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Among other hints of nastiness in the woodshed, or the police station, Britons were perturbed by recent charges that Scotland Yard had browbeaten a convicted prostitute into testifying against Ward (she later recanted), and by speculation that police deliberately failed to produce a defense witness at the trial of "Lucky" Gordon, the Jamaican singer who was imprisoned on charges of beating Christine Keeler, and later mysteriously freed. Since there is no watertight separation of executive, judicial and legislative powers* in Britain's unwritten constitution, the disquieting implication to many Britons was that, in its embarrassment over the Profumo scandal, the government had exerted extraordinary pressure to put Ward behind bars. If such suspicions are unfair, there was little likelihood that they would ever be fully investigated, let alone refuted.
Danger to Democracy? Like many other legacies of 19th century Britain, the law enforcement system seems almost to have been designed not to work. To some extent, it was. Sir Robert Peel, who in 1829 organized the first modern force (and gave the bobbies his name), admitted to grave misgivings that it might be used as an instrument of tyranny. Unlike a soldier or civil servant, the British policeman is not a "servant of the Crown" but has the ambiguous legal status of a uniformed civilian who is merely paid to do what every citizen should do on his own.
Even to this day, many Britons believe that a strong, unified police force could lead to a police state. As a result, they have 158 separate local forces whose chief constables are accountable only to themselves. When a royal commission in 1962 recommended continuation of this system, Commission Member A. L. Goodhart—an eminent U.S. jurist who was then Master of Oxford's University College—objected that a single, centrally controlled police network would be infinitely more efficient, and more democratic, than the "empty velvet glove" with which Britain is now trying to defeat organized crime. "The danger in a democracy," said he, "does not lie in a central police that is too strong but in local police forces that are too weak." In day-to-day police work, the lack of liaison between forces—more than 50% have fewer than 350 men—inevitably helps the criminal. Another boon to careful crooks: a law by which police are only allowed to file fingerprints of convicted criminals, not of suspects.
Buckinghamshire's chief constable, Brigadier John Cheny Cheney (Eton, Sandhurst, India), did not even bother to enlist Scotland Yard's help in the train robbery until nearly a day after it happened. What worries many experts is that such built-in inefficiency can only cost Britain's bobbies what remains of their old prestige. As it is, they are fighting the greatest crime wave in the nation's history with insufficient manpower and inadequate coordination, amid deepening public distrust that suggests their lot will be unhappier yet.
* The Lord High Chancellor, a Cabinet member who earns $5,600 a year more than the Prime Minister, serves simultaneously as the government's chief legal adviser, the nation's senior judge, titular head of the legal profession and Speaker of the House of Lords.