Shock, horror, scandal! One drunk takes 17 - yes, folks one seven, seventeen - coppers to respond. Now leaving aside that I don't believe a word of it, what a waste of resources. This is today's instalment of Chief Constable Adrian Lee's tinpot fascist campaign against people having a good time.
Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway? What this report tells us is that policing in England is a bureaucratic mess and that, under the leadership of men like Mr Lee, the service couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.
Apparently police resources would be better deployed elsewhere:
And those resources would be put to much better use in local communities rather than being called into town centres every weekend to deal with people who wouldn't cause problems if they hadn't consumed so much alcohol
I've really no idea what those "resources" would be doing in "local communities" at midnight on a Friday other that sitting about drinking tea or pointlessly patrolling empty streets. I guess they could use the time to keep up with the paperwork that people like Mr Lee create for them?
Drunken assault is anti-social. But then so is much of the rest of the things police deal with - burglary to feed a drug habit is anti-social, shoplifting is anti-social. In truth all crime is anti-social, the police spend most of their time dealing with people who, for whatever reason, cause problems. It's why we have them, it's what we pay Mr Lee and others to do.
It seems however that, in Mr Lee's world, the problem is with the public not the incompetence of police systems.
Oh and while we're about this - there is no such thing as "24 hour drinking" but since the liberalising of licensing laws alcohol consumption has fallen. Every single year and the biggest fall is amongst the young - the very people Mr Lee blames for the police's bureaucratic uselessness.
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2 comments:
Very similar thoughts, less eloquently expressed, lurched through my few grey cells when I heard the report on the BBC. So, what they are saying is that town centres are no longer “local communities”. What would the “resources” be doing, if not dealing with drunken revellers? Unlikely to be dealing with more serious problems – one report of an apparent shooting took the police 3 days to appear on the scene! Probably hitting the far softer target of the motorists; let’s face it, some of those cads try to get away with 33 mph in a thirty zone. Birching would be far too good for them!
"Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway?"
The issue here is the police are not psychic. When they are called to a disturbance, or notice a drunk being aggressive in a town center they have no way of telling how the following arrest (or interaction) will pan out - there's no way of knowing is hes one guy, or with a group of 20. Thats the primary reason why police do these things in numbers. Its not about wasting money or blaming the public, its about protecting the officers if things go south.
I used to live in Portsmouth and large groups of Navy lads frequency drink in the area. Sending 4 officers to deal with sort of problem will fail more often than not.
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