It says something about the detection skills of a certain constabulary force that it has failed to identify “PC David Copperfield”, the secret policeman in its ranks who has become an internet star by exposing police shortcomings on his website.

A flavour of Copperfield’s condemnation is captured in his newly published book Wasting Police Time (Monday Books), which logs “the depths of sheer incompetence our police are plumbing, how thousands of officers . . . are struggling to keep their heads above a sea of paperwork while your money is wasted”.

Official recognition of the anonymous blogger came last week in the House of Commons when Tony McNulty, the Home Office minister, fended off opposition sneers about police red tape by blurting out that PC Copperfield was “more a fiction than Dickens”.

The secret blogger says he’s flattered by McNulty’s admission that he reads the site and by the backhanded endorsement. “On Yes, Minister it was said you should never believe anything unless it’s officially denied,” he observes.

Copperfield claims to be “an ordinary working copper” in his thirties telling it like it is in “Newtown”, a community of 60,000 somewhere north of Birmingham.

Fears of discovery do not disturb his dreams. “Some days I wake up and think I’ll get sacked, and other days I think, ‘No I won’t’. I’d like to think that people will say, ‘Well, hang on, this chap has not done us much of a disservice, really’. I don’t use stuff that seriously undermines the police.”

He must be joking. One of Copperfield’s most damning revelations is how the crime books are “cooked in ways that would make Gordon Ramsay proud”. Most notable is an official scam known as “administrative detection”, which makes the policeman’s lot much easier than arresting real criminals.

By his account, administrative detection employs the logic of Alice in Wonderland. If a member of the public reports a crime, it counts as such, whether it’s a mild altercation between two people or a real assault. By persuading both parties to the altercation to make statements against the other, with assurances that it will never reach court, the police can register two detected crimes. Throw in a damaged fence and there are three detected crimes.

It follows that a copper walking the beat is no match for a squad car responding to calls within an approved time. Brownie points all round. “What it means is that the detection rates they’re bragging about are, effectively, completely phoney,” Copperfield says. “Across the country this uses up thousands and thousands of police hours and costs millions of pounds.”

With his references to Rousseau and “immutable states”, Copperfield seems too intelligent to be pounding a beat, or trying to. He admits to a “reasonably good” education and a stint at university, but he passed up the chance of promotion in the police as he was too busy writing his blog to take the exams.

He betrays little sympathy for the underclass (“always threatening to kill each other”); those serving community punishment, whom he’d like to see shackled; or Saturday night drunks, whom he’d like to spray with water cannon before putting them in a chain gang.

Everything considered, he’d rather his manor was populated entirely by Iraqis and the elderly, two categories who show unfailing courtesy to the police (he also credits Asians and the middle class for their generosity with cups of tea).

A little harsh, surely? “People think that we only deal with upstanding citizens who come into contact with criminals. But the fact is that most of the time we deal with people who are drunk, can’t control themselves or are bored — and therefore call the police. I think they should just grow up and try to put their problems into some kind of perspective.”

Prison works, in his view. “I have a lot of sympathy for the people who are suffering at the hands of these idiots. It’s all very well talking about prison as a failed way of reforming people, but people either reform or they don’t. Who cares? If they’re in jail they’re not pestering people.”

Copperfield cannot overemphasise how unspeakably awful some of these villains are: “They’re violent people who have no respect for anybody. I meet them and I think, ‘How horrible are you?’ I’d quite happily see them in a chain gang.”

Yet he denies he’s bitter. What sounds like cynicism is merely a gallows humour common to most policemen at the sharp end, he says. He’s anxious to exculpate them of beating people up, although “God knows, a saint would be tempted sometimes”. Besides, many of his colleagues are simply too unfit for such violent exercise.

Despite all the tribulations, he insists that “being a police officer is one of the best jobs in the world”. It makes you want to join up right away.