Wednesday, May 09, 2007

In the distance...

... I hear the sound of senior policemen starting to weep, softly. They like graphs.

Copperfield:

A reader tells me that at the time of the shooting [to death of a police officer] (6am Sunday 6th May) there were a grand total of seven officers with no air cover and no dog cover on duty in the whole of the Shropshire division, which has a population of 289,000 people, most of whom I admit, probably weren’t about to shoot a police officer. Naturally, I can’t vouch for any of this, but from my own experience, (and I admit that West Mercia might be totally different) it doesn’t seem too wide of the mark.

The solution to officer safety doesn’t lie in giving officers guns. It depends on both the government and senior officers accepting that policing is about more than file building, detections and graphs that go in the required direction.

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