I want to take a few lines to explain about the situation of POLICING in the UK these days. I cannot really speak however for Scotland, firstly having never been there, nor knowing any Scottish Police, and also because the Scots seem to be quite straight forward and probably wouldn't stand for any of the complete crap that the Westminster lot pile upon us down here.
So I started to look through news reports.. Back in 2003 there were reportedly almost 140,000 police officers, the numbers only went up from that point, I think the police officer numbers hit an all time high of somewhere near 145,000 officers in 2008. These figures are JUST for England and Wales!
Now with all these police officers you must start thinking ok, so why aren't they out patrolling our neighbourhoods or walking our streets???
So in 2007 the Telegraph did a story which stated that only 1 in 58 Police Officers was actually out patrolling. Scary thought really. That means out of 145,000 Police in England and Wales there are only 2,500 out on the streets?? WTF???????
So IF those figures are correct that is 1 Police Officer to about 26,000 members of the public. Well below the figures that it should be. Can you imagine 1 Police Officer trying to control 26,000 irate people? Not going to happen is it?
Right, so actually, where are they?????
(I'll try to get to that one in the next post but I am interested in where you think they are, so please leave a comment with your thoughts on where the other 142,500 Police officers are...)
1/4 At a guess doing paper work for keeping the masters above and customers who they helped happy.
ReplyDelete3/4 Are sitting in offices creating b/s to keep jobs they do not deserve.
Are they too busy updating their blogs?
ReplyDelete1 in 58 is surely not right?!?
ReplyDeleteI've just worked out that from the total number of officers who work in my force, about 1 in 20 are on front-line duties at any one time. As there are five teams on constant rotation, that means 1 in 4 officers are on response teams.
I know that's still ridiculously low, but we seem to cope most of the time. When we're stretched we find our Neighbourhood Officers and other such units will take on some calls, so it's not too bad.
Then again, I work in Scotland...
Blue Eyes, no fair!! :)
ReplyDeletePC Fish Thief, there en-lies the interesting point here.. though you are short on the streets you aren't as short perhaps as other places. Scotland is a whole different system..
Vet Nurse, not a bad guess at all, hahaha.
I can't work out percentages. Our numbers have dropped in the past decade on the street though, by a huge amount.
ReplyDeleteI think the 1-in-58 refers to response bobbies out there at any one time. I did work out the % for MP a little while back and it was eye opening. When I work it out again I'll plonk it on here.
ReplyDelete