The difference is obvious in small details of behaviour. In France, if a respectable driver sees a notice saying, 'Do not drive down this street' he thinks 'They put it there' and he feels an instant urge to drive down the street. So, I think, does the Russian. In Britain, at a very basic level, we can see ourselves as the people who put up the notice and as the people who want to drive down the street. So we have divided loyalties and most of us acknowledge our duty to our responsible selves. So we don't drive down the street.
Of course, we are not totally law-abiding. In Britain as elsewhere we have young people who have drifted into crime, career criminals such as burglars who aim to make a living out of their activities, organised gangs and groups who feel, often with good cause, that the laws of the country were not made with their interests in mind. By world standards, for an advanced industrial country our crime rate is not appallingly high; it is much higher than it was in the 1970s and earlier, but compared with the later 1990s, most crimes seem to be declining slightly. Such figures, however, are, as the police are always pointing out, highly suspect. On the one hand, some crimes are given much attention in the press, and people, aware of the problem, rush to report their experience of this crime to the police. (Accusations of rape used to be very rare. But nobody knows whether it really happened rarely, or whether women who had been raped hesitated to come forward until there was a campaign to encourage them to do so.) On the other hand, many crimes, especially theft, never get reported because the victims are certain that the thief will never be found and therefore it is simpler to say nothing. Also, a particular crime can suddenly become fashionable. Teenagers have been stealing cars and driving around very fast in them for the fun of doing so ever since the car was invented. Before that, they stole horses. Recently two small children were killed by teenagers when their stolen car went out of control. Suddenly there were criminal teenage car thieves everywhere! But were they really practiced car thieves? Or had their neighbours, attracted by the news, suddenly got fed up with teenage noise and reported it to the police? Or were other teenagers being encouraged to steal cars by the public outrage which made it a fashionable crime? Nobody knows, but we know that crime statistics are difficult to analyse. Much is not reported; much is double-reported; crime stories in newspapers are not really a study of crime.
In your textbooks of British life you will have read of British policemen, 'friendly bobbies' with distinctive helmets. The ordinary policemen still wear helmets, though senior officers have caps, but the popularity of the police with the general public has had its ups and downs. Probably their low point was in the 1980s and early 1990s. At that time they were seen in unfamiliar and, for us, disturbing situations: using riot shields and violent crowd-control tactics against peaceful demonstrations; spending too much time in high-speed cars rather than being on the street; treating our ethnic minorities with contempt and sometimes brutality. Also, since the police deal with criminals in their daily work, and often have to bargain in order to get information, they are always being tempted to accept bribes or tamper with the evidence. The police are made up of people from the general community, so they are a mix of people, good and bad, as in other organizations - and some of them gave in to temptation.
Since the middle of the 1990s there have been huge efforts to improve the police. Senior officers recognised that you can only police a community properly by consent. You cannot, in a democracy, turn the police against the people. So there have been all sorts of policies to encourage black people and Asians into the police force; crowd-control has been deliberately kept very 'low-key'; and policemen are 'back on the beat', walking round their local area, getting to know the neighbours, the problems, the concerns of the community. (Surveys show that people prefer this kind of policing, even if it does not catch so many serious criminals.) Also, policemen have been encouraged to speak out if they know something is wrong in their police force - which would have been unheard of twenty years ago. Those who know the police believe that internal regulations are continuously improving and it is harder for police officers of any rank to be corrupt, whether it concerns their private life, how they treat the public or how they treat people in custody. Individuals are much more accountable and newer recruits are less likely to tolerate the old 'all-boys-together' of the past. (This is partly because there are far more women in the force!)
An important factor in our estimate of the police and in their treatment of us is that they are not armed. Unlike the police in most of the world, our police do not normally carry guns. It is true that more police marksmen have been trained to shoot as a result of terrorist attacks and the fear of further terrorist attacks. But let us put this in context. We have 43 local police forces in England and Wales (we do not have a National Police Force). The total number of policemen - who are now called police officers - in England and Wales is about 150000. About 6600 of them are trained to use guns. During 2006 the police fired guns at people on nine occasions and killed five people. (One of those people was a young man whom the police believed to be a terrorist. He turned out to be unarmed and innocent. There was a huge public outcry about the shooting, it was discussed everywhere in the media, there was an inquest, an independent enquiry, a court investigation with witnesses, and changes made to the way the police operated.) In any shooting incident every bullet has to be accounted for. The guns are handed back immediately afterwards because police are only issued with them under special circumstances.
What we can say is that if you, a Russian visitor, needed help from the police in our country then you could expect to have a positive and fair encounter with them and probably have good access to a translator/solicitor if that was necessary. If by any chance you did not have a decent and helpful meeting, you could report the matter and make a complaint. The complaint would be dealt with fairly. The British police force is not perfect but is probably as good as you will find anywhere.
The person accused of a crime and brought to trial is called the 'defendant'. Can he (or she) expect a fair trial? The answer is 'Yes within our system, but our system does not make it easy for the defendant to believe or feel that the trial has been fair.' The courts dealing with minor offences are 'magistrates' courts '. Magistrates are volunteers who work at other jobs and sit in the courts for, say, two days a week. The lawyers who represent the defendants often know them personally and are used to these kinds of minor crimes. Both magistrates and lawyers have a good idea of what 'real life' is like, and the magistrates, by sitting in groups of three and discussing each case together, can work out an appropriate kind of punishment and explain to the person who has been found guilty exactly what the sentence means, in language that ordinary people can understand. So even if they don't like the result, most people will understand why they are being punished as they are.
In the higher courts where there are trials for more serious crimes, full-time judges preside and special lawyers discuss the case. In these courts justice is associated with wigs, strange clothes, bewildering rituals of the upper classes - nothing much to do with your average criminal. Despite the fact that our rules are based on common law, the atmosphere of a High Court has nothing 'common' about it.
In a court of law, lawyers try to decide whether the defendant is guilty. We do not have an 'examining magistrate' as in most European countries, who is supposed to try to find out what actually happened.* Instead we have an adversary system - one lawyer for and one against the accused person; whoever puts the best case, 'wins', Sometimes the accused man standing in the court thinks that the case as debated between these lawyers has nothing to do with him or his experience. The lawyers have their own way of explaining what happened; and important information may have been ignored because it has not been properly investigated. On the other hand, our system does mean that one lawyer is wholly concerned to help and defend the accused person. This is important because in British law, a person is presumed innocent until he is found guilty. The defending lawyer 'protects' his innocence as long as possible.