I have a puzzle for the Metropolitan police – a mystery that only they can solve. Why, if the Met is so short-staffed, do they hang around in groups? Why do officers clump?

Why are some crimes completely ignored, but at other minor incidents the Met appear en masse? In London side streets I come across police vans, bumper to bumper, full of officers just sitting, doing nothing, like large unhappy children on a school trip. It’s demoralising for me. I can’t imagine how depressing it must be for them.

Sir Mark Rowley, the new Met Commissioner, has announced what he calls the ‘Turnaround Plan’ for transforming the Met. The first step is a ‘listening’ exercise so as to ‘rebuild the trust and confidence of Londoners’. As a Londoner, I should have ‘a greater say in determining my policing needs’, Sir Mark says, which suits me just fine. I have a long list of policing needs.

First up, I’d like the men of the Met to have a shave. Every single one of them has some sort of beard and it makes them look shifty. This is not a strong look, considering. My second policing need is for the Met to do away with virtual recruiting. During Covid they began to interview prospective officers online, not face to face, and they’ve never phased it out. But if you’re in the business of finding decent, non-rapey officers, it’s clearly a good idea to look them in the eye. Online dating tells you all you need to know about that.

The third and most pressing policing need I have is to clear up this question of how and why officers are deployed. I’m a full-time observer of the Met. I bike round town every day and I’m drawn to the flicker of blue lights like a sort of rubber-necking vampire moth. And what perplexes me most is not the shortage of cops so much as the wasting of their time.

Why, for instance, were there 30 or so uniformed police officers protecting the Home Office from four amiable-looking animal rights activists on Monday last week? There was a man with a wheelie bag and three ladies holding placards with photographs of beagles on them. That was it. Because of all the cops, I assumed a ruck was in the offing, and that a great wave of animal activists was about to descend to liberate the Home Office beagles. So I bought a coffee and sat down to see what happened.

No one else appeared. Sometimes the women shouted ‘science is violence’ but mostly they discussed whose coat was best for outdoor activism. Four Met officers in pale blue – liaison officers – had a stab at joining in the coat banter but even from a distance it looked awkward. At about 4 p.m. there was a general agreement that a red-haired lady in a lined parka had the most suitable coat, and after that the protestors peeled off, leaving a line of embarrassed-looking cops stretching from one end of Marsham Street to the other, protecting their own HQ from nothing.

As I left I passed a senior detective, and remembering my ‘greater say’ I had a polite word: why six officers for every activist? He looked cross. ‘We can’t tell how many will turn up,’ he said, then turned his back on me. I don’t think he was up to speed on Sir Mark’s listening mission. Nor was he open to my other questions like: ‘Why can’t you tell how many protestors will turn up? Don’t you check their Facebook page? And now the activists have gone, why are all the officers still standing here?’

If he’d read the Turnaround Plan, and known he should be open to civilian ideas, I might have suggested that he redeploy every officer instantly to stand outside school gates. It was going-home time for pupils, and all over London, after school, pupils are being mugged at knife-point for their phones. On Friday, the headmistress of St Mary Magdalene, Islington, round the corner from me, published a desperate open letter begging the council for help: ‘Following the mugging of yet another pupil yesterday at approximately 4.30 p.m., this one at knife-point and the pupil requiring medical attention, I would urge those of you with the ability to do something about street safety and street crime in the area to do so… the school has no power to bring change in this situation other than continuing to shout with an ever louder, more urgent voice.’ Perhaps liaison officers could be sent in to josh with the hoodies?

A few weeks ago, on my way to the Imperial War Museum, I saw a bus stop full of what looked like dead men, slumped, too still to just be drunk. There were three of them, and the youngest, 18 or so, had yellow skin and his eyes were slightly open. Passers-by stared, but didn’t stop. I guess it’s hard to deal with a pile of corpses at 11 a.m. when you’re desperate for the 344 to Clapham Junction. When I looked closer, two of the men were definitely breathing but I wasn’t sure about the yellow boy, so I called 999 and explained, and then went to try to shake him awake.

When the first set of policemen arrived – four officers in a panda car – I was relieved. I hadn’t managed to wake the boy, so one of the cops took over the shaking and he began to stir. Then another three cops arrived, a medical car and an ambulance. Within about 20 minutes the bus stop looked like a sort of first-responder social event. There was only room at the bus stop for two, so the rest of us stood around and discussed the nature of the overdose. ‘Smack, maybe meth? Fentanyl? Yeah.’

I think the men were OK and I hope the boy recovered, but why were seven officers sent to deal with one comatose addict? I left with the sense that there’s something very wrong, not just with the odd rogue officer, but with the whole management of the Met.