WE MUST THINK about the police, and not only because of awful errors such as Stockwell or awful murders such as the death of WPC Beshenivsky in Bradford. Sir Ian Blair is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he did something very useful last week. In his Dimbleby lecture the Commissioner of the Met made it clear that the fusty old security blanket of British policing needs a damn good shake. He has been monstered in some quarters for asking “What sort of police service do we want? ”, because it is in the nature of newspaper columnists to snap back: “One that catches burglars and doesn’t persecute law-abiding motorists like, er, me.” But read it: he hit a few nails on the head.

On the comment pages on Friday Ben Macintyre amplified his analysis of the central social flaw in the police — the way the upperish-middles don’t join. Despite such examples as Sir Ian himself, Thatcher’s “officer class” of graduate coppers has not fully materialised, and several who set out on that path will tell you that it wasn’t snobbery that drove them away but an ingrained narrow, depressing culture. My own brother gave up in the 1980s and on The Times online discussion board you will find a chap with an engineering degree who joined full of ideals and left because of the “thuggish, racist and hedonistic behaviour” of fellow cops, with whom no “well-educated, rational people” would wish to be associated. I had an illuminating conversation once with a senior commander who mourned that “just when you’ve got your recruits exactly as they should be — thoughtful, liberal, community-minded — you have to send them out in a car with older guys. And they get ruined.”

That is a whole can of worms; and I hope that the thousands of thoroughly decent police officers will not be offended by plain speaking about their less attractive colleagues. But the class row it stirred up, and the national sorrow over Bradford, should not obscure an even more important thread of Sir Ian’s lecture. He pinpointed the fact that we don’t, in any methodical or rigorous way, study policing.

For health there are numerous university research departments linked to medical schools; for education, transport and environment the same solid linking of research with practice. Yet for policing we have only political fashion and a saloon-bar level of opinion-mongering. “Lots of people in this country,” Sir Ian says, “are undertaking a permanent NVQ on it, called The Bill . . . but informed commentary is piecemeal. There is little dispassionate, thought-through public examination of just what we are here to do in the 21st century.” Policing, he says, has simply “fallen behind the curve of modern Britain”. He adds that at the same time “the agents of social enforcement, such as park keepers, caretakers and bus conductors, have disappeared”.

I thought of this the other day on a 453 London bus, as a raging man got on, ticketless, and smashed his fist on the driver’s window. The middle-aged driver flinched helplessly and did not turn his head; passengers, many elderly or children, shrank scared into their seats. I longed for a big old-fashioned conductor to step forward and throw the git off. He raged and spat for the rest of the trip, but it wasn’t enough to stop the bus and call the cops. By false economy, by stupid managerialist abolition of these “agents of social enforcement”, we have created a situation where police are now the only people available to deal with everything — from low-level annoyance to globalised terrorism to identity theft. Then, by creating innumerable pesky new laws and procedures and allowing mistrust of police to grow, we added still further to their burden and obfuscated their purpose.

And we don’t think about policing, or study it with the kind of rigour that we try to bring to other vital services (policing is surely as important as education). Sir Ian offered no easy solution, but he did mention in passing the concept of university police schools. These are worth considering, and a group of universities including Cardiff is now doing so, and discussing the idea with the Home Office with a view to presenting it to the public.

The proponents argue that medical and education professionals have trained for decades in university schools designed for purpose, while “police science” is not a university discipline (except in a handful of new universities and foundation degrees). The Russell Group of leading universities do not touch it. Criminological and social research — far more widespread — is detached from practical policing: there are few clear conduits between the process of discovering what works, and the process of following it up. In medicine, any new understanding gets instantly assimilated into good practice; not so in policing.

Yet there is, say the academics campaigning for this, enough of a body of relevant knowledge to found important university police schools; surely it would be useful to have research, study and evaluation of police practice carried out by bodies independent of the Home Office, yet recognised as big-hitters. Professors of police science would have contacts with other countries, integrate their research into training modules for the lower ranks, and so forth. The existence of a recognised discipline would, according to a proposal paper, “help provide stability in police practice by reducing the extent to which policy is driven by fashion, whim and populism”. Aha! Now you’re talking. Although only senior officers would go through such university schools, their influence “would diffuse through all sections of the police service” . And here’s the line from Cardiff I like best of all: “We would have an evidence-based, rather than an opinion-based, police service.”

Even to those with a healthy scepticism of academe, that has a strangely alluring sound. It works for the military, after all: at Shrivenham, the Defence Staff College has 40 King’s College academics on staff, expert in everything from border controls to military doctrine. And they don’t seem to slow things down in the field, do they?

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