PCSO frolics

There's a lot of comment this morning about the two Police Community Support Officers who stood and watched as a ten year old boy drowned because they hadn't been trained for rescuing drowning children.

I'm not surprised; the words "community" and "support" in the job title give the game away. It's like the word "democratic" in country names. The "democratic" bit of Germany before unification was the communist dictatorship, North Korea has the word Democratic in its full name, and so on. If a country name says it is democratic, it isn't. If a job title says the person will offer support, they won't. "Carers" let the nonagenarian mother of one of my friends sit in her own waste for hours at a time because they weren't trained to lift her tiny, bird-light body, and didn't want to risk hurting their backs.

The combination of unctuous job descriptions and titles, together with health and safety fascism, occupational health assessments, and excessive training for simple tasks is so poisonous that it will turn ordinary human beings into monsters who can stand and watch children drown without trying to help.

But we knew that already. This is just today's example. Let me tell you something you might not know.

CIB2 is one of the complaints investigation units of the Metropolitan Police. Their headquarters in Vauxhall, which I've had cause to visit a couple of times, at their invitation, are famous for having bugging devices in the lifts and corridors, so that when Mr Nice is being all sympathetic as he shows you out, after Mr Nasty has been horrible to you in the interview room, and you blurt out something you hadn't intended to say, it can be captured for posterity.

CIB2 deal with serious police corruption. Or at least, that's what they're supposed to do. But a source in the Met, who will remain unidentified, told me recently that investigations of Police Community Support Officers had so flooded this department that they can't take on any new investigations of corrupt coppers.

The problems with PCSOs, who have been recruited disproportionately from minority groups, boil down to two things: conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (on behalf of other members of their minority group) and active crime, mainly drug dealing and extortion.

And that's the second unsurprising thing you've read in this post.