Oi, Top Cops! Stop whining, and get your officers out on patrol - pronto!

Rare sighting

Chris Weigh, acting chief constable for Lancashire, has been whining about police cuts and warning us that the resulting lack of police on the streets is inevitably leading to an increase in crime. April figures show serious acquisitive crime up 8%, house burglaries up 8.4%, car crime up 6.4% and assault without injury up 15%. So, of course, Weight must be right!

Self-serving tosh, of course.

Weigh pointed to last year’s Operation Julius, which was designed to tackle what he called “burglary spikes”, claiming that he would no longer have enough men to mount such operations. But the reason cities suffered from increases in certain types of crime before any cuts took effect is twofold: police weren’t out on the streets in the first place, and our criminal justice system is useless when it comes to dealing effectively with criminals. In other words, the police aren’t in the right place to deter criminals, and the courts vomit vermin back out on the streets because they don’t have enough prison places to house them (or because the judge or magistrate is a self-pleasuring liberal nincompoop).

The answer is simple: abolish the foreign aid budget and spend the money on new prisons, and send all unformed officers out on patrol within five minutes of the start of their shift (as happens in American cities).

The reason the police spend so much time cowering behind desks isn’t hard to figure out. Pounding pavements is unpleasant and potentially dangerous because they’re now packed with criminals. The streets are packed with criminals because the police gave up patrolling them decades ago. Paperwork is just an excuse – a self-inflicted burden which any half-competent administrator could get under control within a matter of weeks. If the police themselves wanted to cut back on paperwork, they would. There was a recent report that Greater Manchester Police were taking up to 80 minutes to fill out a single holiday request form. This is not “political correctness gone mad” form-mania – this is an example of bureaucratic incompetence. And of course, it requires the collusion of the police themselves – they evidently like the system just the way it is.

Crime levels (at least, the sort of crime that matters to most of us - burglary, mugging, vandalism) and police levels bear little relation to each other. In 2010, before any funding cuts, only 11% of police officers were available for front-line policing. In 2011, after forty years of inexorably rising police budgets, 25% of the public said they never saw a police officer on patrol. That's disgraceful! It’s what you do with the police at your disposal that counts, not the amount of money you have to spend on them. 

What’s evidently lacking is the will to change anything.

Is there anyone out there – apart from criminals – who doesn’t want to see more police patrolling our streets? Anyone at all? You at the back, sir. No, this isn’t the Police Training Workshop on Interfacing Sensitively with the Transgender Community – that’s next door. Would you like someone to help you drag your enormous, wobbling arse out of your chair and help you out of the room. Perhaps you'd like them to carry your king-size carton of donuts, bucket of non-diet Coke and that stack of paperwork in case anyone tries to steal them. Happy to help!

As I was asking, does anyone NOT want more police patrolling their streets? We had a little flurry of rozzer activity around our area about a year back, but that only lasted a week or two, and now the police are warning us that local car crime’s on the rise. Thanks for letting us know! I go for a fairly lengthy stroll or bike ride around our neighbourhood at least once a day. Apart from the area near the police station on our local high street, I have not seen a single beat cop – either a real one or one of those pretend community ones – for months. Last night, one of my son’s friends was mugged a few hundred yards from our house by a thug on a bike (white by the way - I'm an equal opportunities complainer), who will never be caught. Happens all the time. And it’ll go on happening while senior officers like Chris Weigh whine about funding and refuse to face up to the real problem, which is that what he and his ilk call “visible policing” is simply too much of a fag to bother with any more.

On 15^th November this year, the people of England and Wales get to vote for independent police commissioners who are supposed to tailor local policing to the needs of their area rather than to centralised Home office diktats. On paper, this is a great idea: in practice, it won't change a thing. Turn-out will be pitifully low, some extremists will get in (along with some total idiots – for example, John Prescott will be standing for the post in Hull).

People won’t vote because they know that, ultimately, it won’t make a blind bit of difference – no matter what we the public want, no matter who we vote for, no matter how much money is made available to them, the police will remain firmly ensconsed behind their desks, munching donuts and filling out forms. 

Just think how much we used to revere them. All very sad.