Wednesday, September 19, 2007

A police economist

Apparently, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire is also an economist and demographer. Even so, it's hard to understand why she needed to qualify these remarks:

The chief constable said immigrants often arrived with "different standards" from those in the UK, most notably over issues such as carrying knives and drink-driving, which has seen a 17-fold rise in arrests of foreigners in a year.

Mrs Spence said crime investigations could now involve trips abroad to interview relatives, and steep bills for interpreters. Officers must now be equipped to deal with people who speak a range of close to 100 languages, she said.

There is also a problem with "feuds" between foreign nationals being brought across to the UK, Mrs Spence told BBC Radio 4.
With this:
She said: "While the economic benefits of growth are clear, we need to maintain the basic public services infrastructure which means increasing the number of officers we have."
(emphasis added) While her remit clearly includes policing issues, it is less clear that it stretches to immigration policy. It would be more appropriate for her to restrict herself to the former, and not to make statements in support of one particular, contentious, approach to the latter.

No comments: