A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without the consent of the people. Tell that to the residents of what was once East Berlin. But that old canard raises a different problem. Which people are giving the consent? The ones who abide by the law, or the ones who are disposed to breaking it?

I wondered about this when I read two stories over the weekend, both of which suggested to me that the police have long since lost the support of that first group of people, that more numerous community, the people who don’t habitually break the law. The first case concerned a nutter on the Tube, somewhere on the Hammersmith and City line, who decided to drop his trousers and underpants and display his pork truncheon to the various w

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