Tired

36 hours on duty this week, on top of a full week's "day job".

Tired.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the taxpaying, law-abiding citizens who have come up to us and offered kind words of support.  It is appreciated.

Tottenham riots

There are some specials who would bite their own arm off for the opportunity to do "riot" training.  I am not one of those people.  Crowds make me uncomfortable.  The idea of holding a line while my colleagues are getting pelted with street furniture makes my head explode.  I prefer to think of myself as a small cog.  Maybe while the riots have dragged the big boys and girls away from their normal duties I can fill the gap by taking the reports of the domestics and looking for missing persons.

I know you are asking yourself "where are you going with this, SCR?".  Every now and again a special must re-evaluate why he or she gives up his or her time to police the streets.  Being a special is hard.  Sometimes the frustrations seem to come close to overwhelming the positives. 

There have been some frictions in my team between those who turn up pretty much every week and put their full effort into the enterprise and those who tag along when convenient and get what feels like a free ride when it comes to training and development.  There is nothing more frustrating to a special who works hard than a special who doesn't.

Every now and again the penny drops again and I think to myself "this is why I do it".  And it's not because of the riots in North London this weekend, despite the impressive photographs.  My thoughts are with those injured by the criminals and I hope everyone makes a speedy recovery. 

Today it wasn't that which caught my attention.  I had a phone call to say my day job manager had been robbed by a group of youths on his way home on Saturday night.  My immediate reaction was "is there anything I can do to help" and my second reaction was "this is why I knacker myself on a weekend".  Not because I think that what I do makes a huge difference.  Not because I think that I personally could have prevented my boss from having his face cut up with a smashed bottle.  Not because I think the police service would collapse if I reduced my hours to the minimum required.  But surely when you add it all up, we must be making some kind of impact?

How much more liberal could we be?

This annoyed me:

This chap claims to be "a lawyer and writer working in London".  He doesn't say what area of law he specialises in but I strongly suspect he rarely interacts with the police service.  The reason I suspect this is that the modern British police service is not a hiding place for the secret facists in society.  Even if it was, we operate within the law set down by Parliament and the courts and policy set by senior officers which is heavily scrutinised by the police authority. 

It's not as if we can go around beating people up or locking people up for crimes they haven't committed.  If any of us, volunteers or full-timers, did that we would be out of the front door before we could say Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

No, I think Mr Green is operating from a position of inexperience.  Has he never been guided through the arrest and custody procedure?  Has he never had explained the right to free legal advice?  Has he never been asked a whole series of questions to find out how the unpleasantness of being locked up can be minimised?

I can't speak for everyone, but I do not volunteer because it gives me the opportunity to intimidate people or to give me a false feeling of power in order to indulge some sense of insecurity or inadequacy.  If I did I would have given up a long time ago because being a police officer gives me neither of those things. 

Mr Green obviously hasn't taken the time to get to know many police officers as individuals.  There are a few dickheads, but most are liberal, decent and extremely nice.  I think Mr Green is labouring under some kind of weird, outdated stereotype of rough men whose use physical force to subdue their victims. 

I realise that the Twitter posts quoted above were probably simple flippant remarks, written to get a cheap laugh from his followers.  But they do highlight a worryingly common opinion amongst some educated professionals that we are just here for our own fun and to stop anyone else having any fun.  It simply is not true.  It annoys me when people who should really know better make the suggestion.