Having serving police officers (2) in the extended family I hear a little about what their daily routines involve.

Having had friends who were serving officers (several) but now retired, I've heard for at least three decades what their daily routines involved.

All of those people were PC's, the front line officers, some went off and specialised within their force but all of them stayed on the streets - all of them without exception spoke/speak of their role not being the glamorous stuff of "protect and serve", catching bank robbers, jumping over rooftops, solving crimes in half an hour like they do on TV, but of shifts often full of dealing with the minutia of life at the wrong end of the social spectrum, dealing with the homeless addict again that you last saw three shifts ago and here he is again causing a nuisance to passers-by in the precinct - its your job to do something about it even though there is precious little that you can do - and you're accountable so you can't just stick him in the back of your car and drive him 50 miles away to another town.

So you are correct to highlight the fact that the police are our society's care workers now, they are our front line mental health workers who operate 24 hours a day with a limit to their resources but because their resources are greater than the actual mental health teams and because on occasions with some mental health issues violence can be involved, on the street or in the home, then its the police who get called first to stop the incident, isolate the person and then decide what to do - if a case worker isn't available then a cell is often the only instant solution.

Same applies to addicts, alcohol and drugs, whatever your addiction of choice if you over-do it then which agency is going to get called to care for you - more often than not a police officer even if you are just unconscious in a doorway and not causing any bother.


There is a solution of course - more money.

Pay more in tax and create secure units where the drunk, drugged and mentally ill can be detained for their own safety during periods of extreme behaviour and where they can have a case worker and/or a medic observing them and/or caring medically for them 24 hours a day until they are sober or clear of the drug they took or until they can be referred to their personal mental health care worker (who doesn't work 24 hours every day).

Until then we'll just continue using the police to clear up our streets and expect them to provide addiction and mental health services to them on a night shift with all cells full and a custody officer only able to check them every 15 mins or so.

Tot summarise the thread for newcomers: DG has been carried away into a world of groundless hyperbole. Seems after numerous pages to accept that?

It's taken over 15 pages and JC gets to the reality of a Rossers life. (A phrase I hate but I am sure one that most on here refers to) yes a copper who appears to be the lowest of the low yet who everyone on here would expect to turn when in some kind of grief.

When you can all place yourself in the shoes of your every day front line copper and say you know exactly how to handle every situation they encounter then come back and slag them off. I'm talking front line not your BHH and the like of this world. Every thread on this forum has some kind of involvement with the police simply because they are involved in every aspect of life. I know they are not mentioned directly but think about each thread here and what they involve and I bet the police would directly or not feature.

Without the ol bill we as a society will fail. Now. Do you want a police service like we have here in the UK or the real gun tooting service that is in most countries of the world? The bottom line is that we have a police service that still engages with the art of conversation and will resolve many many situations with conversation and not physical force unlike many other "civilised societies" in the world.
A police service that trains it's officers to talk and not be physically aggressive. Look at the Lee Rigby case to see how the police don't go gun ho. And yes the suspects there were black and the aggressors were the MPS.

I'm so glad to know that so many if you have sat through months of evidence at the High Court and know the ins and outs of this case. I'm glad you have the time to do that without having to go to work. Now could you all let us in on ALL the evidence in this case so we can all have a balanced view of this case. I also look forward to you all explaining what you would do when faced with a man irrespective of colour who had a gun and know exactly what you would do in that situation.
That armed man was fully clothed and could quite easily have had another weapon. Now what would you have done? Walked up to him and talked about the weather?

Reality please.

Barn door .... miss!

Anyway, the Met are going to wear cameras.
That ought to be a small step on the road to transparency.

Have there been any riots yet?

Hundreds.
Buckinghamshire is going bonkers.

No system will ever be perfect if this is the downside of an effective protection system for the citizens so be it.

Perhaps his general disregard of the rules required to run a reasonably civilised society worked against him - he knew the risks.

Worth repeating again what I mentioned a few pages back - everyone should run a quick google search for a list of police officers who have been shot whilst on active duty - all of those officers were unarmed and simply doing a day-job, knocking on doors after a minor complaint, walking down a street in Bradford when they find themselves in the middle of a bank raid and still try to get involved, etc, etc, etc - and some of them were volunteers.

Let the UK police force go on strike for a week and lets see what sort of society we descend into.

The fact the police have a very difficult task and the fact that they make such a remarkable job of carrying out that job is not really in question by anyone unless they have had a bad experience or have a grievance against them.
Also the stats show that their record is exemplary.
Incidents like the Duggan one are rare, very rare.
However, there is enough here to compel the authorities to learn from this incident.
There can be no objection surely to looking at methods of operation, public trust and transparency with a view to improvement.
I am hopeful that this happens as a matter of course anyway.
I don't want to see officers put on trial for everything they do, they are not the villains, but they must have proper, transparent systems in place that reduce the possibilities of collusion when bad mistakes are made.
These are not sufficiently robust at the moment and that is the reason for the lack of trust by some people.
That is something the police can address.

The thing is - that is already the case although as you say its often an internal enquiry by another police force, but each armed incident where a weapon is fired is investigated, officers are often suspended pending the enquiry and at that point their career is in jeopardy.

The ultimate arbiter is the inquest and that is what we had in the Duggan case, a complex enquiry presented before a jury of citizens who are then asked to decide on a series of questions and legal principles - the fact that the verdict has not matched expectation from some people is irrelevant, we didn't ask the police to judge their own here and I don't think its a case of a lack of trust in the legal process that we already have, rather than preconceptions of murder and executions that in reality are shown to be just ridiculous.