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Good Morning, Last week a Freedom of Information request from the Â鶹Éç found that more than 150 officers had applied to leave the troubled Greater Manchester Police to transfer to neighbouring forces. The force is in special measures after inspectors found it failed to investigate 80,000 crimes. It now has a new Chief Constable. The last Royal Commission into policing was 60 years ago. It became the basis for the Police Act of 1964. But the world has changed. What the police have to deal with now is different in scope and scale from half a century ago. Some believe there should be a new Royal Commission. The mental ill-health of offenders, burgeoning cyber-crime, international fraud, modern slavery – these all present the police with a vastly different criminal scene. Corruption amongst officers and complaints against them only magnify the problem undermining the public’s trust. As a vicar in Croydon I used to take days out to shadow members of the congregation in their place of work. I spent a day with the Metropolitan Police in which we went to a dozen different incidents. In all but one of them the officer I was with sought to defuse the situation. It opened my eyes to a new understanding of policing and had me reaching for the Sermon on the Mount and those famous words, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. Making peace requires imagination and empathy – virtues which Christians see in God’s initiative to save the world. Sometimes the police have to confront the face and force of evil with which there can be no compromise. Over the years I’ve worked closely with them and seen both the good and the bad. I’ve preached at the National Police Memorial Service which remembers literally thousands of officers killed in the line of duty. It was St Paul who saw the institutions of the State as ‘God’s servants’ to wield the sword against wrongdoers; and it was Robert Peel, the architect of modern policing, who said ‘that the test of police efficiency (was) the absence of crime and disorder’. Yet more than that, the measure of good policing is the degree of peace that exists between the police and the communities whose servants they are.