Thursday 22 July 2010

Set Us Free

I've only just seen this article, which was published yesterday in the Telegraph written by the indispensable police blogger Inspector Gadget. It's well worth a read in full, here is a sort of summary of what he says:
...of the 144,000 serving police officers, only 11 per cent of us are "visibly available" at any one time to deal with complaints from the public.

I'm not at all surprised, and no real police officer will be. It's because there are, in fact, three separate police forces.

The first is the politically driven caste of senior officers, who – under New Labour – spent their lives rushing to publicise the Home Office's latest wheezes about "Partnership Working", "Community Engagement" or "Citizen Focus".

The second police force is largely made up of people who have never arrested anyone: supervisors, auditors, accountants, diversity consultants, health and safety advisers, monitoring groups and crime managers.

That leaves those of us in the third police force, who do the protecting and serving: the patrol and neighbourhood officers who respond to emergency calls (and many not-so emergency calls); the CID; and the custody teams who deal with prisoners.

Go go Gadget...

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