Police should never have allowed burglar shrine near victim's home, says MARTIN TOWNSEND

They were hung there by the family and friends of Henry Vincent, the serial thief and conman who was fatally stabbed during a scuffle with the elderly householder he had targeted, Richard Osborn-Brooks. But they have never been in place for long.

Members of the public, thoroughly sickened by the activities of a career criminal who specialised in targeting elderly people, have torn them down. There is no reason at all why anyone who didn’t know the loathsome Mr Vincent should have a shred of sympathy for him.

But that doesn’t prevent his nearest and dearest loving him and wanting to mark his death. That is understandable. What should have been prevented, right at the outset, was for that memorial to be erected anywhere near Mr Osborn-Brooks’s house.

As I wrote in my column last week he is just as much a victim of events as Mr Vincent. He didn’t ask to be burgled. He has had to move out of the home he loves and go into hiding for fear of reprisals. He will be apprehensive about moving back.

The events of that fateful Friday a couple of weeks back will cast a shadow over the rest of his life. Why does he deserve such punishment? The memorial, I’m afraid, has only made things worse.

It has dragged a usually quiet neighbourhood into the fray and allowed the burglar’s family to provoke Mr Osborn-Brooks further under the cover, shamefully, of their own grief. The police should have stopped this.

It is their job to keep the peace, and keeping the peace in this case means stopping Vincent’s family from inflaming a difficult situation still further. That they didn’t do so, I believe, raises serious questions not only about the purpose of our forces of law and order but also about where we are as a nation.

The first thing that sprang to my mind, I’m afraid, when those flowers went up and then down again, up and then down once more, was that it had all the hallmarks of a Laurel and Hardy movie. 

It was so farcical that it seemed extraordinary that the police would stand by and continue to let it happen. You can almost hear an oldschool, business like copper saying: “Come on, you’ve made your point, move these flowers out now and leave the street in peace.”

But no, the police twisted and turned in the breeze of controversy amid the cold gusts of political correctness. Some of the protesters were from a Travellers’ camp and Travellers, as we have been made painfully aware, “know their rights”.

In trying  to appease both the mourners and protesters the police started off satisfying nobody and ended up, having warned that anyone who tried to remove the flowers might be arrested, appearing to side with the mourners.

The memorial must stay, they declared, every family has a right to grieve. Well, yes, but do they also have a right to torment and antagonise? Law and order, like the whole business of running the country and in common with the entire notion of running anything, frankly, requires moral courage. 

It demands of those in charge that they accept that, from time to time, and possibly more often than not, they are going to make themselves extremely unpopular with some or all of those they have responsibility for, in pursuit of the common good. It calls for cold, possibly even cold-hearted, logic.

In 2018, I’m afraid there are far too few of those in public life who understand this.

Even fewer who are willing to embrace it. Some things are just plain wrong, whether it’s smoking in public places or hunting foxes with dogs – two obvious and straightforward aberrations corrected by legislation that was unpopular with more than a few – or putting up a memorial where it can only antagonise.

The authorities would not have been saying no memorial was possible, just the same way that they didn’t stop people smoking completely or ban all types of hunting. Simply that, in that form, in that place, within that context, such a memorial was not the right thing to do.

That there seems to have been a collective loss of nerve in making such decisions should concern us all.

The police, I’m sure, would point out the complexity of the problem in Hither Green and suggest that their “solution” reflected that.

But I believe it points to a lack of moral backbone, or the ability to quickly separate what is right from what is wrong and act on it.

I think it suggests a police force that has become over-sensitive, over-politicised and uncertain of what it is actually supposed to be doing – and that should be of deep concern to us all.