“Very little,” one whispers into his mobile from the car park of a cop shop in middle England. He is in between a scheduled arrest and an identity parade, “another ridiculous day”. A siren blares at close range and his voice drops further: “Most people have absolutely no idea of what we do all day.”

This, however, is changing. The whisperer is “PC David Copperfield”, a uniformed response officer promising to do for bobbies what superblogger Belle de Jour did for call girls: expose everything.

His anonymous Policemen’s Blog, an internet diary of life at the farcical fingertips of the law’s long arm, began in April 2004 with this entry: “I hope to give you an idea of the depths of sheer incompetence the British police can plumb.” Half a million readers have logged on since, turning the PC with a PC into an unlikely cult figure.

Copperfield’s bulletins are dispatched from “Newton”, population 60,000 and probably north of Birmingham, although he won’t confirm or deny that. He will admit that his beat is decidedly bottom-drawer, limited to estates, the Saturday night town centre and the pinging inbox and overflowing files under which he believes that he and thousands of his colleagues are suffocating.

“I started this to show people who think the police only deal with important things that 80% of our time is devoted to trivial crime,” he says, “or ‘crap with a case number’, as we call it. You watch The Bill and think you know us but the closest representation of what it’s like to be a regional policeman is actually The Office.”

The drudgery of his days translates into dark humour, too, as in this extract in which he describes the terrible fate befalling anyone silly enough to report a crime to the police: “I arrive, armed with the full bureaucracy kit of the modern police officer. They may think they can get away with a simple telephone call and leave it at that, but they can’t. I bring crime numbers, incident numbers, the option of victim support . . . I’ll take a long statement, I’ ll have to telephone you late at night to confirm insignificant details of your statement and I’ll have to speak to people you don’t like and make them aware you’ve made a report to the police.”

Copperfield’s diary is flecked with sarcasm, a large focus of which are the wasted hours spent auditing crime rather than solving it. But as an ungagged officer, he has won his fans by telling it like it is. “Before I joined the force I had no idea that there were a massive class of people who just get drunk and beat each other up”, is a typical Copperfield statement. He calls himself “bourgeois” and gives a description of chavs in this entry from September 2004, Recognising the Underclass — A Copper’s Guide.

“The thing to remember about them is how daft they are. You see them at about 2.30-3am drunk and fighting and wondering why they are getting arrested. Me? I love it when they cry and when the women fight and scream. When they have sobered up they suddenly become ‘victims’ despite their bleeding knuckles.”

Harsh? Anonymity certainly provides Copperfield with the cover to be outrageous, hence an entry titled Ramadan-a-Ding-Dong: “Young Muslims (are) arrested with greater frequency during Ramadan because their latent levels of aggression and arrogance seem to peak at this time of year. After the worst effects of drink and cannabis have worn off, they insist on being fed at very specific times when they are brought into custody and we are powerless to resist their demands. We are, however, allowed to remove their watches . . . which helps.”

Copperfield — who is so deadpan that it is sometimes difficult to gauge the seriousness of his entries — gets the biggest response from readers whenever he posts on the subject of guns: “Working as a police officer I know you can’t rely on the police to protect you in certain situations. Not because they’re not good, because there aren’t very many of them and they take a long time to get to the scene.”

Copperfield’s blog has more universal appeal when he is detailing the minutiae of police existence, like the day someone gets murdered and he gets to interview a vandal with a taste for water features or the officers’ Christmas competition to find the chaviest decorations on the estate (a partially deflated Homer Simpson Santa won).

However, controversy is never far away and Copperfield, who plans a lifetime with the force, says: “I’m interested in doing the best for the people I meet and upstairs are interested in me arresting as many people as I can. What happens is I end up arresting them for an easy life.” So what’s the answer? “I haven’t got one. I can only tell people what happens.”