Police must get back to protecting the innocent
EVERY chief constable in the country should be made to read yesterday’s evidence from the inquest of Fiona Pilkington.
This lady is thought to have killed herself and her disabled daughter after being driven to despair by years of vile taunts.
Night after night, year after year, a gang of yobs would shout abuse outside her house and throw missiles at her windows.
Ms Pilkington and her relatives made 33 calls to Leicestershire police over seven years but officers failed to act, even accusing her of “over-reacting”. So emboldened were the gang by the police’s timorousness that a ringleader shouted to Ms Pilkington and her children: “We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.”
Those words encapsulate all that has gone wrong with British policing. The police’s surrender to political correctness, bureaucratic inertia and the human rights culture has all too often led to young thugs terrorising neighbourhoods without restraint.
Several especially troubling cases have come to light recently. Neighbours of the brothers in Edlington, near
Doncaster, who mounted hideous assaults on local boys, had reported being harassed by them but were told by police not to telephone after every incident. In other cases householders
who defended their property from young thugs have found it is they, rather than their tormentors, who end up facing prosecution.
Britain is crying out for a new generation of no-nonsense police chiefs to tackle this malaise. If it doesn’t get them soon many more people will be driven to take the law into their own hands.