NOW here’s something controversial to say – I like the police. Yes, you read that right, I like the police.

I know it’s customary to sneer at the very mention of their name, and fashionable to heap blame on them for everything from social ills to climate change (or at least that’s how it sometimes seems), but the simple, inescapable truth is that there’s no sight more reassuring than that of a bobby on the beat when some thug starts eyeballing you along the Cowley Road.

I just don’t understand why everybody has it in for them – if they’re deemed too heavy-handed, too insensitive in their day-to-day procedures, they get accused of everything from prejudice to sheer out-and-out bloody mindedness. Yet if they fail to prevent a crime from being committed, they get branded as incompetent and bungling. I mean, how can they win?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve sometimes found policemen to be...not rude per se, but certainly a little ‘testy’. But big deal. I’m ‘testy’ sometimes; in fact, everyone I know has good and bad days. That’s life. And it certainly hasn’t led me to tar their whole profession.

Indeed, truth is, I’m not even sure it matters whether they should be saints or not – so long as they keep every creep, every felon, every fanatic as far away from me – and the people I care about – as possible.

What is puzzling is just how many people do expect police officers to behave like...I don’t know, Barack Obama or Mother Theresa.

And if all of the above weren’t bad enough, they also have to contend with those people who go out of their way to target, and bait, the ordinary Bobby for a whole A-to-Z of crimes, from intimidation to inciting violence, because they won’t allow them – by way of legal protest you understand – to vandalise, threaten and assault.

So, call me old-fashioned, but I can’t help but cheer for the underdog.

Having encountered police officers across the world, I can, hand on heart, say ours are, if nothing else, HUMAN. And that trait alone makes them something quite rare.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I think we should turn a blind eye when it’s clear – or suspected – that they may have acted beyond their authority.

But equally that shouldn’t trigger the inevitable knee-jerk reaction that follows any complaint made against their uniform and duty, ie, that precisely because they are police, they must, by definition, be guilty.

For those among us who shout loudest about injustice, isn’t this a prime example?

Bonn Square – the all-new improved quarter of Oxford that earlier this year was the focus of so much fierce campaigning by people who wanted to preserve this once grubby, squalid patch of mud, favoured by winos, because it symbolised an ‘environmental oasis’.

Well, all this summer it has been an oasis – that much is true – but for tourists and locals alike who at last can sit there, safely, unhindered by drunks, and enjoy their lunches or simply wait for their bus. Way to go Oxford City Council.