The boy who joined a blue line in flux
I joined the police in October 1982, just as the ground beneath it was shifting. The Brixton riots of ’81 had detonated a shockwave that forced the service to confront its own philosophy. Training was dragged – sometimes kicking – away from rote-learning legal definitions and toward something more reflective, more facilitative, more human. Even the existential question of Force or Service? hung in the air like a stubborn fog.
Into this maelstrom stepped a naive 19-year-old lad who needed a home, an identity, a wage packet, and – if I’m honest – confidence. The Organisation gave me all of those, even if the personal confidence bit took a little longer to arrive.
My view of the police prior to being sworn in was shaped almost entirely by television. CID (Criminal Investigation Department) detectives were gods. Plain clothed, sharp eyed, instinctive crime fighters who cornered villains with a mix of guile and grit. They were the elite. The ones who really did policing. I swallowed that myth whole. And it stayed with me for years.
Walking into a CID office as a young, uniformed officer felt like entering a cathedral. These were the suspicious specialists, the lie detectors, the justice seekers. They represented everything I thought policing was supposed to be: allergic to deceit, intolerant of duplicity, armed with a sixth sense for nonsense.
I never joined them. Not because I wasn’t interested – but because I didn’t think I was good enough.
The day the myth began to crack
Years later, as a uniformed sergeant, I was training officers in investigative interviewing. I turned up in operational uniform to a classroom of plain-clothed would be detectives who hadn’t been ordained into the fold, and yet there they were, paying a similar homage to my long held assertion that this chapter of the police represented the very best of what we were principally there to do – prosecute the baddies. Once I explained my reasoning for staying in uniform (I was simply proud of my status), one student admitted he’d gone to M&S and bought five brand new shirts for the course. Such was the power of belief; they all wanted to look like their idols.
It was surreal: a room full of budding sleuths looking at me as though I was the living contradiction of the very mythology I’d spent years worshipping. That was a turning point. I refused to change my appearance and began to question my own devotion to an overzealous reverence for this section of the police service. Nonetheless, even later as a senior officer, I still believed that CID possessed the very best investigators, whose default mindset was to dismiss any attempt to ply pathetic lies – otherwise known as bullshit.
That moment forced me to interrogate my own fragile folklore. Why had I placed CID on a pedestal so high that even I couldn’t reach it? Why had I assumed that suspicion, instinct, and moral clarity were somehow exclusive to one corner of the organisation?
Fast forward: The Facebook era of former detectives
Now those detectives – the ones I once hero worshipped – are retired. Late 50s, 60s, some nudged into their 70s. Social media, especially Facebook, keeps us connected.
And here’s the bit that has knocked me sideways.
As the country convulses with populism, culture-war rhetoric, and political sleight of hand, I’m watching many of these same suspicious specialists –people trained to reject simple answers to complex problems – parrot the talking points of Reform UK and similar movements. Rhetoric that is, frankly, so defective it can be seen from space.
These were the officers who would never accept “nothing to see here, gov.” These were the ones who could smell corruption a mile off. These were the ones who understood disproportionality, nuance, and evidence.
Yet now some of them defend the indefensible with lines like:
• “They’re all the same.”
• “It’s no different to getting a free pair of glasses.”
• “They’re all as bad as each other.”
• “Corruption is corruption.”
The equivalences are staggeringly akin to likening common assault to murder. The lack of suspicion – once their superpower – has evaporated. The same people who could dismantle a suspect’s lie in seconds now share memes that wouldn’t survive a critical-thinking task fit for a twelve year old.
So, what the hell happened?
Was my admiration misplaced? Or has something more profound – and more troubling – shifted inside the minds of these ex-colleagues?
A human behaviour explanation (and why it matters)
Several well established psychological and sociological mechanisms help explain this transformation:
• Identity Protective Cognition People tend to adopt beliefs that protect their sense of self – especially when that identity is threatened. Former detectives – once part of a respected institution – may gravitate toward narratives that simplify societal change and reaffirm their worldview.
• Nostalgia Bias As individuals age, they often idealise the past and view present change as decline. Populist rhetoric exploits this bias by promising a return to a simpler, “better” time.
• Cognitive Load and Heuristic Drift Retirement reduces exposure to complex investigative environments. Without constant professional challenge, people rely more heavily on heuristics – mental shortcuts – which can make simplistic political narratives more appealing.
• Group Polarisation Online echo chambers intensify existing beliefs. A retired detective surrounded by like-minded peers on Facebook may drift toward more extreme positions than they would have adopted alone.
• Moral Disengagement When institutions or political actors behave badly, some individuals rationalise or minimise wrongdoing to avoid cognitive dissonance.
These mechanisms don’t excuse the behaviour – but they do illuminate it.
Perhaps the real lesson is that mythologies – whether about policing, politics, or people – are fragile things. We build them to make sense of the world, to anchor ourselves, to find heroes. But myths crack under pressure, and when they do, we’re forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that humans are not fixed entities. We change, we drift, we harden, we soften.
The detectives I revered were never gods; they were people shaped by time, culture, fear, pride, and the slow erosion of certainty. And maybe the challenge for all of us is to resist the seduction of simple stories – about institutions and about ourselves – and instead, cultivate the suspicion, curiosity, and humility that once defined the very people I admired.
© Ian Kirke 2026 & title image
@ iankirke.bsky.social