Idea for a press conference: someone stands in front of New Scotland Yard and fixes the cameras with a serious look, before appealing for information relating to possible crimes carried out by former occupants of that building. Perhaps the mere sight of the edifice, or its old Scotland Yard predecessor, could trigger memories that could help with inquiries – or, indeed, launch some eye-catching new ones. Remarkable, isn’t it, that in all the furore over historical allegations of abuse by establishment paedophiles, not a single name of a police officer – retired or dead – has found its way into the frame? I mean really, what are the odds? (About 2-1 in the 1970s vice squad, you’d have thought.)

This week’s decision by a senior Wiltshire police officer to position himself outside the late Ted Heath’s home and solicit allegations of abuse against the former prime minister served as a bizarre piece of theatre by an arm of the establishment increasingly given to such things. And increasingly ill-advisedly so. Until that moment in the evolution of British policing, many will not have realised that you could just stand in front of someone’s house and wonder authoritatively aloud whether they might have been a nonce.

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Some will still be struggling to plot the fair limits of free speech as far as Wiltshire police are concerned – this, after all, is the force which asked newsagents for the names of customers who had purchased copies of Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. One of the … suspects, was it?… was 77-year-old former nurse Anne Keat, who wondered after the event: “What’s wrong with me wanting to buy it?” That remains a tantalisingly unanswered question, though the force claims the names of those who did have been “permanently and securely disposed of”. It is similarly unclear whether Wiltshire police are considering investigating burglaries in houses with odd numbers, as their colleagues in Leicestershire have been doing. Either way, my advice to anyone who has been burgled is to promptly purchase a copy of a satirical magazine, which ought to guarantee a home visit from at least two officers.

Ted Heath: IPCC to investigate alleged coverup of child abuse claims Read more

In a cute instance of timing, this all happens against the backdrop of #cutshaveconsequences, the nationwide Police Federation campaign given its Wiltshire launch barely a fortnight ago, which has seen the area peppered with billboards and bus adverts warning of the dire consequences of police cuts to providing basic law and order services. Does this campaign count as auto-satire? In which case, ought it not be investigated? Like any allegation of crime against police officers, of course, it would be vanishingly unlikely to end in a conviction. But no doubt one of the expensive media experts hired by the police might argue for its presentational importance.

One thing that is beyond debate is that the police find themselves in a changed landscape. For decades, the country was effectively ruled by a non-aggression pact between the government of the day, the police, and Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Each gave the others what they wanted, whether it be a heads-up on dawn raids, uncritical cheerleading in print, or the blithe removal of civil rights enjoyed for hundreds of years. (“We asked the police what powers they wanted,” read Labour’s 2005 mini-manifesto, “and made sure they got them.”) Fringe benefits included highly paid columns after leaving office, and pony rides on former police horses.

The breakup of this threesome has been messy (though they’re all still popping back to each other for the occasional quickie). Despite the Met’s dutiful failure to investigate those binbags of evidence on phone hacking, the eventual explosion of that story did for the love affair between Murdoch’s tabloids and the cops. The Sun’s Police Bravery Awards have not been held since 2011, pointedly replaced in the paper’s affections by an annual celebration of the military, while the arrest and trials of so many of its staff seems to have woken those remaining up to the idea that rights abuses and miscarriages of justice are technically possible.

Will the police prove as bad at making media as they are at getting convictions for deaths in custody?

In government, meanwhile, Theresa May is the first home secretary in memory not to have appeared petrified of the police, while for many in her party, Plebgate was the moment at which the scales fell from their eyes as far as the cops were concerned. Other fripperies had failed to stir them in quite the same way – Hillsborough, the Lawrence inquiry and whatnot. But the business over the bike gate at one end of Downing Street was clearly a moral watershed, and the force’s natural defenders in the Tory ranks are now much diminished in number.

So what’s a limelight-seeking force to do? The answer, it seems, is to venture into a form of content creation. Having for many years provided their footage for TV shows such as Police, Camera, Action, forces then moved into allowing broadcasters along for the ride for the likes of Traffic Cops. These days, there is a growing sense that they are upping the ante. The raid on Cliff Richard’s Berkshire home didn’t receive quite the critical praise South Yorkshire police might have hoped for, what with their being found to have released highly confidential information to the BBC.

But far from giving forces like Wiltshire pause, this type of staged media event appears to have acted as an inspiration. And so with the Met, who have run out of Sun journalists to arrest for phone hacking and payments to public officials, but who this week interviewed Sun columnist Katie Hopkins under caution for something she had written in the paper (attention on which madam will have fed greedily.) I can only hope they filmed it all for next year’s Speech Cops, for which material is being collected at a most impressive rate.

The suspicion must be that the police will prove as self-harmingly bad at making media as they are at getting convictions for deaths in police custody. None of this is to suggest that they should not investigate the horrific allegations of past abuse piling up by the day nor that they are the only supposed guardians of public life shamed by the failure to do so historically. The media and politicians are also stained. But now a previously inconceivable reckoning is under way, the police should investigate, not agitate. It may not occur to senior officers on a limelight-loving mission to look busy, but these forays into staged drama and their fallout will eventually damage them in the public standing as badly as some of their very darkest former mistakes.