28 APRIL 2001, Page 19

Second opinion

IT IS reassuring to know that, contrary to what is often asserted by certain ill-disposed people, the forces of law and order in this country are sometimes extremely vigilant and effective. Only last week, for example, I stayed overnight in a London hotel, pulling up outside its front door in my car to unload my suitcase (there was nowhere else to stop within at least a hundred yards of the hotel's door). Within two minutes — quite literally — I had a parking ticket, awarded by an eagle-eyed traffic warden. When I accosted him, he agreed that his action was overzealous, but he had already written the ticket and the law must henceforth take its course.

It goes without saying that no vast apparatus such as that of justice can operate equally smoothly in all its parts. To take another example from only the week before, that of a patient who threatened (in front of two witnesses) to kill me should he ever meet me in the street. Since the particular patient had already severely assaulted several people, causing them injuries requiring attendance at hospital, his threat was not entirely to be disregarded. Indeed, it was entirely credible: he meant what he said, and I had no desire whatever to test his sincerity by meeting him in the street.

Since it is illegal to utter a threat to kill, and since I knew this man to be extremely dangerous and violent, I called the police. It was my duty to do so: those who take no notice of such threats are helping to ensure that they are later carried out, if not on themselves, then on somebody else.

The policeman who arrived in answer to my complaint gave the impression of taking the matter seriously. Unfortunately, he was not empowered to take a statement from me or from either of the two witnesses. He said he would send one of his colleagues to do so in the very near future. Two weeks later, I have heard nothing, and I know I shall hear nothing, however long I wait.

The British state is thus much more concerned to prevent parking on double yellow lines (themselves a sign of official bloody-mindedness and disregard for the public) for two minutes outside a hotel than to prevent the murder of its citizens. Parking is a mortal, but murder a venial, sin.

The inversion of official values is all but complete. The large white van that dis

tributes contraceptives to the street sexworkers in my residential district also brings them food and drink at the NHS's expense. My valiant neighbour, who grew tired of pruning the condoms from the rose bushes in her front garden, took to photographing the sex-workers as they touted for business on nearby street corners, and so far has taken pictures of 40 who work in a radius of about a hundred yards. To judge by these photographs, neither Otto Dix nor George Grosz exaggerated: they were not so much expressionists as straightforward realists. My neighbour makes her pictorial record because she had been told by the local police inspector that the sex industry does not exist locally. She wants to prove to him that it does.

He knows it already, of course, but his job is not to catch criminals; it is to try to hoodwink the public. He knows about the local sex industry because a sexworker was picked up by a client recently and rewarded for her services to him by a severe beating. She went to the police at the inspector's own station, where she was advised to seek compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board — and not to forget to claim for loss of earnings.

Theodore Dalrymple