It’s a world in flames. Too much antisocial behaviour, too many street gangs, too few crimes being solved – but fear not, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has a plan to fight back. Go to the Notting Hill carnival this weekend, he’s told his officers. Keep the peace, lay down the law – and I’d better not catch you dancing.
He’s right to be concerned. Dancing policemen are a menace. They undermine tradition and the public’s trust. The Laughing Policeman was bad enough, but dancing ones? You wonder how they ever got through the vetting and the training. From now on, perhaps it will be a specific part of the vetting and the training. “Regan, you almost made it through, but when we played that bit of Rihanna in the final module, you shimmied a bit and there was a definite head bob. I’m sorry, this job isn’t for you.”
There are many problems in the running of and the policing of the Notting Hill carnival. The numbers are too big, the west London space too small. We know there’s crime: two murders last year and melees in which more than 60 officers were injured. No one underestimates the challenge. Last week, Tory members of the London assembly called for city hall to take over the running of the event, and mooted once again the idea that it could move to a park, Hyde Park perhaps, and become ticketed.
No one close to the event and its tradition wants that. But everyone knows that, security-wise, things have to change.
Will motionless, ear-plugged officers do that? I’m not sure that’s the eureka moment. I can’t quite equate the difficulty of keeping roads unblocked and hyped-up young men from maiming themselves and others with the dereliction of rogue officers momentarily shaking a leg to Mighty Sparrow, Sean Paul or Shaggy. How does that work in fact? Is that the officer who says: “There is a punch up over there and I know I should intervene, but I do like this banging tune, and I’m having a nice dance, so I’ll wait until it’s finished?”
I don’t think any officer would do that, and I doubt the commissioner really thinks so either. The statement from Scotland Yard says: “Almost 7,000 officers will be deployed to this year’s event. They are there to keep revellers safe, not to join in the revelling. We want officers to positively engage with the carnivalgoers while staying vigilant at all times and remaining able to respond and intervene swiftly as necessary. They can’t do this if they are dancing. The standards of behaviour expected as part of the policing operation will be communicated clearly before the event, just as they have been in recent years.”
On its face, this last bit appears to reveal that those who have got jiggy wit it at carnival in recent years have been dancing disobediently, perhaps with intent, perhaps with malice aforethought. As for those who have actually danced in actual contact with the revellers, well, bring back Keir Starmer’s all-night courts.
There is, of course, a simpler explanation for this new diktat, rather than any genuine nexus between carnival crime and the beat officer who likes the beats. It’s not really that too many officers over-engage: it’s that occasionally one makes a human connection, and someone takes a photo of that, and it ends up on the TV and in the papers – because little else happens on a bank holiday – and the rightwing press goes full tonto about woke coppers who talk to folk they should be tasering. Before you know it, someone is saying that the commissioner himself is a woke disciple who secretly loves Afrobeats and privately takes the knee on Congolese religious holidays, and that we really need new leadership, of the kind that Nigel Farage would seek out were he to reach No 10.
And all of that grouching is bad for the top team at Scotland Yard, who’ll be forgiven by the right if they never catch another criminal, so long as they don’t go woke. So the best thing for them, short of stopping the music itself, is to stop the thin blue line dancing, even for a smiley snapshot. And so they have.
It’s all quite funny, and it’s all quite sad. Because those pictures of communal revelry between the public and law enforcement were sometimes a bit cringe and often a bit stagey, but they spoke to a desire of some officers to present as a police service rather than a police force – and showed an enthusiasm from carnivalgoers to embrace that. And for those who weren’t there, those moments – like the time in 2017 when a PC Daniel Graham threw his shapes and went viral – conveyed a world that doesn’t always exist, but one that most of us would like to see.
We’ll have the old pictures as an archive, but pity the officers deployed to carnival this year: concerned about the crush, concerned about the crime (with optimists at the Mail already predicting “three days of carnage”) and now concerned that a surveillance camera might catch them twerking in the line of duty. Jeez, isn’t policing dangerous enough as it is?
Hugh Muir is a Guardian columnist
