Regular readers will know that I have an obsession with home burglaries. Specifically those occasions when a burglar goes into a British home, helps himself to the contents of the household and finds that the last people on his case are the British police. Scanning some recent burglary statistics, I was struck again by the almost miraculous failures of force after force.
Take Kent Police. In a recent breakdown of crime statistics, the force managed a career high. In one of the areas where they are meant to have oversight, there were 123 home burglaries. Of those 123 burglaries, they managed a great, round zero in their detection rate of the burglars. Or 0.0 per cent as it comes up, slightly forlornly, on the stats chart, presumably to differentiate it from those majestic years in which Kent Police may find themselves capable of locating, say, 0.1 per cent of culprits.
A report from 2023 dug into some of the possible reasons for this. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) not only found that the number of crimes solved by Kent Police is ‘unacceptably low’ but that there are ‘areas for improvement’. One such area was their record of responding to the public. As of March 2023, the force did not have a call switchboard for the public to dial when they are victims of a crime. Almost exactly a third (33.4 per cent) of calls went unanswered, because they use a system which puts callers to the non-emergency number straight through to what is called ‘a call handler’, who then never calls them back. Responding to these problems, Deputy Chief Constable Peter Ayling said: ‘We acknowledge there are areas where improvements could be made and are being made.’
Even if you are one of the lucky people who gets your call picked up, it doesn’t matter, because the only thing less likely than your call being picked up by them is that they will do anything about it. Just about the only thing Kent Police have been praised for in recent HMIC reports is their innovative use of ‘emotional support dogs’ for vulnerable victims.
But then I looked at the front page of the Telegraph this past weekend and read the story of Julian Foulkes. As it happens, he is a retired special constable. The newspaper revealed that, in November 2023 Foulkes was visited at his home in Kent by a bevy of local police. Six officers came to his door, handcuffed him on his doorstep and then searched his home. The cause of this was that Mr Foulkes had written a post on X (formerly Twitter) concerning the hate marches that were then going on every weekend in London and other cities.
The only thing less likely than your call being picked up by Kent Police is that they will do anything about it
Foulkes responded to a post by a participant in these marches who was threatening to sue the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, for correctly identifying the hatred in question. In a post seen by a grand total of 26 people – most of whom were presumably members of Kent Police – Foulkes replied that given the recent storming of an airport in Dagestan by people hunting for Jewish passengers, things in Britain looked like they would soon be ‘one step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals’. No member of the public reported the tweet to the police – but that didn’t stop a specialist unit, which is apparently meant to be focused on terrorism and extremism, from investigating. Officers arrived at Foulkes’s front door the next morning.
Armed with batons and pepper spray, the police asked Foulkes to identify himself, then said they were arresting him ‘on suspicion of an offence under the Malicious Communications Act’. For more than an hour, officers searched the 71-year old’s house, even rummaging through his wife’s underwear drawer. After looking through newspaper clippings relating to the death of Foulkes’s daughter in a hit-and-run incident, they went to the kitchen, where they commented on an ‘odd list’ of items, identifying bleach, foil and gloves. Foulkes explained to Kent’s finest that this was not because he is some master bombmaker, but because, more prosaically, his wife is a hairdresser.
Foulkes was driven to Medway police station. He was booked in, finger-printed, photographed and had his DNA taken. After many hours in detention he was released on bail. A week later he was forced to return to Medway police station to be issued a caution. As a distraught Foulkes told the Telegraph, he didn’t agree that anything he had done warranted this, but was so intimidated that ‘I felt I had no choice’. The police had succeeded in beating down someone who had given over a decade of his own life to the force. Imagine what they could do to the rest of us.
This is of interest for many reasons, most of which do not need to be interpreted or extrapolated for readers here. But one thing that especially bothers me is that the police bodycam footage shows them rifling through Foulkes’s bookcases for evidence of wrong-think. One idiot policeman performing this task finds that Foulkes has a copy of my international bestseller The War on the West on his shelves. Showing that Mr Foulkes has exceptional taste in reading materials, there were also copies of The Spectator in his home. One suspicious police officer flags up these things as signs of extremism – as ‘very Brexity things’. Which goes to show that members of the Kent Police dawn-raid squad not only can’t read, but can’t think either. Even if a book of mine on issues wholly unrelated to the EU and some parts of this magazine were ‘Brexity’, that would only mean they reflected the majority views of the British public.
But ah – the British public. Who is meant to care about them? Surely all we are fit for is to be harassed in our homes for non-crimes, and given emotional support animals after actual crimes. I would say that heads should roll, but Kent Police might misread that – and besides, they never do roll, do they?
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