More from Peter Hitchens on British anarcho-tyranny

Peter Hitchens, PACE, versus Gene Hunt

A few things about the police, jury trial and the presumption of innocence. The former criminal justice system never sees - or never saw - most of the work that the police do (or used to do) to keep crime and disorder under control. One of the reasons that it is now breaking down is that every encounter between authority and disorder has to be recorded and dealt with formally. Jury trial was never intended to protect burglars, shoplifters or violent louts from the fist of the law. It was meant to ensure that the state couldn't persecute the innocent through abuse of the criminal courts.

Let us please not be sentimental, or go seeking after a Toytown perfection. The police (usually large cynical men who had grown up and gone to school alongside those they policed) were given a great deal of licence to be rough with criminals.

I use the word criminals quite deliberately (see below). They left the rest of us almost entirely alone, and would not have dreamt of behaving towards the law-abiding as they do now. In fact it is largely because they have become the over-mighty bureaucratised servants of the left-wing state that they have ceased to harry criminals (which is what we all want them to do), and begun to trouble the innocent.