likely to have had a hand in the Met’s declared intention to achieve 50:50 equality between male and female officers.

Both these initiatives will intensify the obsession with thought crime, because they will complete the destruction of the old commonsensical, practical-minded approach — deferential towards the law-abiding and respectable, but willing to take a robust and assertive attitude towards criminals.

Instead, we will have eager young would-be intellectuals, their heads full of fashionable slogans and pseudo-science, confident in their beliefs about white supremacy, patriarchy, implicit bias and all the rest of it. The new class of officers genuinely believes in the terrible danger of “hate speech”. The old, robust British liberties of thought, expression, speech and association which Robert Peel took so much care to defend when he founded modern policing 200 years ago mean nothing to them. And that should worry us all.

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Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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