I agree very much with the words of Chief Constable Andy Rhodes here and have written to him to offer complete support.
Modern society is blighted by a loss of civility, manners and common decency. We can debate the causes and identify the remedies. That’s a matter for politics. But it's also a matter that concerns the conditions of doing politics, recovering the conditions of the ethical life in the points of stability and support that bind people and communities together in a common endeavour. These are questions which concern the conditions of basic civil order, the ties and bonds of healthy communities. These questions are not, ultimately, policing questions, although an effective police force is integral to the health and integrity of these conditions. The police can establish a framework that facilitates right conduct, but cannot compensate for its absence. The police are effectively being put in the impossible situation of having to compensate, through external force and sanction, for the lack of an internal self-policing through right character and appropriate behaviour on the part of individuals in the first place. It can’t be done, and the police deserve our wholehearted support in face of impossible stresses and strains in the social and moral fabric.
The reaction against the police in this instance through (anti-)social media sets a dangerous and destructive precedent. At what point do the police, faced with such automatic, routine, hostility simply abandon the attempt to maintain order among a “public” so absorbed in their own concerns and conflicts that they are capable of nothing but the generation of disorder? That will come. And when it does, heaven help us all – because this fractious and fissiparous will fall in on itself, and only the strong, the assertive and the pitiless will survive.
Rebuilding public community and reclaiming the political and ethical commons requires personal moral effort, the character-forming discipline of an everyday life lived through work, family and community, and a commitment to something greater than the self. The issues that are in danger of overwhelming society at the moment, which the police and other public services are in the frontline in dealing with, are issues of self-government and self-policing in the first instance - they concern character, conduct and behaviour, and these things need to be taught and reinforced by society's little schools and platoons.