The coppers were so stunned that their carefully planned heckles died in their throats.
Episode two of Channel 4's Coppers followed police officers during the riots in Nottingham last summer.
"The book Bent Coppers is a serious investigative work covering matters of major public concern" it said.
They argue for replacing centralised control over the police with contracts spelling out what people can expect of local coppers.
But thanks to the mayor, police bosses have twigged that more coppers on the streets do keep the public happy.
One reason the coppers are so cocky about their ability to dominate the market is that they have more uniformed bodies.
George Osborne unleashed a fatwa to make teachers and nurses, coppers and soldiers, the low paid and jobless pay for his Treasury catastrophe.
The case was brought against Orion Publishing and the author Graeme McLagan, a former BBC home affairs correspondent, over their book 'Bent Coppers'.
As a result, Britain's coppers are wondering whether one side-effect of the information age is going to be an upsurge of civil disobedience.
"People want the reassurance of seeing more coppers about and I think we can do that within the financial envelope we have got, " he said.
Along with lawyers, policy wonks and consultants, the room was packed with seasoned old coppers eagerly discussing "comparative assessment tools", "turning data into insight" and "mainstreaming".
Compared with Northern Ireland's coppers, who struggle to overcome a reputation for Protestant partisanship, English and Welsh officers tend to be given the benefit of the doubt.
ECONOMIST: Second-guessing the police is a hazardous business
British coppers are investigating both phone-hacking and bribery charges.
In part because there are now more of them, the police are moving away from rapid-response methods, where coppers wait for the phone to ring and then race out in their cars.
But an increasingly large number of Level-two criminals are slipping through, partly because they are too large to be caught by the neighbourhood coppers and too small to interest the national agencies.
ECONOMIST: Britain's police forces are about to have a rash of mergers
RGO, it might be a nice gesture if the exhibition's sponsors could come up with a few extra coppers for the upkeep of the organisation that is the ultimate reason they are there.
The middling stuff is what worries the coppers.
ECONOMIST: Britain's police forces are about to have a rash of mergers
Mr Innes and most British coppers reckon such a heavy-handed approach is alien to the culture of British policing (indeed, it turned out to work nowhere so well as in New York) and may even be wrong in principle.
Jackie Kaur, a prosecutor who has worked with officers in Kent, reports that coppers tend to over-charge, perhaps for the sake of effect: choosing actual bodily harm, for example, when the evidence only supports the lesser charge of assault.
ECONOMIST: Police muddles mean botched prosecutions. Time for reform
应用推荐