Steve at thinbluelineuk made the BBC on Sunday. They didn’t give him enough space, but there was a gist – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00c96jz . If this link doesn’t work you can get it off his site for a few days.
The cuts will roll out in the next few months. They’ll get everything wrong and waste the opportunity. It’ll be like having an under-performing soccer team and a dud manager. You leave him with ten men and tell him you want promotion by the end of the season. That’s ‘more with less’. By the time the failure is attributed to the ‘foot-fall shortage’, another scheme, one that cannot be resisted for ‘PC’ reasons, holds sway. 11 women can be hired for the cost of ten men. I swear, in the contemporary lunacy, they would be rolled out to play! Who would dare predict the inevitable failure of this, other than those with a preference for the Siberian Detachment?
I’ve never found anything I could sensibly challenge on Steve’s site. The only criticism I would levy is that I want to know more about the situation in comparable countries. International comparison is full of pitfalls, but my own experience is that our guys are already doing ‘more with less’ and are blighted by Acpoisation too (this though is a complaint from every cop I ever met not an Acpo). We have too many chiefs, not enough Indians and inadequate supervision. Copperfield is claiming the Canadians are much more efficient. My only reason to suppose him ‘wrong’ is the general trip-wires around in international comparison. I remember a time when UK unemployment was being vaunted as much less than that in France. We found it very similar once we added in what we don’t call unemployment and they do.
Of course, it shouldn’t be up to Steve or “Gadget” (there are many more, often less skewed by the ‘cops never do anything wrong, we are being victimised by lefties syndrome’) to put the facts in front of us. I want to see more cops and and better attitude amongst them (not least a happier one), though not back to the days of AA men saluting motorists. But even to say this is to spit in the wind. So much else that affects policing is wrong – in social work, courts, the lack of “jobs” and whatever the vile nexus is that creates the ‘evil poor’ – beyond this, we have “earnings” almost totally separated from effort. How can we expect an Acpo tribe member, concerned with a better villa in Portugal, her golf handicap, sexual assignations and career portfolio to cope with the real problem?
Are the borrowers-from-shops, crushing prescription drugs, spending benefits on poor heroin worse than Muslims organising anti-Semitism, gross sexism and so on in schools (Panorama)? Who had the money from international scams building houses no one could buy? We only know who ends up paying. Who has made money from our drunken miles? We only know who foots the bill. Bookmakers are the only people leaving the turf in profit on a regular basis – we all must lose. Who are these wider bookmakers making out while we all lose and do we need their game?
Economics is useless to us as a body-politic, because we can’t understand it. We need more cops, have plenty of experienced unemployed and young people, but ‘have’ to cut police numbers. This situation remains the same after an 80 page fandango with frequency distribution linked Gaussian copula wizardry with Sooty’s Magic Wand. Even if we get to talk nearer the bone, perhaps on New Deal public works, we need to remember even these were not the ‘fix’ – we still ‘needed’ WW2. We (UK plc) used to make money by exchanging heroin for Chinese silver. If we need rid of corrupt markets, we need to remember the alternative is more National Government (and what use have they been?) – what we actually need is new ideas and means of exchange to get from between the rock and the hard place. Separate high street and commercial banking? When they did this in the States, it was about giving the Rockafellers advantages over JP Morgan; just another sleaze-lobby power dodge, so why is Vinny Cable so sure this is an ‘answer’? [in the mass of reading I have to do as an academic, this link is a tiny example of economic history we could do with knowing when our clown politicians speak – http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae1_1_1.pdf ]
Our politicians have no answers from kids with BB guns ‘growing’ into the pathetic gangsters of perpetual childhood our cops have to nick and throw back into the old routines, to ensuring work, fairness in pay and wealth and the basics of a free society. Steve is more important to the debate on police restructuring (leaving aside my ‘demand for Utopia’) than much else I’ve heard. The horrible truth is that it’s in the hands of serial bunglers. Politicians like them.
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