On Apr 18, 9:20*am, Jeremy Double wrote:

Tony Polson wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

[snip]

I am really utterly perplexed by how the police maange to get away with
being a bunch of incompetent thugs. Not that there aren't good individual
policemen, but there are certainly some very bad ones, and the
organisation as a whole is a disaster. It just seems that nobody with the
power to do anything about it gives a toss. Or has it just not occurred to
people that things could be any better?

The government is well aware of the problem. *A couple of years ago it
tried to bounce police forces into merging into a much smaller number of
much larger forces. *Unfortunately for the government, the police
rebelled, and so did the local councils whose ineffectual police
authorities may well be at the root of the problem.

I don't pretend to know whether bigger would be better, but the Home
Office seemed to be convinced that it was.

However, it's interesting that most of the complaints come from the
Metropolitan Police area, the same police force that shot an innocent
man on a tube train, and incidentally the biggest police force in the UK.

I don't actually think that basing a critique of the Met on that event
- the killing of de Menezes - is particularly effective at all. Be in
no doubt, it was an abhorrent screw up of the first order, but to
extrapolate from this one very unusual event ideas about how other
more regular day-to-day policing happens in the capital is not a
strong argument at all.

That's not to say that I endorse how more regular day-to-day policing
happens, but the notion that the Met are out there shooting innocent
people all the time is just plain daft and does nothing to help the
credibility of any argument - yet it is a point people make over and
over again. The Met's armed response units are out on the street 24/7,
they are unfortunately called out to particular incidents far too
often, and yet I understand it's far from common for them to pull a
weapon on anyone, and they hardly ever actually fire a shot.

This isn't meant as some great spiel on why the police is great -
that's not my point, merely that they are not out there shooting
people all the time.


One of the arguments against the mergers was the local accountability of
smaller forces.

I'm extremely concerned that this government has allowed the UK to drift
towards being a police state, in the name of "security". *I will vote
for any party that has the guts to repeal anti-terror legislation and
reverse the drift towards authoritarianism.