Would an extra 20,000 police officers, as promised by Boris Johnson during his Tory leadership campaign, actually make a difference?
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Given the state of violent crime in the UK today, t sounds a silly question. But how much extra benefit would those further 20,000 police officers bring to society without an accompanying seismic shift in UK policing techniques in general?
I have the fear that those 20,000 new officers would end up going through exactly the same recruitment process as our current police constables and be bound by the same politically correct generated rules as they are today, with the result that the general public would be no better protected.
And the very first hurdle would be the recruitment process.
Would we be looking for the 20,000 'best' candidates? Or the 20,000 'correct' candidates?
Wouldn't we just end up with a recruitment drive that seeks a 'diverse' set of recruits?
Remember the case of Matthew Furlong? Who had to take Cheshire police to court to get the job he should have been offered on merit?
Don't you reckon that, under the current thinking on police recruitment, we would be deluged in adverts looking for the 'correct' balances in gender and race, not looking purely for the candidates most likely to be good thief-takers?
With millions in taxpayer money being spent on recruitment agents with instructions to make sure the police is gender and colour correct, above all else – probably with targets and incentives to ensure this happens?
Then once you have your 20,000 recruits chosen under the proper politically correct guidelines, you have to push them through the police colleges and make sure they are thoroughly trained in how not to offend.
Under current thinking, they will have to be instructed carefully on when to turn a blind eye to serious crime and ignore the impact on victims, if taking action could offend certain sections of society.
And I also have to wonder how many of these 20,000 would end up patrolling the virtual streets of social media, ready to pounce on any commenter for using an incorrect term or being even mildly offensive.
Fighting crime, especially of the violent type we are seeing today, is not all about money and getting the 'right' officers on the streets who will be forced to continue to combat, or not combat, crime in the same failed way.
It is also about attitudes and the political will to take the bull by the horns and strike at the heart of the crime, wherever it is and whoever is involved.
Knife crime and these county lines drug gangs will not be defeated unless there is a sea change in our attitude to the law.
In a letter to the Times, five former heads of Scotland Yard have called for a public inquiry into policing in the UK and they wrote:
"The reduction of police and support staff by more than 30,000, the virtual destruction of neighbourhood policing and the inadvisable undermining of lawful police powers such as stop and search have taken their toll."
And they wrote about the 'emasculation' of policing in the UK.
The essence of the problem for me is that the law today, is seen not to apply evenly across our society.
There is meant to be one country and one legal system with everyone in it treated equally under that law. But from what I see in press reports and social media, the true situation is the exact opposite of that.
And until that one thing changes, we will never win the battle against crime because there will always be a way out for the criminal clever enough to use politically correct driven principles against the police and against society.
And bear in mind there is also a section of our political class who are happy to see this imbalance, as it helps push their own agenda.
At the end of the day we do not need 20,000 new police recruits, if all that results is that they are picked purely for their 'diversity', then trained on how to avoid offending people and how to only work within a tight set of politically correct driven regulations that actually prevent proper crime prevention and detection and where many of them will probably end up, sat behind a computer, chasing social media activists who upset people online. All at great taxpayer expense.
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