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The chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), has called a meeting for September. All chief constables in the UK are invited to discuss the recent series of incidents in which the police themselves have been victims of serious crime. No one can fail to have felt heartbroken at the pictures of PC Andrew Harper on his wedding day 4 weeks before he was killed; and Deputy Chief Constable Stephen Martin spoke out following what he described as the fifth attempt in Northern Ireland to murder police officers this year. The police are the people the rest of us call when we don’t know what to do. We hope that they do know what to do in situations of conflict and confrontation, sometimes violence. And even with the best training and preparation, it is often simply not possible for a police team to know what they are walking into; situations can escalate without warning. But underlying this relationship between the highly trained officers and those of us who call on them is a strong tradition in the UK, of policing with consent. Based on principles developed when Robert Peel was Home Secretary in the 1820s, police are not a separate breed of people, or an imposed state force; they are citizens in uniform. And while the uniform gives them both authority and makes them more visible and vulnerable to attack, the fundamental principle remains that the police are the public and the public are the police. There is deep wisdom in this principle that finds resonance in Christian theology. That before we are anything else, we are fundamentally connected to one another by our common humanity and equality before God, with interchangeable obligations and rights. For this principle to hold, it requires a commitment to trust one another, and when that trust between the police and the people breaks down, as it does from time to time of course, the whole of society’s flourishing is imperilled. St Paul created an image of a body as a way of understanding human community which illustrates the very close bond, in his metaphor, a bond of blood and sinew, that exists between human beings whatever our background, ethnicity, gender, or job. In his words, it is just not possible to say that we don’t need each other, because we are part of the same indivisible body. I think that this vision of a flourishing society requires restating our common commitment as often as we can to the principle of policing with consent. And to let the men and women know who serve society in the police that if one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer too.