Question of authority on the front line

THE successful contemporary English policeman bears no resemblance to Dixon of Dock Green. Or rather to judge by Richard Wells, holder of the Queen's Police Medal, MA (Oxon), Companion of the British Institute of Management and Chief Constable of South Yorkshire there are new ways of exercising authority and of being an authority figure.

The most interesting thing about this very interestingly placed man is that he has announced he will retire from the service in 1998. His grandfather was a policeman, and his great uncle, and his father, and his brother is one now.

But just as Richard Wells prepared himself in modern ways for the traditional job of the policeman - he's a graduate in modern languages and literature, a t'ai chi enthusiast and does water colour painting - so he sees a future for his beliefs outside the service career path. He will work in "leadership". He will still address him sell, if not through the policing function, to the crisis of authority and assent to authority which he sees as fundamental to delinquency and crime in the contemporary world. The delinquency first then the crime.

Again and again, in conversation, he returns to the young, and to the home and the school as the sites of their alienation from society. The places where young males, in particular, accept or do not accept some version of personal value.

Such a vision is more than non political: it is effectively anti political. It is the way of looking at social tensions under represented in the media, perhaps because many media commentators on the state of nations, being close to the political establishment, base their analyses on perceived political ideologies... They might see a connection between "Thatcherism," say, and personal aggressiveness, or "liberalism" and personal permissiveness.

But Chief Constable Wells - who has been at the front line of a changing society since 1962, when he joined the Metropolitan Police doesn't appear to think of political ideology as an important shaping element of a culture. Not compared to such factors as what he calls "the parenting deficit". Whether he thinks changes of government affect the quality of life in Britain is not a question one would put to him. He wouldn't make what might be construed as a partisan comment, even if he wanted to. But he doesn't want to. And he takes these matters too seriously to improvise. He gives an interview whose parameters and themes are very clearly established beforehand in his own mind.

The theme of this one to The Irish Times will be authority.

Not that he is anything but courtesy itself. He hurries into the hotel, youthful and physically impeccable and fresh even after a series of demanding meetings at Scotland Yard. His wife is sorting out a crisis involving their daughter's car; his driver has gone to collect documents for tomorrow's meetings, but Chief Constable Wells orders Earl Grey tea and prepares to concentrate completely, and for as long as may be necessary, on the interview to hand.

He conducts it by way of illustration and parable, as if accustomed to explaining complex ideas to people ill used to grasping them at first attempt. Thus, for example, when talking about the absence of any crisis in British society, and the general tranquillity of the nation, he paints two pictures.

He evokes school prize giving days, and the thousands and thousands of good and able youngsters one sees at them. And he describes the big shopping complex on the outskirts of Sheffield - where he has his headquarters - and the mild behaviour of shoppers to each other, no matter how crowded the place may be.

"If they jostle anyone they apologise. They make way for each other. They co exist with each other without a problem."

Mr Wells then moves on to make his next point but not without saying "I want you, Nuala, to keep those two images in mind..." And every so often, when he has made a purely abstract point and is about to illustrate it by homely images like the above he says, "Let me put that in very clear terms for you, Nuala...

He announces his topics. After talking about sex information, for instance (most regrettably everywhere available to the young, but without any accompanying moral structure) he continues, "I want to make a transition here into aspects of violence".

He even uses our names, as if our conversation was some sort of management seminar. He is talking about the children who become delinquents and finally criminals. They suffer, he says, from a lack of self esteem. But when they go off the rails, he says, "that can be coped with by a significant adult saying `No, Richard', `No, Nuala'..."

The deliberation with which Chief Constable Wells approaches a meeting with a journalist perhaps reflects the importance he attributes to the media, in British culture in general but particularly in forming attitudes to the police.

He is insistent on removing questions of policing from any crisis ridden account of British society. The crisis is the invention of the media. The media response to ff events like the James Bulger murder case, or the Fred and Rosemary West case, is quite disproportionate, he strongly believes.

"Competition within the media to have the most screaming headline completely distorts the true picture of a relatively peaceful society. "Take local radio stations," he says. "They're not just competing between each other but within each other, to have a more sensational lead story, every hour, on the hour. There's a constant diet of `90 year old mugged'..."

When I suggest that there is, nevertheless, a crisis in social life, and one especially obvious to policemen since it is manifest on the streets - in the tube station outside a woman is living in an alcove, with only a dirty pink blanket against the night chill - he reacts defensively to the word street".

"Did you walk here tonight? And were you frightened? No, you weren't. You felt perfectly safe. And that's the experience of the vast majority of people on the vast majority of streets." The media, in his view, shape the relationship between the people and their police force.

"Two out of three people never encounter the police service." They base their opinion of it on television and newspapers. But are there not some defects in the relationship between people and police itself? Well yes. "There's a crisis of confidence in our dealing with burglary and car crime." And later, "There is a huge gap between ourselves and young people."

But mention race relations - since this is" surely a most difficult issue for the force in the English cities he knows so well - and a reassuring statistic comes out. "There were two members of a visible minority in the South Yorkshire force in 1990. Now there are 70. This is indeed an impressive figure, but, the general point about racism has not been addressed. Still less is the question of tolerance addressed by the chief constable's own efforts.

"I myself, wearing my uniform, symbolically - I've been in mosques, temples, synagogues and at the Chinese New Year over the last few weekends..." He believes that England is, on the whole, a very tolerant society.

"It pains me when I see examples of intolerance," he says. "And I do see it. But generally," he says, "I give society in the United Kingdom a sound tick."

And again be uses a homely analogy. When cars are trying to get out from a side road into a line of cars on a main road, they'll be allowed in. Every few cars, someone will wait, and let in a car from the side road. Similarly, there's an unspoken agreement that makes Britain, on the whole, work.

The picture the chief constable - with transparent belief and commitment - presents is so much more about the future than the present that it takes on a rosy hue. He is asked - what about the prisons? What about the fact that Britain imprisons almost as great a proportion of its population as does Turkey?

HE changes the subject to crime prevention. Brought back, he talks of his hopes for offerings real jobs to prisoners, so that they can earn money for their dependants, "and emerge from prison identifying work with earning, and with self esteem, and having acquired skills..."

He even sees the relationship between the politicians and the police force as immensely positive - although, to an outsider, the Home Secretary had certainly seemed one of the members of John Major's cabinet most repudiated by his own security forces professionals. Has Chief Constable Wells felt listened to by the political establishment?

"Oh, yes," he says. "The government has been pouring millions into crime prevention no less than crime detection. National Lottery money, for instance, has been made available," and he goes on to talk about the City Challenge and Safer Cities schemes. Of course he doesn't see such schemes as attacking the very basis of civic disorder.

THAT goes back to self esteem, and to the individual who does not have a sense of worth trying to assert worth through cars and consumer goods "which my own children can acquire through paid work and doting parents". But what of young people who don't have either of those things? On the whole, he is a believer in "well funded, long term strategies to address the young", along with emphasising the three Rs (reading writing and arithmetic) in education, smaller, possibly religion influenced, schools where uniforms are worn, parenting which includes saying No ("our drugs crisis comes, I'm afraid, from a generation of parents who did not say No"), better manners and media moderation.

These things are what he wants to see and will work to see. But even as things are, he looks at his society with pride and affection. He says that the occasional instance of corruption or injustice within the police force gets all the news. What about the good news? - What about the fact that the police officer is a trusted figure who everywhere in the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland has not been mentioned) can go about his or her business unarmed?

"This is only an ideal in many parts of the world. But we have it here. We're very, very fortunate here. If you were inventing a society, from a police point of view, this society is what you would invent."