Night Watch

without him, but he was, as it were, the tip of the boil.
    He’d been trained at the Assassins’ School and should never have been allowed to join the Watch. He had too much brain to be a copper. At least, too much of the wrong kind of brain. But Swing had impressed Winder with his theories, had been let in as a sergeant and then was promoted to captain immediately. Vimes had never known why; it was probably because the officers were offended at seeing such a fine genn’lman pounding the streets with the rest of the oiks. Besides, he had a weak chest or something.
    Vimes wasn’t against intellect. Anybody with enough savvy to let go of a doorknob could be a street monster in the old days, but to make it above sergeant you needed a grab bag of guile, cunning, and street wisdom that could pass for “intelligence” in a poor light.
    Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn’t look around, and watch, and learn, and then say, “This is how people are, how do we deal with it?” No, he sat and thought: “This is how people ought to be, how do we change them?” And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing’s patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.
    There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.
    Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers—say, three per citizen.
    Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day.
    Some citizens took the not-unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers. The average copper, when he’s been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don’t much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won’t instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford. The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that.
    Admittedly, most of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens. That was Assault On A City Official, a very important and despicable crime, and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere.
    It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.
    And then, just when the whole wretched stew was thickening, he’d invented craniometrics.
    Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days—hah, now —they included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood, and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn’t need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows.
    He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space between the eyes. And from such figures he could, infallibly , tell that you were devious, untrustworthy, and congenitally criminal. After you spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools of inquiry, he would, amazingly, be proven right.
    Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was