In the United Kingdom our once lauded and admired police forces are now getting a reputation for policing everything in society except crime. The senior officers of various forces will turn out to opine on whatever is the current leftist or trendy cause of the day and the more junior officers seem to be more interested in policing people’s Tweets rather than policing the streets. It’s a complete and utter mess.

One example of the mess that our police forces have become is in the form of the Chief Constable of Dyfed -Powys Police in Wales, Dr Richard Lewis. He’s popped up in order to virtue signal to the public by supporting the ludicrous ban on Welsh rugby fans singing the Tom Jones hit ‘Delilah’ at rugby matches.

Dr Lewis praised the ‘Delilah’ ban on Twitter citing what he sees as the song’s content which is about a jealous man killing their partner. He then went on to virtue signal about the levels of domestic violence in Britain.

To Dr Lewis’s comment, a Twitter user, Woofter Superior replied:

Woofter Superior is bang on correct here. There are indeed a lot more things that the police should be concerned about instead of a song.

It’s ridiculously inappropriate for a police officer to be commenting on this. The fact that he can feel that he has the right to intervene in this way and in particular intervene on the side of a policy of disgraceful and unnecessary censorship, is a pretty good indication of how far the politicisation of our police forces has gone.

Dr Lewis’s comment also grossly misreads the context of the song or its subject matter. The song does not say that the murder of Delilah was right, even though the murdering protagonist tries to excuse himself. We can clearly see that the song is not approving of the murder and that the murderer eventually hangs around the murder scene waiting to be nicked. He surrenders to the police even though in the context of the time when the song was written, roughly two years after the abolition of capital punishment in Britain, the idea that a jealousy murderer like the man who killed Delilah would have taken a one way trip to the gallows, was probably still understood and accepted by the public, as it would have been by the protagonist. ‘Delilah’ paints a shocking story of a senseless murder and the potential penalty of taking the path of letting emotions take control. It is a song that no more encourages domestic violence than Lord Of The Rings makes me want to stick rabbit fur to my feet. It’s a song that ultimately condemns murder rather than approves of it.

It’s both disgusting and disgraceful to see a senior police officer perk up and virtue signal like this and over such a minor issue as a song sung at rugby matches. If Dr Lewis gets so heated up about a Tom Jones song then maybe the uniformed weapons grade censorious arse that Dyfed -Powys has for a Chief Constable, should avert his eyes from gangsta rap and the opera Carmen.

There’s a great irony in Dr Lewis’s intervention into this matter as reports from His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary has said that his force has many failings. Failings such as the inability to record all crime and only managing to record 87.6% of recorded crime. In 2021 one of His (then Her) Majesty’s Constabulary inspectors said:

Dyfed-Powys Police is too often failing to record reported crimes, the policing inspectorate has said.

HMICFRS found that Dyfed-Powys Police is only recording 87.6 per cent of all reported crime – meaning an estimated 4,400 crimes are not recorded each year.

Its performance is even worse for violent crime, of which only 85.4 per cent of offences are being recorded – some involving domestic abuse or vulnerable victims.

In 2018, HMICFRS found that Dyfed-Powys Police was too often failing to record reported crimes. Through a follow-up inspection in 2021, the inspectorate found that Dyfed-Powys Police had failed to make the expected improvements, with crime-recording levels broadly unchanged.

HMICFRS has recommended that Dyfed-Powys Police should immediately:

• improve its systems and processes for recording reported crimes, paying particular attention to domestic abuse; and
• ensure adequate supervision of the crime-recording decisions made by police officers and staff.

The inspectorate also recommended that the force should provide better training for all police officers and staff working on crime recording within the next three months.

Woofter Superior is correct in pointing out that maybe the police should refrain from involving themselves in stuff like song lyrics when their own houses need a lot of putting in order. Like him I’m more offended that the Met Police seems to contain an awful lot of wrong ‘uns and that many other police forces can no longer be considered as impartial in the way that they police, than I am about song lyrics.

Dr Lewis arrogantly told Welsh rugby fans to ‘sing something else’ yet when you look at the state of his force (or should that read ‘farce’?) just a few years back, then you can see that neither he or his force have anything to be proud about. His force didn’t properly record, and therefore be able to effectively police crime, but instead try to police everything else except crime. Maybe Welsh rugby fans should tell Dr Lewis to put his demand to sing what he wants them to sing where the sun don’t shine and sing ‘Delilah’ anyway. If nothing else such an action would piss off numerous unlovely, censorious pearl-clutchers, of which Dr Lewis is sadly but one of too many.