That's fucking stupid

Cherie Blair has been doing the rounds of the parliamentary committees offering her sage advice on how to tackle gun and knife crime. It would appear that the government has taken the wise decision to divert funds away from the police so that they can set up an expensive consultation for a solution from a middle aged woman with kids who were educated at private school under the watchful eye of armed police officers.

Boris Johnson has also set about tackling gun and knife crime on the streets of London as well but his plans to teach everyone Latin are a slight mistake in causality; it may be true that few people who are fluent in Latin commit gun or knife crimes however it is unlikely that Latin is the cause, more likely is that there is some other common factor like a public school education. One could equally suggest that teaching Latin causes a penchant for buggery, a fondness for toast and a predilection for white collar crimes however you would still be wrong.

How do we cut crime? I would have thought that it would be obvious however like so many things the people who are charged with the job of governing us fail to think inside the box and come up with the simple and faithful solution: more fucking police officers. The media tells us that the country is in criminal meltdown with children getting knifed and shot on a regular basis in London. While many of these are unlikely to grow up to be anything else but a burden on tax payers and society the odd good one gets caught in the cross fire. While this has been happening the successive governments have diverted funds from actual police officers and turned police work from a highly respected profession into a McJob staffed by idiots. To make matters worse the chronic shortage of police officers has been masked by recruiting people too fucking stupid to even make it into the now underpaid and under trained job of a police officer and dressing them up in a similar uniform while they patrol the streets doing the job which used to be done by card board cut outs. These Community Support Officers are not police officers, they do not have any real powers and are basically the police equivalent of a school prefect. They are there to fool the public into thinking that the people patrolling the streets in high visibility jackets are there to protect and help them.

In a few key ways the PCSOs are similar to those Highways Agency muppets who turn up when you have broken down and hand out sheets of tin foil to keep you warm. They provide the illusion of a police presence when you are bombing down the motorway and everyone slams their brakes on because they see a neon car and then accelerates off again when they realise it is either an RAC van or a Highways Agency womble. If the RAC or the AA put more vans on the road then the Highways Agency patrols would be redundant because people would get towed before they got cold enough to need a sheet of tin foil.

Police officers are not paid very well any more. It’s not surprising that the job now only attracts people who were bullied at school and were unable to make it as a PE teacher. The solution would be to allow individual police forces to pay the market rate to attract quality candidates. It would cost more and the forces would need to increase the numbers of police officers on the streets before any difference was felt but after two to four years things would change.

Oh yeah, did you spot that? The reason this won’t happen is there in the paragraph above. Don’t be fooled by the ‘it would cost more’ bit because that was a red herring, the real clue was the ‘two to four years’ bit. The reason no government wants to spend money on training more good quality police officers is that the benefit would not be felt for at least two years (the time it takes for a police officer to be trained and go through probation) an more likely nearer 4 years so there is a very real chance the government of the time would not be in power when the benefit was felt.

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