I was out in a local town yesterday when a young lad approached me. He was not from the area and his bike had been stolen. He had managed to find the local police station, only to discover that it was closed. His phone battery had died, so he asked whether I could look up another station or find out when this one would reopen.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I thought. “Police stations are like hospitals. They don’t close.”
I was wrong.
The local police station advertised opening hours of 10.00 am to 6.00 pm, Monday to Friday. I was genuinely gobsmacked. The fact that a police station had opening hours at all was astonishing. Crime does not stop in the evenings. People do not cease needing help at weekends. Yet the public is apparently expected to organise its emergencies around office hours.
We are constantly told that our taxes pay for public services, but increasingly those services are no longer there when we need them. We pay more and receive less. Police stations close, front desks disappear, local services are centralised and ordinary people are left to fend for themselves.
Freedom of Information requests found that at least 663 police stations closed across Great Britain between 2010 and 2022, more than one every week. The real figure may be higher. There is no reliable official total for England because, conveniently, the Home Office stopped maintaining a comprehensive national record.
This is not only about buildings. It is about the steady destruction of local, accessible public provision. The young lad whose bike had been stolen did what most people are told to do: seek help from the police. But where are people supposed to turn when the station is shut, the phone is dead and there is nobody behind the desk?
We are increasingly on our own.
Of course, the police have not disappeared. There seem to be plenty available when workers protest, when campaigners disrupt business as usual, when students occupy buildings or when people step outside the boundaries of what the state considers acceptable. The resources suddenly materialise then.
That tells us something about the real purpose of policing under capitalism. Its first responsibility is not to protect ordinary people from harm. It is to defend property, preserve order and provide the first line of defence for the state and the ruling class.
There was a period, particularly in the postwar decades, when local policing was presented as a community service. Stations were visible, accessible and embedded in towns and neighbourhoods. But as those services have been stripped away, the underlying function of the police becomes clearer.
So the next time you need help from the police, perhaps put a sign around your neck saying you support Palestine Action and you may find that several officers arrive very quickly indeed.
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