Tango, Juliet, Foxtrot

In thirty years with the police, Iain Donnelly has seen and done nearly everything: from being a uniformed constable on the beat to counter-terrorism and surveillance; from CID to child sexual exploitation investigations; from intelligence to running national data analytics projects. During that time, he has seen the service change irrevocably, to the point where the public no longer knows what to expect from the police and the police service no longer knows what to expect of itself. Here he reveals how constant political meddling and a hostile media narrative have had a devastating impact on the morale of police officers and their ability to combat crime.

This has led to a situation in which the force has been decreased in size by 20,000 officers and 23,000 members of police staff and only 7 per cent of reported crime now results in a charge - compared with around 20 per cent ten years ago.