PETER HITCHENS: Now we know why the police are too busy to bother with all those shoplifters and thugs

• e-mail

The amazing thing about modern Britain is what is legal. That is to say, what can you do without anything happening to you? This week it is legal to burgle, to shoplift, to travel on public transport without paying your fare, to smoke marijuana in the street, to fill your tank at a petrol station and drive away without paying. It can’t be long before GBH joins the list. The police, we’re told, have more important things to do. Now we know what sort of things these are.

Behold PC Stephen Smith and PC Rachel Comotto. A stout jury of British citizens has just examined their actions in a South Coast care home and decided that what they did was not a crime. So it is legal, too. I’ve watched film of this event and advise you to do so, even if it makes you very angry. Because it contains some crucial truths about this country as it now is.

Bodycam footage shows Donald Burgess as he was tasered and pepper-sprayed

What you see is a bemused old man. We now know he was suffering from a urinary tract infection (UTI), not uncommon among people of his age. This is well known to cause a sort of crazy derangement. His name is Donald Burgess. He was 92 at the time of these events – three years ago – and has since died. Mr Burgess, a carpenter, was near the end of a hard-working and quiet life, bereaved and alone since the death of his wife from cancer after 60 years of marriage. In 2018 he had to have a leg amputated and so found his way to a ‘care home’.

On the day of these events (probably thanks to the UTI) he had been behaving oddly, flicking food about and poking a staff member in the stomach with what has been described as a butter knife (no serious damage done, anyway). Police were called. And so, after many decades of harmlessness, Mr Burgess fell into the hands of the might, majesty, dominion and power of the modern British state.

 As he sat in a fog of bafflement, his mouth a little open and his eyes vague, two heroes of Sussex Police appeared in his room. They spoke to him as if he was a child, but I doubt whether, in his state, he really heard what they said.

PC Smith and PC Comotto did not have to face this dangerous armed criminal alone. The alleged manpower shortage, always used to excuse the absence of police from our streets, did not apply in this case. Against a lone, ancient, ill pensioner with one leg they were a veritable army of two.

They had the usual array of police kit Velcroed to their bodies and dangling from their belts. PC Smith had a synthetic pepper spray called Pava and a telescopic baton, and he knew how to use them.

The effect of the spray has been best described as being like ‘wet fire’. It causes intense pain in the eyes and its effects can last for quite a while. It is hard to tell whether Mr Burgess, brought up in an uncomplaining world, was weeping as this venom was coolly pumped into his face by burly PC Smith. He tried to wipe it off.

But there wasn’t much time to worry about that, because PC Smith soon began to bellow in an enraged sort of way, and drew his baton, which he used to knock the pathetic knife from the old man’s hand. Meanwhile his colleague, doubtless following some health and safety procedure, said, flatly, ‘Taser Taser’. And then she fired it, delivering 1,500 volts to Mr Burgess as he tried to cope with his stinging eyes.

PC Stephen Smith arriving at Westminster Magistrates' Court last week, left, and PC Rachel Comotto at Southwark Crown Court this month

Even Channel 4 News wasn’t prepared to show what happens when a Taser hits a 92-year-old one-legged man in a wheelchair.

US police officers are often required to undergo being Tasered as part of training, and one described it like this: ‘When a Taser is used on you, it is pure electric hell for exactly five seconds. God never stitched together five longer seconds – the current from a Taser is by far the most acute pain I’ve ever endured.’

I’d say both of these actions, if inflicted on a prisoner in a cell by guards, could unhesitatingly be described as torture. I do understand that police officers need to defend themselves on the street, when they actually go there, though I think they’d be in less danger if they’d made more of an effort to be the citizens in uniform they are supposed to be.

But why are they like this? It is because we have stopped punishing crime as wilful wrongdoing and classified it as a disease to be treated. So all of us are now viewed as potential criminals, and even in our last few years on Earth we are not safe from these useless paramilitary social workers – who matily call us by our Christian names as they squirt chemicals into our faces and voltage into our trembling, ancient bodies.

God help us all. Nobody else will.

Alas Vine & Hitchens: What's the big idea? Get the Mail's new politics podcast, hosted by columnists Sarah Vine and Peter Hitchens - wherever you listen to podcasts now. 

Will the EU now push Poland into line?

The European Union is the continuation of Germany by other means, an empire without an emperor, willing to let its subject states have flags and anthems but no real independence – and far from free.

I dislike Europe’s new breed of nationalist, but the EU’s response to the challenge of Marine le Pen in France (prosecution) or of Calin Georgescu in Romania (banned from standing for president for having the wrong opinions) is part of a nasty new type of repression. In Austria, a ‘far-Right’ government was manoeuvred out of power. In Germany, security men ponder banning the ‘far-Right’ AfD as a threat to ‘the free democratic order’. Yet Germany’s leaders reassembled a dead parliament, after it had been replaced in elections by a new one. Then they got this zombie body to vote through measures the new parliament would have rejected. How democratic is that?

Today, Poland faces a very close-fought election between Brussels-style liberals and conservative nationalists.

The one who Brussels and the BBC want to win is the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski. The one the BBC don’t like is conservative Karol Nawrocki.

I wonder what methods the European Union has quietly used to try to get the result it wants?

In Poland, where independence is highly valued, they might just not work.

Search for Alas Vine & Hitchens on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts now. New episode released every Wednesday.