Who on earth would want to be a policeman today? Not many, I fear. Seasoned officers are leaving the force in droves. They are the latest cadre of ‘public servants’ to vote with their feet by quitting their profession, following teachers, doctors and the nurses out of the public sector door.

The rate of attrition is alarming given the upward trend in violent crime. Resignations have doubled in just four years.

Even if there were willing and keen police cadets waiting in the wings, it would make little difference. The police have been rendered impotent. They too would find themselves neutered, operating with their hands tied behind their backs, walking the tightrope of the competing demands of the culture of complaint while defending themselves against those very complaints.

It is an impossible balancing act, however much they pursue the demands of the domestic violence lobby or say their mea culpas about their failure to prosecute enough rapes to placate the feminists. All the while they risk being put on trial themselves. It’s little wonder they spend their time signalling their zeal by prosecuting ‘hate crimes’; or by conducting ‘guilty until proved innocent’ paedophile witch-hunts going back half a century, instead of going after present day crime.

Given the politically correct environment they have to operate in, is it surprising that some senior police believe it’s their job to pursue a dedicatedly ‘multicultural’ agenda, like the diversity-genuflecting Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, who said her force would consider allowing a Muslim recruit to wear a burka?

The idea that they would help enforce Sharia law is no longer so far-fetched in these Alice in Wonderland times. The Metropolitan Police reportedly have already turned a blind eye to Muslim officers who believe female genital mutilation to be ‘a clean and honourable practice’ which should not be criminalised; officers who thought that female victims of domestic violence should have their cases resolved in Sharia courts.

It is ironic that 18 years from Macpherson’s indiscriminate and destructive accusation of police institutional racism and the endless defensive attempts by the police since to demonstrate they are not, that a practising Muslim female officer found herself driven to resignation by the police’s politically correct racism – a racism bred directly out of the fear of being accused of racism.

This she said had allowed an ‘us and them’ culture to thrive among some Muslim officers, who considered themselves to be beyond the law.

Since Macpherson, respect and diversity have been hijacked to promote minority groups as Niall McCrae argues here. Institutional racism has become an active requirement of multiculturalism, which is exactly why the police were backward in coming forward over Muslim child abuse gangs in Rochdale, Oxford, Rotherham and Newcastle.

Whose fault is this? The police’s? No. The fault lies with the political establishment for imposing these mores, including the very un-conservative Conservative Party. That is who.

It’s the fault of the righteous Left under whose sway they have fallen, who never turn up an opportunity to carp and cavil at the police, a pastime Theresa May eagerly embraced. What is easier than making the police the perpetrators and putting them in the firing line? What more effective way is there to emasculate the police and undermine their authority?

They are not to be trusted as their own bosses confirm. Cressida Dick tells us that stop and search will only be done courteously and ‘subject to proper scrutiny’. Has she considered how such appeasement of the angry anti-police lobbies undermines police authority?

The Met Police Commissioner’s carefully crafted commitment in last week’s Times ticked all the boxes. Her fairytale fantasy of defeating violent crime with niceness and good community relations was yet another restatement of the failed progressive liberal approach to policing brought about by the Macpherson Report.

“Policing is ever evolving,” Steve White, the Chairman of the Police Federation, warned wearily. “The struggle to meet these demands in recent years has changed the outlook for many officers.”

It was the understatement of the year. “Evolution” to a feminist agenda was demanded the day ‘discriminatory’ height and fitness requirements were abandoned.

Now with a 28 per cent female contingent, no policeman in his right mind would dare even question this not ‘very PC subject’, as one former cop put it: “I will probably get a few abusive replies for this one, BUT has anyone else noticed that new cops just out the box seem to be getting smaller and smaller in both size and stature? If you were applying for a job where you might be required to dispel angry mobs and wrestle violent offenders, wouldn’t you think that in general the larger members of society would be at an advantage during the recruitment process? Let the abuse begin”, he ended.

There is no room for discussion. Police might have evolved to survive the strictures of feminism and multiculturalism, but they are still left having to contend with its social and cultural consequences.

They are the ones who have to police a world that has changed beyond recognition in terms of population size, behaviour, culture and criminality.

They are the ones faced with the behavioural consequences of family breakdown, rising lone parenthood and fatherless families. It’s their lot to handle an ever expanding population that no one planned for. Is it surprising that the faster the population has grown the more police numbers have retracted?

Unprecedented immigration has not just delivered more crime but whole new rafts of criminality for the police to contend with – from terrorist attack to child grooming and abuse, from modern day slavery to people trafficking.

It’s a tall order to police, by any standards. It’s an impossible one while their masters – Cressida Dick, Amber Rudd and Sadiq Khan – put the promotion of political orthodoxy before common sense and the protection of human life.

What self respecting copper wouldn’t opt out for the simpler life as a private security guard or bouncer?