Thursday, January 17, 2008

The UK Police's Reassurance Gap

I have no doubts that the British policeman on the beat is every bit as brave and capable as you would find anywhere in the world. That said, the British police force does not answer to the locality it serves, but rather it is centrally controlled by the Labour Government. Thus what you get is a police force that is less responsive than would otherwise be, a police force suffering under the weight of bureaucracy, and a leadership element far more concerned with appearances and statistics than reality. This today from the British Police Inspector who blogs under the pseudonym of Inspector Gadget:

. . . I had to listen to some fool Inspector today telling me all about how what actually happens with crime reduction is not as important as what the public perceive to be happening.

In the crazy world of British policing we call this the “reassurance gap”, and we are currently working on loads of ways to deal with this, none of which (I fear) will actually have anything to do with catching criminals.

Note: UK readers will be unsurprised to read that one of the killers of Gary Newlove was on bail at the time. Mrs Newlove spoke today of the lack of consequences for youth criminals; the liberal elite won’t like that!

Read the entire post here.

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