{"id":225314,"date":"2023-12-16T03:08:13","date_gmt":"2023-12-16T03:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/allworldreport.com\/?p=225314"},"modified":"2023-12-16T03:08:13","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T03:08:13","slug":"when-was-the-last-time-you-saw-bobbies-on-the-beat-where-you-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allworldreport.com\/world-news\/when-was-the-last-time-you-saw-bobbies-on-the-beat-where-you-live\/","title":{"rendered":"When was the last time you saw bobbies on the beat where you live?"},"content":{"rendered":"
It was bitterly cold as I navigated icy pavements in the early hours of a winter morning \u2013 and spotted a figure shinnying up a drainpipe to a first-floor tenement window.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was a beat bobby back then, checking the rear of some shop, and assumed the intrepid climber might have locked himself out, but called up to him: \u2018What are you doing?\u2019<\/p>\n
With a degree of candour, if no sense of shame, he replied: \u2018What do you think? I\u2019m breaking in!\u2019<\/p>\n
The occupier of the flat had been asleep and was thankful he\u2019d been alerted to the unexpected guest, who was arrested once he was safely back on the street.<\/p>\n
In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was on the beat \u2013 later I was promoted to superintendent \u2013 these encounters didn\u2019t happen every day, but it wasn\u2019t unusual to come across a crime as it was being carried out.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Beat retreat, Police patrols were once a familiar sight on Bonfire Night<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Officers attacked in Niddrie\u00a0with petrol bombs & fireworks, 5th November 2023<\/p>\n
Today, police are effectively in retreat, having withdrawn from the communities they are supposed to protect, with stations shutting down and officer numbers at the lowest level since 2008.<\/p>\n
It has helped to embolden criminals, and that loss of visibility has many repercussions, including the steady decline of respect and deference for policing.<\/p>\n
If you grow up rarely seeing the police \u2013 except when things go seriously wrong \u2013 you will be wary of them, and that can and does build into resentment, fuelling an \u2018us and them\u2019 mentality.<\/p>\n
One of my colleagues once told me there was a woman on his beat who sadly was regularly assaulted by her heavy-drinking husband and she was greatly reassured by the presence of a cop patrolling outside \u2013 her abuser, coming home from the pub, would think twice before attacking her.<\/p>\n
These were vital relationships but they\u2019ve been swept away over the years so that beat policing is more or less extinct, allowing thugs and thieves to commit crimes without fearing the consequences.<\/p>\n
Last month Justice Secretary Angela Constance claimed the youths who attacked riot police with fireworks and petrol bombs on Bonfire Night were \u2018vulnerable\u2019 and \u2018disengaged\u2019 from society.<\/p>\n
The worst disorder took place in Niddrie in Edinburgh, where more than 100 youths targeted police amid \u2018unprecedented levels of violence\u2019.<\/p>\n
In the weeks that followed, officers tracked down some of those responsible using video footage taken by specialist evidence-gathering teams.<\/p>\n
Police say they lack the manpower to make arrests at the time of such incidents \u2013 now depressingly frequent \u2013 but clearly they had the personnel on hand to film officers coming under attack.<\/p>\n
The prevailing theory is that officers weighing in to put handcuffs on these yobs would inflame the situation, but swift \u2018nip in the bud\u2019 arrests can sometimes stop escalation, laying down a marker for others who might be tempted to join in.<\/p>\n
In Greenock, I was called to a report of public disorder and we found a group of 40 or so youths \u2013 or neds, as they were called at the time \u2013 most of whom scattered when our unmarked car pulled up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of them was armed with a stick and I gave chase.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eventually he ran into a tenement close and when I opened the door he lashed out and caught me just under my eye; the resulting injury required five or six stitches but I got hold of him and he was arrested.<\/p>\n
On another occasion, there was a report of \u2018group disorder\u2019 in Paisley \u2013 gang fights were commonplace.<\/p>\n
I chased one of those involved for a quarter of a mile, then as I was about to run round a corner I saw a shadow.<\/p>\n
He was lying in wait for me and I could see in the street light he was holding a big pole \u2013 ready to bring it crashing down on me.<\/p>\n
I crept up alongside the wall and reached round with my baton, hitting out at him and catching him, as it turned out, in the face, before apprehending him.<\/p>\n
Naturally, he complained but he was given short shrift \u2013 we weren\u2019t as well protected as officers are now, with Taser stun-guns and pepper spray \u2013 though it\u2019s shameful that Police Scotland, unlike English forces, hasn\u2019t yet equipped cops with body-worn video cameras.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the bosses usually had our backs.<\/p>\n
There is an inquest culture now, with the balance skewed towards the rights, or supposed rights, of criminals, so today I might have found myself subject to a disciplinary hearing for tackling that pole-wielding ned \u2013 even if doing so possibly saved my life.<\/p>\n
The intelligence about gang conflict and public disorder came from the beat cops \u2013 and it was clear in Niddrie that police were blindsided by their attackers because they hadn\u2019t picked up on signs of trouble brewing.<\/p>\n
Police Scotland, created in 2013, was an attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all approach on the whole of Scotland but it was bound to fail.<\/p>\n
Officers\u2019 links with local communities were severed, and the policing needs of the islands, for example, will be very different from those for the centre of Glasgow and Edinburgh.<\/p>\n
The single force was intended to cut costs, yet it limps on in a state of seemingly permanent financial crisis.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, it has fallen prey to politicisation \u2013 something that was far harder when there were eight chiefs under the previous territorial model, and they were generally charismatic people with a sense of authority.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s, I accompanied Sir Patrick Hamill, boss of the now-defunct Strathclyde Police \u2013 my former force \u2013 to a council committee which allocated funds to police and fire services.<\/p>\n
He was told his budget would be cut by millions and he calmly responded that this would be possible \u2013 but he\u2019d have to close police stations in Milngavie and other well-off areas, which would be sure to trigger a backlash.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The committee backed down.<\/p>\n
Those chiefs were old-fashioned cops who wouldn\u2019t be pushed around. It\u2019s far less clear that this is the case with Police Scotland, which has become a political football.<\/p>\n
Senior cops who run the force now may have had no meaningful experience of having been on the beat and they advocate a different tactic \u2013 trying to anticipate demand and hopefully being in the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n
This is reinventing the wheel \u2013 I recall similar strategies decades ago when we were told research had suggested crime was more likely to happen late at night between town or city centres and housing estates, as people made their way home from pubs and clubs.<\/p>\n
For most beat cops, that wasn\u2019t exactly a surprise.<\/p>\n
Trendy academic thinking of this kind \u2013 known as intelligence-led policing \u2013 put paid to beat policing about 20 years ago and officers effectively disappeared from many neighbourhoods \u2013 when was the last time you saw a bobby on patrol on your street?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is certainly true that, with only 16,600 officers, police nowadays have to prioritise \u2013 but cutbacks can be counterproductive.<\/p>\n
I set up a vehicle theft unit in the north of Glasgow in the late 1990s which collared 350 car thieves in one year.<\/p>\n
There was an officer collating intelligence gathered by beat cops, and a dog-handler was attached to the unit to help pursue runaway thieves.<\/p>\n
It was successful but the unit was scrapped after a change of management \u2013 and it\u2019s hard to imagine any such initiative now, given the major financial constraints police face, with one top Police Scotland official recently admitting \u2018every penny is a prisoner\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there are many false economies.<\/p>\n
On the night in October when the new chief constable, Jo Farrell, took her infamous taxpayer-funded \u2018taxi ride\u2019 south of the Border to her family home, after stormy weather forced the cancellation of her train, it emerged that her chauffeur was a traffic cop \u2013 one of only two covering Lothian and the Borders.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s scandalous \u2013 in north Glasgow there would have been 20 to 30 traffic officers under my command on any one shift. How much crime is now going undetected?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re in an absurd situation where police are refusing to investigate crime deemed to be minor \u2013 as happened in a recent pilot project in the North-East.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is now under evaluation pending a potential wider roll-out.<\/p>\n
At Strathclyde Police, we always looked into reports of crime, or tried to listen to people\u2019s concerns, even if they didn\u2019t amount to a report of a crime \u2013 and the notion of ignoring them wouldn\u2019t have occurred to us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That said, there is no doubt that helping people who pose a risk to themselves or others, because of mental health problems, puts huge pressure on police.<\/p>\n
Forces in England and Wales have laid out plans to reduce the number of mental health callouts to which they will respond.<\/p>\n
Under a new framework, known as the National Partnership Agreement, some forces will attend only 20-30 per cent of health and social care incidents in the next two years.<\/p>\n
In Scotland, thankfully, this has been resisted so far \u2013 protecting the public is a core legal duty of policing \u2013 but rank-and-file officers rightly point out that about 80 per cent of incidents attended by police north of the Border do not involve a crime.<\/p>\n
Up to 60 per cent of an officer\u2019s shift can be taken up by mental health incidents because they\u2019re held up in hospitals, trying to get the vulnerable person admitted \u2013 a process that needs to be accelerated.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s wrong to propose simply ignoring these calls \u2013 it\u2019s easy to imagine someone tragically taking their own life, or taking someone else\u2019s, when police don\u2019t turn up.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, thousands of homes across Scotland have been declared \u2018too dangerous\u2019 for ambulance crews to attend without police back-up \u2013 another burden on the force.<\/p>\n
Many cops are doing a brilliant job against all the odds but they are being let down by top brass and our political masters, and an increasingly soft-touch justice system.<\/p>\n
We desperately need effective sanctions \u2013 and that is proving a problem as the courts are yoked to sentencing guidelines urging leniency for under-25s due to the alleged immaturity of their brains.<\/p>\n
Given that most of the vicious louts who spent their Sunday evening launching petrol bombs at police in Niddrie are likely to be under 25, they have little to fear from the courts.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s obscene, given that in their mid-twenties some criminals are reaching their prime, and young offenders aren\u2019t as naive as they used to be.<\/p>\n
Recorded Police Warnings are regarded as a joke by those who receive them \u2013 and they are now dished out even to people caught with hard drugs.<\/p>\n
Police Scotland cannot or will not say how many have been issued to those found in possession of cocaine and heroin \u2013 Class A substances which have fuelled Scotland\u2019s drug deaths crisis, the worst in Europe.<\/p>\n
Crime is being kept off the books, allowing ministers to boast about a fall in offending \u2013 but the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS) recently revealed record levels of violent crime, theft and vandalism are not being reported because the public have no confidence that officers will respond.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no wonder people are giving up on the police, given that they\u2019re so hard to contact \u2013 and when you do get in touch they might say they can\u2019t help because they don\u2019t have the resources or because they have a policy of not investigating less serious offences.<\/p>\n
But criminals are quickly getting the message that the police aren\u2019t to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n
The SCJS also found that only 39 per cent of those asked said they were aware of regular patrols in their area.<\/p>\n
True, cyber-crime in all of its forms \u2013 from fraud to grooming and online child abuse \u2013 is a growing problem and takes cops away from the front line.<\/p>\n
The police must respond accordingly \u2013 and get the funding they need for that purpose.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t necessitate the loss of beat policing, which in reality no longer happens in any meaningful fashion.<\/p>\n
Police need to get back to basics and back out on the streets \u2013 and if that is too upsetting for the Lefty do-gooders, in government or at the top of Police Scotland, then I\u2019m sure that the majority of law-abiding folk will say: \u2018Too bad.\u2019<\/p>\n