In 1964 Churchill's health declined and his public appearances became rare. His death at his London home on January 24, 1965 was followed by a state funeral at which almost the whole world paid tribute. He was buried in the family grave in Blandon churchyard, Oxfordshire.
Text 29
British Police System
There are about 60,000 police officers, men and women, in England, Wales and Scotland, excluding London. They all have , the same rates of pay and the same conditions of service, and all are subject to the same code of discipline. All are engaged in the enforcement of the law, the preservation of life and property, and the prevention of crime. Each of them has to take the same personal oath of loyalty to the Crown, in whose service they are; and each one, whatever his or her rank, has virtually the same power and authority under the law.
Yet they form not one police force but many. For there are 155 different police forces in the country, varying in size from sixteen in Scotland to over 3,000 in Lancashire and 20,000 in the Metropolitan Police District. Each of these forces is a separate body, independent of the others, and each operates only within its own area, under the command of its Chief Constable, and is administered by its own local police authority.
From the point of view of organization and operation, there is little difference between a county police force and a borough police force, but there is a difference between the police authorities in the two types. The police authority of a county force is known as the Standing Joint Committee and is composed of justices of the peace elected at quarter sessions, and county councillors elected by the county council, in equal numbers. The police authority of a borough force is known as the Watch Committee, and consists of borough councillors elected by the borough council. In the case of combined police forces, the usual pattern is that the police authorities of the constituent forces elect members to form a combined police author-%»in proportion to the populations concerned.
The powers and responsibilities of Standing Joint Committees d combined police authorities differ from those of Watch Committees in certain matters.
Although the local police authority is responsible for the administration and maintenance of its force, the central government nevertheless plays an important part. And it is the Home Secretary who is generally responsible to Parliament for the maintenance of law and order throughout the country as a whole.
Although he has no responsibility for the actual operations of individual forces, he must see that they are efficient. This he does in three ways. In the first place he makes regulations, with the approval of Parliament, governing the pay and conditions of service of all police officers and establishing their code of discipline. In the second place, his department maintains certain common services for the benefit of all forces in such matters as training, radio-telephony and scientific investigation. And in the third place, he maintains control over the establishments of the forces, their efficiency and standards of housing and accommodation, through an inspectorate.
Text 30
English Criminal Law
Criminal Law is that part of the law of the land which is concerned with crimes. The English criminal law has never been reduced to a single code but many particular topics have been codified by separate statutes, for example, the Larceny Act (1916), which deals with various forms of theft and related offences such as fraudulent conversion and the offences against the Person Act (1861), which covers many forms of assault and personal violence. Criminal statutes call for judicial interpretation, just as a comprehensive criminal code would do, and authoritative rulings by the courts on the meaning of statutes are as much part of the criminal law as are the statutes themselves.
A crime, according to the doctrine of the Common Law, is made up of an outward act and the state of mind of the criminal. He must have a guilty mind or mens rea, in addition to committing the physical act which is forbidden. This doctrine of mens rea is still of importance, particularly in some Common Law crimes, but in many statutory crimes it has ceased to be of much significance. Every crime, it may be said, has its own kind of guilty mind. This clearly exists if the intention is to commit the criminal act, knowing it to be such, But every person is taken to intend the probable consequences of his act and so a person who treats another so violently that he jumps out of a window to escape and is killed by the fall is guilty of murder. Sometimes mens rea may take the form of negligence or mental inadvertence, as in manslaughter by neglect. Then the mental state must be proved to exist, as in the crime of burglary. In the case of murder the necessary mens rea is expressed by the phrase «malice aforethought». This phrase does not imply that murder can be committed only if it is premeditated. Nor need malice in the ordinary sense of spite or ill-will be present in the mind of the murderer. An act is said in the criminal law to be done maliciously if it is done intentionally without a just cause for excuse.