How could 1,400 girls in the northern English town of Rotherham be groomed, tortured, trafficked and raped by Muslim gangs right under the noses of the police?

This must-watch interview gives the best answer yet.

Will you be calling the police 'hurty helpline' yes or no? Watch part one of this genuinely jaw-dropping debate between Julia and South Yorkshire's Police & Crime Commissioner ▼@JuliaHB1 | https://t.co/sv3MZUm41c pic.twitter.com/jPFZJ7YveY — talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) September 11, 2018

Julia: "I think those most affected were people terrified when a woman with a large knife ran through the town shouting'kill kill kill'. You're telling me the feelings of someone who saw a nasty tweet were affected just as much!?" Watch part two below ▼ pic.twitter.com/PtdPBHq8Ew — talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) September 11, 2018

It is between TalkRadio’s Julia Hartley-Brewer and the man currently in charge of local policing in that area – Alan Billings, the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire.

Billings runs a failing police force (or “service” as it’s now known) so inadequate to the task of rocketing crime rates (up 30 percent this year) that it was recently caught deliberately not recording 10 percent of reported crime, just to massage the statistics.

Yet despite its manifest incompetence – from the botched, vexatious raid on the home of pop star Cliff Richard to the Rotherham (and other) rape gangs – South Yorkshire police has decided to widen its remit to dealing with reported “non-crimes”.

Challenged by Hartley-Brewer, Billings defiantly argues that “non-crimes” like hurtful remarks on Twitter are just as important a problem as real crimes because they “affect people in diverse communities.”

Hartley-Brewer is unconvinced:

“Do you know what also affects people? People being raped. People being stabbed. People having their homes burgled.”

The interview is jaw-dropping, infuriating but, above all, extraordinarily illuminating.

What it clearly demonstrates is the vast gulf between the attitudes of senior police in Britain and those of the public they supposedly serve.

In essence, what the public wants – what it has always wanted – is for the police to prevent it being raped, murdered, attacked with acid, mugged, burgled, stabbed and so on.

But what the senior police would now prefer to be doing is to remake the world according to the religion of Social Justice: celebrating diversity, combating sexism, banning hateful thoughts, prancing around at gay parades and making sure that the only kind of fun anyone has is the kind of fun they approve of…

Before I listened to this interview, I had thought – or at least naively hoped – that the clash of attitudes I have just outlined above was merely a glib right-wing caricature of modern policing.

“Of course the police want to stop crime every much as they did. They just have a funny way of showing it, sometimes…”, I thought.

What this encounter between Hartley-Brewer and this berk of a “crime” commissioner shows is that they really, genuinely don’t…

At least not at the level of people like Alan Billings. I’m quite sure that at the rank and file level, the police are as brave and committed and determined to have a go at criminals ever they were.

But they are lions led by donkeys.

Billings is not himself a policeman – only an elected functionary with a worrying degree of influence over policing policy in his district, in charge of a budget more than £250 million. His attitudes however are very much of a piece with those at senior levels within the police – often graduates with touchy feely sociology degrees promoting the politically correct notion that crime is society’s fault – such as the London Metropolitan Police’s current leader Cressida Dick.

The most striking thing about the interview is Billings’s utter, utter lack of shame, embarrassment or willingness to change.

Despite the fact that the interview was prompted by a total public relations disaster – the mass public outrage over South Yorkshire Police’s tweet urging people to report “non-crime hate incidents” – Billings is determined that he knows far better than the public he serves.

That’s because, like so many of those in authority in Britain today – from social services to Westminster – Billings lives in a politically correct bubble, quite divorced from ordinary people’s hopes and fears.

A former priest and academic, married to a former Labour councillor and former Labour MEP, he embodies the politically correct orthodoxies of the liberal elite. He was voted into office on a mere 15 per cent turnout and comes from a Labour heartland where socialist traditions are so strong that if a blind monkey in a red rosette were put forward as the official Labour candidate it would certainly prevail over any Conservative one.

So you could argue that the people of South Yorkshire have basically got the policing they deserve.

Except they don’t. Nobody deserves policing as bad as this.