Katie Lam: If the Metropolitan Police teaches us anything, it’s that bigger forces are not always better

Katie Lam: If the Metropolitan Police teaches us anything, it’s that bigger forces are not always better

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent. It’s a cliché picture we all recognise: the local police officer on his bicycle, managing his beat in the countryside, comes across a young troublemaker getting up to some sort of low-level mischief. Rather than referring his case to the Crown Prosecution Service, the good-natured bobby instead takes the child to his mother. He knows, because he’s seen it all before, that a ste…