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Samizdata quote of the day – too many laws and too many policemenThere are too many laws and too many policemen… police persons. Don’t you ever feel that? Every new regulation diminishes us. We’ve got to the point where we do more harm than good. – Inspector Bert Lynch, Z-Cars (last ever episode), 1978. The episode was written by Troy Kennedy Martin who had – appropriately enough – created the long-running series in the first place. August 2nd, 2025 |
 6 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – too many laws and too many policemenLeave a Reply |
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And now I’ve got an earworm!
Oh dear, I can see the remake – generation Z cars!
Rooting out the evil that comes from the protocols of the elders of gammon.
If anyone wants to see a clip of that line being spoken, here’s a link to the episode on YouTube. That link is meant to start at the right time, but if it doesn’t, start watching at 50:00.
There are some other lines in the episode that also resonate now. At the end they are testing a newly-installed automated security shutter for the police station, which symbolically comes down at the end of the episode, representing not only the end of the series but also, I think, the end of an era when policing was animated by Sir Robert Peel’s words, “the police are the public and the public are the police”. A few moments before that, some whizz-kid is showing the shutter off to the Chief Constable. Starting at 55:00, the dialogue goes like this:
“If you can imagine, Chief Constable, a large crowd of natives surrounding the building.”
“Natives? Where have they come from?”
“From Wolverhampton, sir.”
“What are they doing in Newtown?”
“They were on a march to London, sir, and they lost their way.”
I’m afraid Z-Cars was a bit before my time. However, although I agree that there are way too many laws, the real problem is that the laws we have, especially the ones people care about, are very poorly enforced. In the USA most big cities have a murder clearance rate below 25%, this is just shocking. Burglary? The police don’t even bother to try. Their function is to issue a report so you can go to your insurance company. Where I live near Chicago, every weekend a half dozen kids are shot to death in the street and nobody is ever caught, nobody every punished. Even traffic laws seem to be enforced entirely capriciously.
There is a push on the right for extreme punishment of criminals. FWIW, I don’t agree with that view at all. For those people we put in prison with the expectation that they will return to society we put them in a situation where they are brutalized and inculcated into systems of deep injustice and immorality, and we are surprised when they leave more dangerous than they arrive. Of course some people should never get out and in all honestly I don’t really care too much what happens to them. But for those who are released it seems in the best interests of the rest of us to give them more of the treatment that they might get in European prisons. (And, FWIW, for those held in pre-trial detention American prisons are nothing short of criminal themselves.)
Nonetheless, the brutality of the punishment is advocated as a deterrent to future crime. But why would that be if you have a 3/4 chance of getting away with murder? And especially so since many criminals are pretty stupid and can’t necessarily make that calculation? No, the best deterrent to crime is not brutal punishment but the certainty of swift and sure justice. And it is these two things that the criminal justice system in both Britain and the US is quite terrible at.
Notwithstanding the shameful clearance rate of crimes by the police, criminal trials and punishment take a RIDICULOUS amount of time. Here in the US state of Utah they are about to execute Ralph Menzies for a crime he committed in 1986, nearly 40 years ago. Famous murderer Hawley Crippen killed his wife in January 1910, and despite the fact they had to extradite him from the USA in the days when that was not a quick process, he was dangling from a rope by November that same year.
I have mixed feelings about capital punishment, nonetheless my point is that the public would be a great deal happier if the police focused their energy on catching and punishing criminals who perform the basic baseline crimes of murder, theft, rape, assault, burglary, fraud and so forth with a swiftness and certainty that would make even the most hardened of potential criminals think twice.
And police do not exist to protect citizens from criminals, but criminals from citizens.
Once you grok this, all becomes clear