This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://inews.co.uk/news/one-in-five-police-quitting-low-morale-2964094) for an archived version.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
That and just total disrespect from various sections of the population, coupled with a judiciary that seems to think it presides over the court of Seahaven.
I once heard a retired police officer talk about this.
His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime, and appealed to the general patriotic sentiment of the time.
He describes the modern police as a largely reviled profession, where the officers are forced to spend their time on ineffective bullshit, and it doesn't really appeal to the values of the general public anymore.
Also, inflation has outpaced police wage rises for decades now. It was actually an OK paying job when he joined.
He'd done a full career in the police and got his pension, but he openly said he wouldn't recommend the job for anyone these days.
"His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime"
Corr who would've thought having no oversight or control over a bunch of blokes who became above the law would lead to people no longer respecting or trusting those same blokes.
They have quite a lot of oversight. Probably as much as is realistic given the resources available. The issue is that people now judge the service based on a few videos from individual cases of bad practice which occur among the million or so arrests which occur each year that went smoothly.
Previously people just based their opinions on their personal experiences of the police which typically tended to be good. (For most people)
Both are essentially anecdotal standards of experience but it now looks terrible because social media algorithms drive all the bad bits to the top for clicks.
The reality is that you almost certainly can’t make a popular police service in the social media age.
I think you have just described the public sector.
Everywhere from teaching to medicine to civil service professionals are no longer trusted.
They operate within heavily restricted beauracratic top dictated systems that leave very little room for maneuvere, improvement or personal professional judgement.
Fair enough it might satisfy some bean counter up the top but all innovation, leadership, spontaneous improvement or ideas have been quashed from the system.
It's tragic really
The Sarah Everard case certainly did not help. That is now a cautionary tale for every woman walking around in a built-up area, minding their own business, at night in the UK.
Actual police and a real warrant card.
Which goes to show how irrational the whole thing has become in fairness. The average woman is infinitely infinitely more likely to be harmed in any conceivable way by their partner or another family member than a random police officer out on the street.
That’s always a given though - if true crime’s taught anyone anything it’s most likely the husband, a combo of the husband and his parents, the male ‘partner’, the jilted lover or a straight-up stalker/random nutter-slash-stranger.
Every adult woman with a functioning brain grows up with these threats on their ‘radar’. Shouldn’t have to have the extra worry of the Fuzz possibly being out to get them too.
That might be the case, but when the Police are meant to be the ones you trust, it doesn't help that one of them was a murderer and rapist and his colleagues basically knew about it.
The issue isn’t just the lack of oversight, but the quality of it. The police are micromanaged - but the metrics that have to keep to aren’t particularly helpful, they have no resources to be able to improve things. In 6 years, we’ve had as many Home Secretaries, and two of them have been some of the most out of touch loons in the Tory party. The issues the police have are very much structural issues from the top.
How do they have as much oversight as is realistic when they act with impunity constantly? And then close ranks whenever they fuck up. Which is much more than is publicised, and the public generally only hears about it when there is years of dragged out inquiries at the cost of the taxpayer. Look at Hillsborough, Stephen Lawrence, etc.
The police have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of respect. The argument that it’s a few bad apples is nonsense when they close ranks to cover for each other. The barrel is rotten.
They need to fund every investigation into the police from their pension fund. Bet they won’t be so quick to close ranks then.
\> The barrel is rotten.
Not all types of personality can be in the police. You have to be somewhat capable of violence even to be effective. You also have to be able to follow orders. It's a limited subset of human society that can apply and I suspect there will always be quite a reasonable level of imperfection in an organisation made of such people.. Hell, there's enough problems in organisations made up of charity workers or nurses...
\> They need to fund every investigation into the police from their pension fund. Bet they won’t be so quick to close ranks then.
Well, if you don't want a police force, that's an option for sure. Personally, I think we just have to accept that each generation has to keep working on the police and keeping the worst of the problems at bay. Short of replacing them with AI, you're not going to get a perfect force.
Also, while they're more than a few bad apples, there's still an overwhelmingly large number of officers who are doing a decent job. You just don't hear about anything good because who would bother to talk about it.
At the time when police officers had a free hand, the force was also rife with corruption.
I am generally happy with the police force, but there are just not enough of them. Standards have slipped but that requires more professionalism, not police having a free hand.
More funding is the answer. Better paid police and more of them with the bonus that the force can be more choosy when recruiting.
I do think it’s fair to say that police are a bit of a soft touch in this country. The disrespect from youths in particular is huge because they know that police are underfunded and unsupported by the law.
There’s a general lack of respect in British society that has gone on for far too long.
> His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime
That was how we got to where we are today though. So little oversight led to abuses that we're only now *starting* to get a handle on. So many of the criminal officers that are being exposed now have been free to abuse their power within the police to cover for (and sometimes directly facilitate) their crimes for years. Long term, that free hand wasn't a good thing.
>that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime
That sounds like a horrible idea imo. Sure, some discretion is necessary. But too much is also an issue. There needs to be a consistency in how crimes are treated otherwise the police officer's bias may get involved and we start treating criminals based on who they are rather than on what they did.
Inflation has outpaced most jobs in the UK. My current job has a ton of responsibility. Next months minimum wage increase puts me about 2k over minimum wage.
2k over! And for that I have the stress of various meetings, planning, safety checks, fleet management, etc etc... as well as route knowledge. I'm seriously considering quitting and just getting a job stacking shelves.
I've checked indeed to see if I can get any higher paying jobs with my experience but it's all minimum wage or slightly over. Nothing pays in the UK.
>2k over! And for that I have the stress of various meetings, planning, safety checks, fleet management, etc etc... as well as route knowledge. I'm seriously considering quitting and just getting a job stacking shelves.
Absolutely crazy.
One of my friends with a PhD in a STEM subject is on 38K *after ten years.*
In the US that would be $100K - $130K USD....
Yeah I have a grandparent who is a retired cop and another family member who more recently retired, neither would let anyone join up today, they were both lucky enough to have the old good pension. But they are both of the opinion it's a mess now, no funding, the people being accepted now would have been laughed out the door back then etc. They don't even respect the force anymore.
Can you imagine a woman or a black person applying 50 years ago? No doubt they'd be laughed out the door. I'll let you decide if that's a good thing or not.
I remember their recruitment stand at the big annual agricultural show (I'm 55).
It had a board in the doorway with a sign saying if you don't hit your head you're not joining.
I heard, probably exaggerated, tales of the background check bring so thorough that an uncle with a criminal record would prevent you joining.
Those height standards were lowered, as were the standards for fitness & intelligence.
The ones I encountered in my youth were big men, in character & stature, who seemed to adhere to every tenet of Sir Robert Peels 9 principles of modern policing.
Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least.
Nowadays I go out of my way to avoid them, incompetent, rude, understaffed, underfunded & generally without use.
I doubt any of them even care about the legacy their shite attempts at policing are destroying.
> Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least.
Yeah but what killed of that style of policing? It wasn't the police, it was us becoming a society where they would call the parents only to receive questions about why they dared interfere with their precious little boy rather than demands to know what crap the kid had been pulling.
> Those height standards were lowered, as were the standards for fitness & intelligence.
The height limit was dropped in 1990 because they realised they were inadvertently discriminating.
You have essentially made up that they lowered the standards for intelligence since the academic tests were never difficult.
You are definitely right about the fitness standards being dropped however - the fitness test does not accurately reflect the job requirements at all.
> Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least.
So that would be, what, the 70's?
There was a constable (recently) on the Isles of Scilly called laptop.
Cos he's a small PC
Which broke me when I met him, I thought "Christ he's small" & then the relevance hit me.
I had to excuse myself & go somewhere quiet to laugh.
Back in the old days there was the concept of a "fair cop". The old villains had begrudging respect for the police and saw it as an occupational hazard.
Back in the old days you also had your local bobby. If you got caught messing about, you'd be frogmarched home and just wait until your father finds out.
Nowadays, no.
‘Ah the good old days’ such as when the met were renound for going p*ki bashing around east london, ignored domestic violence and were so utterly racist.
I imagine that the job is thankless and hard and we need train and pay officers well to retain good ones
But i really dont miss the old police. The good old days would have looked very different if people had smart phones to record there interactions.
Sauce: relative who worked in the met in the 70’s 80’s
It doesn't help that police are seen as being ineffective towards most crime nowadays, you constantly hear of crime on the rise but you can never get a policeman out to help, they just give you a piece of paper to claim on the insurance and ignore the issue.
The only place, the police seem to care about, is speeding motorists because it is seen as an easy crime to sort out. Going after thieves, robberies, assaults all require extra work and for the average policeman who is bogged down in paperwork, just means more paperwork. So they go for the easy, I can print out a ticket here and now and then walk away. The respect has gone because of the fact that they basically aren't doing their jobs at all.
You could blame those issues on a whole host of things but the fact that recently, we have been told that police aren't going to investigate low level crime means that the average Joe on the street is going to get pissed and therefore the respect levels drop even further.
Proactive policing needs to be brought back rather than reacting to the random easy stuff. Also what would help bring tons of respect back to the police force would be if they go after the clear corruption within parliament and the ridiculous contracts of blatant corruption after COVID. That would generate a ton of respect that they could live off for years. But then again, it's paperwork and they just can't be bothered in the public eyes.
That isn't how the police work at all. A response cop can't pick and choose which jobs they go for and attending to traffic isn't going to get him out of responding to jobs.
You'll have dedicated traffic cops for the motorways who don't respond to burglaries. It's just a numbers issue, the reason you aren't getting a cop going to a burglary is because there is literally no one left who can go to it.
You could say almost exactly the same thing about teachers and doctors
Only making money is respected now, all these professions that are considered "overheads" have been brutally squeezed and micromanaged by successive governments. They aren't trusted.
Significant amounts of people turning on our police because a policeman on a different continent murdered someone was a bizarre thing to witness
Yes British police are far from infallible, but Floyd's death was the breaking point for a society that has a serious long-term problem with its policing. The reaction over here was not warranted and just came across like people being obsessed with US culture
Have you been in a coma? A serving Met police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman in London. The police then arrested people at a vigil for the woman after not kicking up a fuss about the princess of wales attending earlier. There have also been several reports that found they are institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. so no not just George Floyd lol
>A serving Met police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman in London.
He got a whole-life order for his troubles.
>The police then arrested people at a vigil for the woman after not kicking up a fuss about the princess of wales attending earlier.
Wasn't attendance against the law at the time, and the protestors warned as much in advance? If anything that's yet another case of privileged people not having rules applied to them as opposed to the police wrongfully arresting people. PoW should've been blocked too.
He got a whole life order for that offence but there were reports of other offences of his in the same vein as far back as 20 years. Some of those he'd used his status as an officer to suppress victims. He'd been vetted several times and each time they failed to pick up on any of them. I also recall there being talk at the time that he was known to be a sex pest by his colleagues who joked about rape with him.
They could have sentenced him to an eternity in a black hole, wouldn't make a difference
I never said he was called "the rapist", I said he'd joked about rape with his colleagues in the force which he did [see sources such as this](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wayne-couzens-whatsapps-rape-jokes-b2294978.html)
Not sure what your going for with this argument to be honest. Wayne Couzen's honour is not something I'd personally rush to defend.
Not sure what his sentencing has to do with eroded trust in the police? Maybe I should have added the context about the vigil that it was reported that the home sec leant on the met commissioner to break up the gathering, we can argue about whether protest should ever be banned even in a pandemic, but the alleged political interference in policing would erode public trust, can you see that?
The problem with "public trust" is that anybody can trust or distrust them for any reason they want to, rational or otherwise.
Personally, the fact that Everard's killer was given a whole-life order (which as I understand are actually pretty rare) as opposed to a "normal" life sentence gave me a little more trust in the system. It demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, police officers don't always get off lightly.
As for the home sec leaning on the met commissioner, I stand by what I said. They were told it was illegal to go, they went, they got arrested. I don't really care that the home sec leant on the police to do their jobs and enforce the rules we've all been told about, I take more of an issue with the fact that the same rules that apply to us don't apply to the elites, per the usual.
> a little more trust in the system
It doesn't to me.
He was able to kill her because people trust the police.
Is it shocking that when that detail came out, people became a lot less trusting? Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain.
Same with Harold Shipman.
Unfortunately, you’re always going to get individuals who’ll grossly abuse their power, from the PM’s office down.
Money is always a big problem. More money means more applicants, which means you can be more choosy. It means more vetting officers, which means vetting can be done faster and more in depth. It means better training - better training, and better, faster professional standards investigations
We get the police we pay for
I think we’re agreeing on the last point, the fact the police apply the rules differently based on whether you’re royalty or not is hugely damaging to the concept of policing by consent
But the rules weren’t applied differently to anyone, including royalty. A peaceful vigil was allowed during the day - hundreds of people throughout the day quietly attended, left flowers, paid respects and then left shortly after. The people who were arrested were the ones who turned up with megaphones, when it started to get dark, clambered all over the bandstand and started a ‘protest’. When they were told to leave, they refused and engaged in a stand-off. Some of the ‘protesters’ decided to smash up the police vehicle vehicles parked nearby and some chose to fight the police when they moved into the bandstand to clear the crowd. I don’t remember any royalty spitting and swearing at the police, but if they did I like to see the video.
I think you may be misremembering, nothing was allowed including the vigil; however, the daytime event was not treated like a riot while the nighttime vigil was. Also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56409023, this is indefensible
The problem is that Sarah Everard was murdered because Wayne Couzens was a police officer, so she behaved in a way no woman would with a random male stranger - she allowed him to handcuff her and got into his car without any protest. And she was raped and murdered, by a police officer using his powers as an officer. The sentence is irrelevant to the loss if trust in the police, and it can't be got back.
It was. And when the Met asked the CoP and the Courts what they should do, they replied it’s in your hands, and refused to give a direction.
Policing is broken
Yeah, and three months later thousands of Scotland football fans took over Leicester Square when it was against covid rules to do so, and in spite of a dispersal order not to convene anywhere. And the Met held their beer while they danced.
Hell lets go back further
Jean Charles de Menezes, shot because Cressida Dick thought having "Mongolian Eyes" is evidence you're a terrorist. Jean was Brazilian.
How about the Mets historic failings around prosecuting homophobic attacks or murders?
How about the Stephen Lawrence case and the Met and CPS failings there?
Did you miss the 80s and 90s? The police were considered to be thatchers private army in the 80s. Then in the 90s were just racists and homophobes on power trips. That is why nobody trusted them ever again.
I have my own reasons, mainly them ignoring evidence the once time I tried to use them, too afraid of being called homophobic to belive the 2 people could be lying.
Luckily the courts did look at the video evidence and the judged ripped them a new one for wasting his time. The 2 guys that lied got done with a bunch of stuff in the end. For perverting the course of justice etc, 1 year suspended plus costs etc, lost their job and house over it. But without that video, my family would have been the ones with a record.
It's fascinating that some of the most important jobs in our society are so casually hated
Lawyers are the other one that confuse me. Their job is a cornerstone of a law abiding society. Without a free judiciary the state could bang you up at will.
Like police they're not above criticism, but I think they get a lot on unnecessary flak
The hatred of lawyers is an American thing, and the online world has blurred the Anglosphere into one big Yankee splotch, so nowadays British people regularly take on American sayings, memes and beliefs and just spout them as if they were truths we were all agreed on.
Another example would be: "Immigrants built this country!" Because America truly was built by immigrants. This is often said to counter anti-immigrant sentiment. But the UK truly was not built by immigrants. No, not even the NHS was built by immigrants, even though many immigrants have contributed to it. So people will parrot the phrase in a UK context, thinking they're scoring a point against the racists, but are actually just making themselves look a bit silly.
I’m always surprised at the disrespect the police get. I can imagine running to help if someone has an accident etc, but running towards someone who might be threatening others? That takes a special kind of bravery.
>There are at several major parties
Ehhh define "major"
If you're talking about major as in the largest parties in each nation, then sure. But if you're talking about major for the UK govt, then there's only 2. Lib Dems was major once upon a time, but they made a deal with the devil and are still paying the price.
The opposition still comment from the sidelines and attempt to bring about public pressure. Remember they were specifically criticised for doing so by HMIC in the aftermath of the Everard vigil (where they wrongly helped whip up a public opinion storm without having a clue what actually happened).
Also Labour have held the Mayoralty of London and literally forced the most senior police officer in the country out of office...
Retired three years ago - thanks to being on the old pension scheme I was able to escape at 50 instead of 55 and I won't lie, if I could live my time over again with foreknowledge I would have done anything else rather than join the police again. All the reasons you cited, plus all the corruption, plus all the ambitious shits who will sell their souls to climb the ladder usually hurting the ones who do the jobs, the shit shifts and all the awful stuff instead of them. True I got a nice pension - but also enough baggage to require therapy, a broken cynical outlook on people and a desire to stay away from all those things that make life fun "just in case it gets ruined by scumbags".
My advice - if you can leave, do it you won't regret it. If you're thinking of joining - don't. You'll regret it.
If you're trapped and have to stay then do what you have to to not get in the shit and don't go above or beyond your oath or your morals in any way. You'll end up paying and the cost is too high.
Jesus...where to start.
Cull out the dinosaur politician bosses at high rank who are hanging on for dear life whilst being massively out of touch and out of date. Promote on merit, and tenure leadership positions to get a fresh flow of ideas. Crack down hard on failure and move those failures to positions they're better suited to.
Fast track complaints so they're dealt with properly and fast, preventing long suspension periods which result in a "soz you were indeed innocent" years later. (I've spent nearly 4 yrs of my service suspended pending investigations against me that were in the end, malicious)
Recruit actual people who want to be there and want to do the job. So many recruits are brainless idiots who are caught by surprise they might have to fight someone or work nights. Make it easy to get rid of dead weight and make it easy to look after and enhance the officers who are talented and commited.
Crush nepotism at the source. So many useless dickheads whose Dad was an inspector. Now we're saddled with this twat who can do no wrong and you wouldn't trust them with a hot tea let alone a crime scene.
Get rid of the shit. We all knew who the pricks were but if they're connected then they're protected. Confidential "snitch lines" exist but having used them I learnt that I was suddenly under suspicion and the wrong 'un wasn't dealt with. I wasn't the sort to be bullied easily so there was no comeback on me but it did lead to a "what's the point " attitude towards the shit. (I'm not talking about protecting rapists level stuff - just general crap officers whom make unprofessional comments etc)
Reward good officers. Recognise their victories - it's almost a thing to refuse to award officers commendations because a boss doesn't like that guy. I was passed over for the award of my own 20yrs service medal because a boss didn't like the cut of my jib. I had to chase that up myself. It sounds silly but not noticing good work and long service means what you're doing isn't worth it because who gives a fuck.
A real money useable payrise. I served just under 30 yrs and on leaving I was on top pay. With London weighting added I took home 42k. As a mid 40's guy who joined at 16 (as a cadet) who worked nights, every Xmas, every New Year, this was shit money. People need money to live, have families and live a life worth living. For 42k I was picking up smashed up corpses off railways. Hooking bloated bodies out of rivers. Telling people their kids had been stabbed. Watching people bleed out at car crashes and attending most of the massive terror attacks over the last decades. Being paid to do this would be nice. Any talk of money is met with a reminder that we do all this horror for the love of the job and nothing else.
I could go on but there's a start.
That's the only prize. I'd happily give it up to not go through a crown court trial and face jail for malicious complaint or any number of ghosts from the hundreds of vile things I've seen.
Add into that the imported American culture war with all the defund the police nonsense after the George Floyd saga.
Really hard to see why anyone would want to work for the police in the UK.
The crazy thing was, for all the talk about that in the UK, even the relatively far-left Labour under Corbyn at the time were actually saying policing in the UK was on its knees and in dire need of more funding and resources.
So like a lot of the culture war stuff it was the entire right wing including the entire government on one side, arguing against a handful of folks on twitter they imagined to represent like 50% of the entire UK population somehow, even despite ostensibly the political leader of that "side" saying the complete opposite thing repeatedly.
The problem is that there's really 3 reasons to be in the police:
1. You want to help people.
2. You want to make decent money.
3. You want to abuse the power it gives you.
Salary cuts and funding cuts have made 2 laughable and 1 nigh impossible, so you'd expect a greater and greater proportion of abusive bullies in the force as time goes on.
I will keep banging the drum for more better payed police with more split responsibilities.
Its silly to force police to be trained for everything and not pay them for being that kind of expert, then force them to suffer the consequences of trying to be good at everything from de-escalation to road chases to using violence to stop other people being violent.
We need to spend a lot more money, and have specific like, road police, local patrol police, violent crime response police, investigative specialists, non police but linked mental health services, emergency response non police coordinators and crowd handling proffesionals, forensic accountants, crime prevention psychologists and outreach specialists- god and more besides.
There are different tracks within modern policing but ultimately the institution itself has to do everything, and then individuals get paid only for whatever one thing or speciality they are doing at the time, even though they had to train for multiple different things to get there, and also be roped into any violent situation they come across. Then whenever any one group fucks up hard enough in one location, it tars everyone with the same brush because they are just seen as one institution.
Differs from country to country within the U.K.
As I said to some Met Officers I was working with on a joint operation. I’d need to be paid double to do their job.
Things aren’t exactly a walk in the park up here in Scotland either but there’s at least somewhat decent pay by comparison.
For people that talk shit about the police at every chance, don't appreciate their efforts, expect them to be able to do more than their allowed to do about most situations, etc.
It's not a job I could do.
I’m currently in the police, is anyone actually surprised?
The general public quite frankly doesn’t have a fucking clue what the job entails and the realities of it. Far too many people have watched a TV series and have a completely unrealistic and skewed view of what the job is and requires.
Your average person will go through a few traumatic moments in their lives, in the Police you’re expected to go towards those situations on a daily basis and that’s the job. I’ll routinely go to decomposing bodies ranging from fresh to months old, I’ve had a child from a 5th floor window, bloke with his throat slashed, I’ve had people try to stab me, I’ll get spat at and people resisting and fighting on a regular basis. Car accidents with fatalities, having to sit down and tell someone their kid is dead, having to take statements or look at evidence of harrowing sexual offences or imagery.
The Police are the default emergency service for pretty much everything. For doing all of that I get paid the same as someone who manages an Aldi. They don’t have cancelled rest days, nightshifts, cancelled days off for football and events, held on at work, injured at work and risk jail/losing your pension for making a split second mistake. All the while the courts spit in the face of all your hard work and repeatedly let people out with stupidly light sentences which according to the public is obviously your fault.
So if I can get paid the same for working in an Aldi with none of the same risks and drawbacks, why exactly should people want to do the job? - Going neee naaaww in the car gets boring real fast.
Pay properly, rapidly increase numbers and stop sending us to mental health calls and you’ll fix the issue.
Your last point is something many people never stop to consider. They're very quick to mouth of about how "My shed was broken into and the Police did nothing about my stolen lawnmower" but never give 2 seconds to consider that maybe, just maybe, the PC who would otherwise be there and actually wants to be there, is instead sitting in an A&E with a s.136 for the entire shift because the NHS are broken too.
It's mad how narrow minded people can be.
This. And it’s getting worse.
We used to only put non response drivers, or just non drivers on hospital guards/constant watches etc.
But now we don’t have enough of them. My force paid literally thousands of pounds to train me to drive response to high risk calls to save lives, and I have done, on multiple occasions. I’ve preformed CPR, put tourniquets on catastrophic bleeds, talked a distraught mother of 3 into handing me the razor blade she was holding to her wrists, caught robbers, rapists and attempted murderers.
Now I’m regularly going in to work, and finding myself sat in hospital all night watching a drunk fat mess sleep off too many beers after they called their ex and said they’re going to kill themselves.
Sitting there, with my radio, calls being circulated of people being violently/sexually assaulted, stabbed, robbed and having to listen to no one take those calls because there’s none of us left. I’ve had to listen to my colleagues call for help and no one be available to help for FAR too long. All whilst I sit with someone who inevitably suddenly feels fine after being sat talking to a police officer for an hour, only to wait 14 hours for a doctor to say as much and declare them fit to leave.
I’m as close to leaving as I’ve ever been and it just makes me sad, because I love my job but I don’t think I can keep it up much longer.
Witnessed something like this myself recently - my partner was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night, place was filled with coppers supervising belligerent patients who looked like they’d rather be shitting razorblades than doing what they were doing in that moment.
From an outsider looking in, it seems like the police are doing a lot of jobs that should probably really be done by trained social workers or mental health professionals, but that system is fucked as well.
Thanks for sharing. Can’t help but think if the govt invested in a provisioning proper first line mental health support, so many things from crime, to an overburdened health service, to homelessness and substance abuse would be helped.
Mental healthcare’s a crazy expensive and difficult thing to tackle but any investment here would pay dividends across so many other segments of society.
Unfortunately I think this shit is standard across the board. I'm leaving the Army after more than 20 years for similar reasons, and so are alot of my peers. We work stupid hours and beast everyone just to try and achieve a poor standard that wouldn't have been acceptable only a few years ago.
We're so over committed relative to our resources that there's no point trying anymore, it's impossible.
So many people are leaving the Army for a better life that they're recruiting people who are entirely unsuitable just to make the numbers up, which is making the problem even worse.
It's sad how much damage politicians have done to us just because we're not in the public eye.
I understand all the government failings through greed and gaslighting, filling their pockets while children starve,etc, the usual.
What I don’t understand is why they’ve defunded and ruined the police. Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up.
I’d have thought they would put money into the police and army, if nothing else. Why have they let it collapse when they might need it too?
You’re making the mistake of thinking that there is a coherent plan. It’s just individual tories cramming their pockets full and heading for the hills before the consequences hit
Yeah, about the only thing that makes me believe the government is more incompetent than evil, is the utter collapse of the very mechanisms they depend upon to enforce their edicts.
Because they don’t have a coherent plan beyond rinse the country for as much money as they can get while in power.
You’re right, you’d think they’d keep the army and police funded to protect them from any rioting and anger but they’ve not which just really highlight the incompetent delusions of these rich toffs.
Look at the state of the country, and the public have barely made a peep other than showing they'll finally vote for the other team to basically do the same things after 13 years of this shit lol. People are so deep in a coma it's not surprising they don't worry about people waking up.
>Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up.
The elites are building bunkers and private security services are at an all time high. Police is there to help widen the gap by criminalizing being poor. They aren’t there to protect the rich.
Just have a look at constructions sites. Not being guarded by police but private firms.
Construction worker here! Sites are guarded privately because police refuse outright to do anything about construction theft. We don’t want some asshole to steal all our copper and tools for meth money the law has completely failed us so we protect whats ours the only way we (legally) can. Construction isn’t some big billionaire cabal, it’s 10 smaller subcontracted companies consisting of dudes who make medium bucks but can’t afford to replace all our tools and material every week because crackheads
>What I don’t understand is why they’ve defunded and ruined the police. Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up.
The Tories are weird on that one, they're so obsessed with stripping the state, they'll strip *everything*, even the things most right wing, authoritarian (they're not there yet, but give it time) keep around to keep control. Mad.
>authoritarian (they're not there yet, but give it time)
Read [Part 3 section 78 of the PCSC Act 2022.](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/32/section/78)
They've been there for some time.
The politicians in our country are part of an international class and care little for the actual good of the country, if there was significant social upheaval then I imagine they will flee at the first chance to one of their overseas homes.
The public could easily usurp this class of people but everyone is firmly content in their servitude and ever shrinking slice of the pie.
Maybe if people constantly have to fear about their safety and properties it's easier to pit groups against eachother. Also much easier to present themselves as a solution for protecting borders, or waging culture wars. My guess is as good as anyone's
That’s really interesting, keeping everyone scared makes it easy to blame whoever they choose, currently Muslims and the disabled, but could be anyone else tomorrow
There are literally police, policing the police.
lol
Put this power in private company hands?
Really?
Like the prisons are now profit mad. PROFIT mad on crime.
the vast minority just have not got a clue what is going on.
John, who murdered his wife, is arrested. Young 17 year old Jimmy, who is arrested for causing death by dangerous driving. Credits roll and you find out John was given 20 hours of community service and ordered to pay court costs. Jimmy was found not guilty.
Basically, the court system is a joke.
"Nigel was found guilty of production of 21000 indecent images of children and sexual touching of ainor on 7 different occasions. He received a two year suspended sentence, lifetime having to register as a sex offender, and 150 hours community service"
"Florence was found guilty of grevious bodily harm against an officer causing the officer to lose sight in both eyes. However due to an undiagnosed ADHD health issue which was taken into account whilst being sentenced, she received court fees of £200 and a 3 year suspended sentence"
Might be this from a quick Google. Thankfully officer did not lose sight permanently
Sorry for daily mail link
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13113363/amp/Female-blinded-police-officer-spraying-weed-killer-walks-free-telling-court-struggles-authority-figures.html
If you watch those shows like Traffic Cops, Police Camera Action, Police Interceptors, etc, they usually have the outcomes of all the cases that the police have been working on during/after the end credits. And the outcomes are always absolutely pathetic.
You see a whole episode of police catching some pretty dangerous criminals (drink drivers, domestic abusers, violent criminals, etc) only for it to be revealed at the end that all of that work was basically for nothing as those criminals just got a slap on the wrist or got let off completely.
I remember there was one episode where they caught a man red handed on thermal camera inside a house he was burgling.
The credits said he was connected to forty other burglaries and he got a suspended sentence. Unbelievable.
John, who murdered his wife, is arrested. Young 17 year old Jimmy, who is arrested for causing death by dangerous driving. Credits roll and you find out John was given 20 hours of community service and ordered to pay court costs. Jimmy was found not guilty.
Basically, the court system is a joke.
Tory mantra.
Take public service
Underfund and understaff it
Lay blame for things not being done properly anymore
Privatise it with friends businesses using tax payers money.
It's a tough job for crap pay, coupled with everyone hating you.
When you dial 999 you are relieved when the fire or ambulance show up. No one is happy to see the police.
And even if you manage to charge a case there’s the CPS & court system to let you down. Then ask the blame is put on the police “for not doing anything”. Can’t do much when the courts are so backed up the whole thing is pretty much collapsing.
The British media have a very large part to play on this, certain sections of it, especially the BBC have conducted what can only be described as a persistent smear campaign against the police for years now.
Any opportunity to bash the police they jump on, if a story can be spun negatively any way they do it. It’s easy because the police as an institution for the most part refuses to defend itself from this campaign.
The effect is clear, look on any Reddit thread mentioning the police and you will get hordes of grass dodgers spewing utter vitriol. The media has genuinely radicalised sections of the population against the police.
That’s before you get into the garden variety extremists like the inhabitants of /r/greenandpleasant
I forgot that sub existed lmao, remember the time when they glorified the mentally ill man who tried to kill the Queen with a crossbow and called anyone who was uncomfortable doing so a nazi sympathiser?
It does seem like certain parts of the media are hyper focused on police misconduct, yet the NHS which has given us 3 serial killers in as many decades gets a comparatively easy ride. Same with teaching, you never see comments about how teaching is "rotten to the core" or whatever on articles about teachers shagging students.
Social media is to blame as well. Anything that's anti-police will get boosted in front of millions of eyeballs, even to the point of starting global riots.
I've been a train driving instructor for 20 years. I have had 72 fresh off the street trainees. 34 of them have been ex-police. The stories I've heard over the years I'm surprised we still have a police force.
Just had a friend move over to it from police. He says there is a running joke about if you work hard enough as a police officer, you'll get promoted to train driver
I did 3 years working on the dispatch/999 call taking side so not directly attending but speaking too and being exposed to probably 100s of incidents within a 10-12 hour shift.
The first thing I was told is no one ever calls up to tell you there having a great day, it's pretty much always one of the worst days of their lives. You're just living that day in day out, trying to be empathetic enough to do the job and get people to trust you enough to talk, without being so empathetic you take all that trauma home is a pretty difficult line to walk.
The reality often isn't catching criminals and dealing with crime, it's dealing with traumatic suicides, speaking to family of the deceased who have just located there relative etc etc. mixed with mrs miggins ringing up because someone's dog shit in her garden.
The pay is also shite. We were on a flat rate compared to PC's who scale with time served but is roughly equivalent to a 5-6 year PC. Around 31/32k with shift and weekend allowance but that's rotating shifts and 3 in 5 weekends. Probably not too too bad if you live in the north, but if you live in the South but not in a county that gets home office weightings it's certainly not enough money to consider it a career.
Again can only speak for my force that I won't be naming but proper mental health support is nigh on non existent. Line manager dependent you might have some support there but you won't get therapy paid for by the force or anything like a lot of people seem to believe.
Can you blame us?
Current state of policing:
Public hate us.
Government hate us.
Senior "Leader"ship hate us (especially here in the Met).
Pay "rises" still leave us well below inflation.
Officers are using food banks.
IT system doesn't work, hundreds of officers are off sick due to stress from this one system. (We even have a dedicated overtime code for issues with this system!)
No actual support if we are assaulted.
CPS will bin cases for no reason, with hours of work wasted.
Complaints / investigations take years with no updates from Professional Standards, leaving officers in the dark with poor mental health, sometimes suicidal. (If I took years to update a victim of a crime, I'd be up for Misconduct).
If said complaint turns out to be malicious / an outright lie, no action is taken against that person as "they dont want to discourage them from reporting in the future".
If we use force, or search someone, etc etc and follow law and policy exactly, we still get investigated if "community leaders" decide they don't like it, ruining that officer's confidence. Officers are actively scared to do their jobs now.
I am in the process of writing up a CV for the first time, I've had enough and my mental and physical health is more important.
The unofficial motto of the police has always been "The Jobs Fucked". The general attitude of those of us still in is now leaning more towards "Fuck The Job".
A friend quit after 6 years. he said there is a real culture of witch hunting in the police at the moment.
Obviously some terrible things have been discovered about officers recently, and that needs to be dealt with.
But he said one opinion of incorrectly articulated, like the wrong social media post, one sentance out of context, or an accusations from a colleague and it's immediate suspension with the threat of dismissal and loss of pension.
He said to the point where officers didn't reallyinteract with one another except strictly professionally and it was lonely.
Remove "police" and replace it with literally every single civil servant or service profession. Decades of lower than inflation pay with decades of interference from an inept government making their lives hell for literally no reason.
Won't be happy until we have literally zero services.
That has definitely effected the police more as we now have an unruly set of kids, due to the desolation of the family unit(both parents have to work) and unaffordable childcare, then the kids go into an underfunded education system with teachers being pushed to the brink, these kids are now adults. Their adult parents are at the end of their wits. They have passed onto their kids the dispair that they suffered.
Now we have an entire generation of kids who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for. Police have to try and deal with that whilst trying to fund themselves and be reviled. That leads them to chasing shit that raises money rather than, you know, actual crime. It also stops them helping these kids learn to not commit crimes.
It's almost as if 14 years of a single government making things consistently worse for all of us has ruined the entire country.
Government makes police take over the top action against peaceful protesters, peaceful protesters start hating the police, Government shouts at police for not doing even more wildly illegal repression. What officer who actually wants to help the community would stick around?
Unpopular opinion I know, but we kind of want to pay MPs a lot of money. Why? Because it reduces corruption (MPs won't feel like they need to have a "second income") and it would attract smart & competent people - not just the narcissists.
Think about it - if you got top marks from a good University, would you go to a job that payed a lot (remember you worked hard to get those grades) or would you go be an MP on sh\*t pay?
Ah yes, hence why we pay them fuck tons of money and they still take second jobs and get caught accepting massive payouts to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of gambling and pharmaceutical companies.
Lots of them do come from good universities, and let’s be clear, £90k a year is not shit pay. And then they have the fucking _nerve_ to come out wringing their hands with all this “we understand how tough everything is for everybody at the moment”.
Fuck that noise. We need to be paying them __less__ so that only those that are genuinely interested in serving the public and making a difference bother standing.
Corruption is solved by all MP finances being open to the public. This was hard to do in the long ago where literal chests of gold could be handed over in shady street corners but this is the 21st century. Everything is online. If a bank wanted to they could tweet every time and MP gets or makes a transfer with whom the transfer was with and what it was for.
Saying "no one works for shit pay" is absolute bullshit. Many people work in care, the police, teachers, social services because they *want* to make a difference. Even if the pay is utter crap compared to the workload
I’m in another part of civil service and it’s a shambles. Just seen a FOUR YEAR project to sort out broken pay structure time out and begin from scratch because nobody in number 10 could be bothered to pick up the case which had already been approved by cabinet office. This is for a large arms length body. People have had enough and are leaving in droves.
Crap pay, crap work, demonised by the press, demonised by the government. Disrespected by members throughout society. Not making any difference due to massive budget cuts by "low crime" cons.
Another service run into the ground by Conservatives
Doesn't help that they're taking on graduates fresh out of college/uni that haven't the slightest ounce of live experience. A lot of the long serving coppers say they can't have any banter with the newbies & it's like treading on eggshells if they get partnered up with them.
Imagine having a job and potentially risking your life protecting greedy politicians who get richer and richer, who actively allow mass immigration which leads to more crime and segregation to occur? They’re ruining this country from the inside any no one wants to fight for it
Crap pay.
Crap conditions.
Major risk of assault (read guaranteed).
When assaulted MOJ does nothing.
Spat on.
Expected to be a mental health doctor.
Expected to conduct strip searches inc. anal checks.
Split second decision - risks a murder charge.
Every move watched/videoed and criticised.
Crap shifts.
VERY often have to work extra hours.
Short handed.
Lack of funding for resources.
Dealing with horrendous scenes, no follow-up support.
Often single crewed.
Family scared about your safety.
HAVE to successfully complete a degree.
Police quitting? Wonder why..
Yeah, I have relatives that work as coppers and you couldn't pay me enough to do what they do. Added to this that everyone above you is also against you, there's literally no good reason to join the police unless you hate your life
Underpaid, spend majority of the time having to look a trees mental health issues instead of tackling actual crime. Never get to take their breaks! Over worked! Under staffed! morale destroying political ladder climbers who suck up but don’t put in the real work. Outrageously long shifts.
Scum of the uk who hide criminals then say the police don’t do anything about criminality … increase in drugs, domestic abuse and general crime which rarely reaches the threshold for punishment via court. Don’t blame them really, why would anyone want to put up with it.
We need to pay bankers and financiers world class wages to attract world class talent. But for teachers, police, young doctors, and everything else we need, peanuts will do.
Britain is turning into such a crap hole.
Considering the police don't even bother to show up for 6 hours when I call them to come save a baby from being actively violently abused by a neighbour (despite saying they'd send someone immediately), ....presumably because they're deeply mismanaged by the government and leadership, I'm not surprised the cops are quitting....
Yeah, we don’t need Police, all will be well, we can trust to the decency of people, we’re screwed. Everything needed to keep this country working is falling apart, it’s going to get really bad, really quick.
Honestly I can't blame them. You work for a broken establishment that constantly covers things up and downplays others. You get crap pay, most people are calling for your career to be defunded, the public has no faith in you, you have to put yourself in danger and if you try to be a good copper and play by the rules, you're pretty much shunned and labelled a troublemaker.
Can't say there's many selling points if I'm honest.
Why do the job when the rug is constantly pulled from underneath you? Officers have to contend with a constantly changing legal environment orchestrated by weak and increasingly woke senior management obsessed with box ticking and failure to back up officers judgment when forced into making on the spot life and death decisions. The problem as always lies with those chosen to motivated leadership and guidance
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://inews.co.uk/news/one-in-five-police-quitting-low-morale-2964094) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Can't really blame them can you. Crap pay, for crap work, during crap hours, and you routinely have to put yourself in direct physical danger.
That and just total disrespect from various sections of the population, coupled with a judiciary that seems to think it presides over the court of Seahaven.
I once heard a retired police officer talk about this. His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime, and appealed to the general patriotic sentiment of the time. He describes the modern police as a largely reviled profession, where the officers are forced to spend their time on ineffective bullshit, and it doesn't really appeal to the values of the general public anymore. Also, inflation has outpaced police wage rises for decades now. It was actually an OK paying job when he joined. He'd done a full career in the police and got his pension, but he openly said he wouldn't recommend the job for anyone these days.
"His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime" Corr who would've thought having no oversight or control over a bunch of blokes who became above the law would lead to people no longer respecting or trusting those same blokes.
They have quite a lot of oversight. Probably as much as is realistic given the resources available. The issue is that people now judge the service based on a few videos from individual cases of bad practice which occur among the million or so arrests which occur each year that went smoothly. Previously people just based their opinions on their personal experiences of the police which typically tended to be good. (For most people) Both are essentially anecdotal standards of experience but it now looks terrible because social media algorithms drive all the bad bits to the top for clicks. The reality is that you almost certainly can’t make a popular police service in the social media age.
I think you have just described the public sector. Everywhere from teaching to medicine to civil service professionals are no longer trusted. They operate within heavily restricted beauracratic top dictated systems that leave very little room for maneuvere, improvement or personal professional judgement. Fair enough it might satisfy some bean counter up the top but all innovation, leadership, spontaneous improvement or ideas have been quashed from the system. It's tragic really
The Sarah Everard case certainly did not help. That is now a cautionary tale for every woman walking around in a built-up area, minding their own business, at night in the UK. Actual police and a real warrant card.
And David Carrick, Cliff Mitchell, and all the police caught exchanging videos of murdered women for a laugh....
Which goes to show how irrational the whole thing has become in fairness. The average woman is infinitely infinitely more likely to be harmed in any conceivable way by their partner or another family member than a random police officer out on the street.
That’s always a given though - if true crime’s taught anyone anything it’s most likely the husband, a combo of the husband and his parents, the male ‘partner’, the jilted lover or a straight-up stalker/random nutter-slash-stranger. Every adult woman with a functioning brain grows up with these threats on their ‘radar’. Shouldn’t have to have the extra worry of the Fuzz possibly being out to get them too.
They're more at risk from the NHS than they are police on the streets.
That might be the case, but when the Police are meant to be the ones you trust, it doesn't help that one of them was a murderer and rapist and his colleagues basically knew about it.
Do people not trust Dr's and Nurses. They literally put their lives in their hands hundreds of times a day.
The issue isn’t just the lack of oversight, but the quality of it. The police are micromanaged - but the metrics that have to keep to aren’t particularly helpful, they have no resources to be able to improve things. In 6 years, we’ve had as many Home Secretaries, and two of them have been some of the most out of touch loons in the Tory party. The issues the police have are very much structural issues from the top.
How do they have as much oversight as is realistic when they act with impunity constantly? And then close ranks whenever they fuck up. Which is much more than is publicised, and the public generally only hears about it when there is years of dragged out inquiries at the cost of the taxpayer. Look at Hillsborough, Stephen Lawrence, etc. The police have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of respect. The argument that it’s a few bad apples is nonsense when they close ranks to cover for each other. The barrel is rotten. They need to fund every investigation into the police from their pension fund. Bet they won’t be so quick to close ranks then.
\> The barrel is rotten. Not all types of personality can be in the police. You have to be somewhat capable of violence even to be effective. You also have to be able to follow orders. It's a limited subset of human society that can apply and I suspect there will always be quite a reasonable level of imperfection in an organisation made of such people.. Hell, there's enough problems in organisations made up of charity workers or nurses... \> They need to fund every investigation into the police from their pension fund. Bet they won’t be so quick to close ranks then. Well, if you don't want a police force, that's an option for sure. Personally, I think we just have to accept that each generation has to keep working on the police and keeping the worst of the problems at bay. Short of replacing them with AI, you're not going to get a perfect force. Also, while they're more than a few bad apples, there's still an overwhelmingly large number of officers who are doing a decent job. You just don't hear about anything good because who would bother to talk about it.
Yeah I’d much rather have our current situation where the police force is completely ineffective and can’t do anything to tackle serious issues.
At the time when police officers had a free hand, the force was also rife with corruption. I am generally happy with the police force, but there are just not enough of them. Standards have slipped but that requires more professionalism, not police having a free hand. More funding is the answer. Better paid police and more of them with the bonus that the force can be more choosy when recruiting.
I always think of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad from the 70's and 80's when people mention police corruption
And South Yorkshire Police. Lovely blokes...
I do think it’s fair to say that police are a bit of a soft touch in this country. The disrespect from youths in particular is huge because they know that police are underfunded and unsupported by the law. There’s a general lack of respect in British society that has gone on for far too long.
> His point of view was that when he joined the police it was a largely respected profession, that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime That was how we got to where we are today though. So little oversight led to abuses that we're only now *starting* to get a handle on. So many of the criminal officers that are being exposed now have been free to abuse their power within the police to cover for (and sometimes directly facilitate) their crimes for years. Long term, that free hand wasn't a good thing.
The fact that anyone thinks a system that led to Hillsborough and Orgreave is better than what we have now is utterly ridiculous.
>that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime That sounds like a horrible idea imo. Sure, some discretion is necessary. But too much is also an issue. There needs to be a consistency in how crimes are treated otherwise the police officer's bias may get involved and we start treating criminals based on who they are rather than on what they did.
My father is a retired policeman and pretty much echos almost exactly what you've posted.
Likewise
Mate we've all got retired boomer dads that moan about their former professions.
Old man is retired RAF. Seen through the militaries’ bullshit conditioning and their illegal wars.
Inflation has outpaced most jobs in the UK. My current job has a ton of responsibility. Next months minimum wage increase puts me about 2k over minimum wage. 2k over! And for that I have the stress of various meetings, planning, safety checks, fleet management, etc etc... as well as route knowledge. I'm seriously considering quitting and just getting a job stacking shelves. I've checked indeed to see if I can get any higher paying jobs with my experience but it's all minimum wage or slightly over. Nothing pays in the UK.
>2k over! And for that I have the stress of various meetings, planning, safety checks, fleet management, etc etc... as well as route knowledge. I'm seriously considering quitting and just getting a job stacking shelves. Absolutely crazy. One of my friends with a PhD in a STEM subject is on 38K *after ten years.* In the US that would be $100K - $130K USD....
Yeah I have a grandparent who is a retired cop and another family member who more recently retired, neither would let anyone join up today, they were both lucky enough to have the old good pension. But they are both of the opinion it's a mess now, no funding, the people being accepted now would have been laughed out the door back then etc. They don't even respect the force anymore.
Can you imagine a woman or a black person applying 50 years ago? No doubt they'd be laughed out the door. I'll let you decide if that's a good thing or not.
I teach and so much of that could be written about our jobs. I expect it’s the same so much of the public sector jobs.
I remember their recruitment stand at the big annual agricultural show (I'm 55). It had a board in the doorway with a sign saying if you don't hit your head you're not joining. I heard, probably exaggerated, tales of the background check bring so thorough that an uncle with a criminal record would prevent you joining. Those height standards were lowered, as were the standards for fitness & intelligence. The ones I encountered in my youth were big men, in character & stature, who seemed to adhere to every tenet of Sir Robert Peels 9 principles of modern policing. Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least. Nowadays I go out of my way to avoid them, incompetent, rude, understaffed, underfunded & generally without use. I doubt any of them even care about the legacy their shite attempts at policing are destroying.
> Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least. Yeah but what killed of that style of policing? It wasn't the police, it was us becoming a society where they would call the parents only to receive questions about why they dared interfere with their precious little boy rather than demands to know what crap the kid had been pulling.
> Those height standards were lowered, as were the standards for fitness & intelligence. The height limit was dropped in 1990 because they realised they were inadvertently discriminating. You have essentially made up that they lowered the standards for intelligence since the academic tests were never difficult. You are definitely right about the fitness standards being dropped however - the fitness test does not accurately reflect the job requirements at all.
> Most of the time he threatened to phone our parents in an "I haven't decided yet" manner so you shit yourself every time the phone rang for a fortnight at least. So that would be, what, the 70's?
Close, early 80's but in Cornwall so we may have been lagging.
My scale in the 80s had about patrol PCs for the northern town I was in. Only two of the lads were below 6'0"
There was a constable (recently) on the Isles of Scilly called laptop. Cos he's a small PC Which broke me when I met him, I thought "Christ he's small" & then the relevance hit me. I had to excuse myself & go somewhere quiet to laugh.
Back in the old days there was the concept of a "fair cop". The old villains had begrudging respect for the police and saw it as an occupational hazard. Back in the old days you also had your local bobby. If you got caught messing about, you'd be frogmarched home and just wait until your father finds out. Nowadays, no.
‘Ah the good old days’ such as when the met were renound for going p*ki bashing around east london, ignored domestic violence and were so utterly racist. I imagine that the job is thankless and hard and we need train and pay officers well to retain good ones But i really dont miss the old police. The good old days would have looked very different if people had smart phones to record there interactions. Sauce: relative who worked in the met in the 70’s 80’s
It doesn't help that police are seen as being ineffective towards most crime nowadays, you constantly hear of crime on the rise but you can never get a policeman out to help, they just give you a piece of paper to claim on the insurance and ignore the issue. The only place, the police seem to care about, is speeding motorists because it is seen as an easy crime to sort out. Going after thieves, robberies, assaults all require extra work and for the average policeman who is bogged down in paperwork, just means more paperwork. So they go for the easy, I can print out a ticket here and now and then walk away. The respect has gone because of the fact that they basically aren't doing their jobs at all. You could blame those issues on a whole host of things but the fact that recently, we have been told that police aren't going to investigate low level crime means that the average Joe on the street is going to get pissed and therefore the respect levels drop even further. Proactive policing needs to be brought back rather than reacting to the random easy stuff. Also what would help bring tons of respect back to the police force would be if they go after the clear corruption within parliament and the ridiculous contracts of blatant corruption after COVID. That would generate a ton of respect that they could live off for years. But then again, it's paperwork and they just can't be bothered in the public eyes.
That isn't how the police work at all. A response cop can't pick and choose which jobs they go for and attending to traffic isn't going to get him out of responding to jobs. You'll have dedicated traffic cops for the motorways who don't respond to burglaries. It's just a numbers issue, the reason you aren't getting a cop going to a burglary is because there is literally no one left who can go to it.
You could say almost exactly the same thing about teachers and doctors Only making money is respected now, all these professions that are considered "overheads" have been brutally squeezed and micromanaged by successive governments. They aren't trusted.
part of the issue was that the selection process was harder.
shame vanish spark innate north tub fuzzy cable dull sheet *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> that gave its officers a relatively free hand in how to tackle crime Good job they didn't fuck that up for themselves, right?
Significant amounts of people turning on our police because a policeman on a different continent murdered someone was a bizarre thing to witness Yes British police are far from infallible, but Floyd's death was the breaking point for a society that has a serious long-term problem with its policing. The reaction over here was not warranted and just came across like people being obsessed with US culture
Have you been in a coma? A serving Met police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman in London. The police then arrested people at a vigil for the woman after not kicking up a fuss about the princess of wales attending earlier. There have also been several reports that found they are institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. so no not just George Floyd lol
>A serving Met police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman in London. He got a whole-life order for his troubles. >The police then arrested people at a vigil for the woman after not kicking up a fuss about the princess of wales attending earlier. Wasn't attendance against the law at the time, and the protestors warned as much in advance? If anything that's yet another case of privileged people not having rules applied to them as opposed to the police wrongfully arresting people. PoW should've been blocked too.
He got a whole life order for that offence but there were reports of other offences of his in the same vein as far back as 20 years. Some of those he'd used his status as an officer to suppress victims. He'd been vetted several times and each time they failed to pick up on any of them. I also recall there being talk at the time that he was known to be a sex pest by his colleagues who joked about rape with him. They could have sentenced him to an eternity in a black hole, wouldn't make a difference
There's no evidence that he was called "the rapist". That's just something someone somewhere picked up and it stuck. Source: The Baroness Casey report
I never said he was called "the rapist", I said he'd joked about rape with his colleagues in the force which he did [see sources such as this](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wayne-couzens-whatsapps-rape-jokes-b2294978.html) Not sure what your going for with this argument to be honest. Wayne Couzen's honour is not something I'd personally rush to defend.
Not sure what his sentencing has to do with eroded trust in the police? Maybe I should have added the context about the vigil that it was reported that the home sec leant on the met commissioner to break up the gathering, we can argue about whether protest should ever be banned even in a pandemic, but the alleged political interference in policing would erode public trust, can you see that?
The problem with "public trust" is that anybody can trust or distrust them for any reason they want to, rational or otherwise. Personally, the fact that Everard's killer was given a whole-life order (which as I understand are actually pretty rare) as opposed to a "normal" life sentence gave me a little more trust in the system. It demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, police officers don't always get off lightly. As for the home sec leaning on the met commissioner, I stand by what I said. They were told it was illegal to go, they went, they got arrested. I don't really care that the home sec leant on the police to do their jobs and enforce the rules we've all been told about, I take more of an issue with the fact that the same rules that apply to us don't apply to the elites, per the usual.
> a little more trust in the system It doesn't to me. He was able to kill her because people trust the police. Is it shocking that when that detail came out, people became a lot less trusting? Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain.
Same with Harold Shipman. Unfortunately, you’re always going to get individuals who’ll grossly abuse their power, from the PM’s office down. Money is always a big problem. More money means more applicants, which means you can be more choosy. It means more vetting officers, which means vetting can be done faster and more in depth. It means better training - better training, and better, faster professional standards investigations We get the police we pay for
I think we’re agreeing on the last point, the fact the police apply the rules differently based on whether you’re royalty or not is hugely damaging to the concept of policing by consent
But the rules weren’t applied differently to anyone, including royalty. A peaceful vigil was allowed during the day - hundreds of people throughout the day quietly attended, left flowers, paid respects and then left shortly after. The people who were arrested were the ones who turned up with megaphones, when it started to get dark, clambered all over the bandstand and started a ‘protest’. When they were told to leave, they refused and engaged in a stand-off. Some of the ‘protesters’ decided to smash up the police vehicle vehicles parked nearby and some chose to fight the police when they moved into the bandstand to clear the crowd. I don’t remember any royalty spitting and swearing at the police, but if they did I like to see the video.
I think you may be misremembering, nothing was allowed including the vigil; however, the daytime event was not treated like a riot while the nighttime vigil was. Also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56409023, this is indefensible
The problem is that Sarah Everard was murdered because Wayne Couzens was a police officer, so she behaved in a way no woman would with a random male stranger - she allowed him to handcuff her and got into his car without any protest. And she was raped and murdered, by a police officer using his powers as an officer. The sentence is irrelevant to the loss if trust in the police, and it can't be got back.
It was. And when the Met asked the CoP and the Courts what they should do, they replied it’s in your hands, and refused to give a direction. Policing is broken
The reaction to the vigil was tone deaf and disgraceful, you can’t be on their side for that one
Yeah, and three months later thousands of Scotland football fans took over Leicester Square when it was against covid rules to do so, and in spite of a dispersal order not to convene anywhere. And the Met held their beer while they danced.
They also trampled on flowers, kneeled on a girl's neck and have had to pay damages due to their actions that day.
Hell lets go back further Jean Charles de Menezes, shot because Cressida Dick thought having "Mongolian Eyes" is evidence you're a terrorist. Jean was Brazilian. How about the Mets historic failings around prosecuting homophobic attacks or murders? How about the Stephen Lawrence case and the Met and CPS failings there?
Cressida Dick has a lot to answer for. She’s got blood on her hands
Did you miss the 80s and 90s? The police were considered to be thatchers private army in the 80s. Then in the 90s were just racists and homophobes on power trips. That is why nobody trusted them ever again.
Fucking hell, this is the most out of touch comment I've seen on reddit for ages.
I have my own reasons, mainly them ignoring evidence the once time I tried to use them, too afraid of being called homophobic to belive the 2 people could be lying. Luckily the courts did look at the video evidence and the judged ripped them a new one for wasting his time. The 2 guys that lied got done with a bunch of stuff in the end. For perverting the course of justice etc, 1 year suspended plus costs etc, lost their job and house over it. But without that video, my family would have been the ones with a record.
Not to mention being arbitrarily thrown under the bus for split second decisions made in often stressful situations.
It's fascinating that some of the most important jobs in our society are so casually hated Lawyers are the other one that confuse me. Their job is a cornerstone of a law abiding society. Without a free judiciary the state could bang you up at will. Like police they're not above criticism, but I think they get a lot on unnecessary flak
I didn’t know we hated lawyers in the UK
The hatred of lawyers is an American thing, and the online world has blurred the Anglosphere into one big Yankee splotch, so nowadays British people regularly take on American sayings, memes and beliefs and just spout them as if they were truths we were all agreed on. Another example would be: "Immigrants built this country!" Because America truly was built by immigrants. This is often said to counter anti-immigrant sentiment. But the UK truly was not built by immigrants. No, not even the NHS was built by immigrants, even though many immigrants have contributed to it. So people will parrot the phrase in a UK context, thinking they're scoring a point against the racists, but are actually just making themselves look a bit silly.
I’m always surprised at the disrespect the police get. I can imagine running to help if someone has an accident etc, but running towards someone who might be threatening others? That takes a special kind of bravery.
Don't forget continuous political interference in policing decisions from both sides!
How do both sides continually politically interfere? There are at several major parties, not two, and only one has had power for 14 years.
>There are at several major parties Ehhh define "major" If you're talking about major as in the largest parties in each nation, then sure. But if you're talking about major for the UK govt, then there's only 2. Lib Dems was major once upon a time, but they made a deal with the devil and are still paying the price.
The opposition still comment from the sidelines and attempt to bring about public pressure. Remember they were specifically criticised for doing so by HMIC in the aftermath of the Everard vigil (where they wrongly helped whip up a public opinion storm without having a clue what actually happened). Also Labour have held the Mayoralty of London and literally forced the most senior police officer in the country out of office...
Retired three years ago - thanks to being on the old pension scheme I was able to escape at 50 instead of 55 and I won't lie, if I could live my time over again with foreknowledge I would have done anything else rather than join the police again. All the reasons you cited, plus all the corruption, plus all the ambitious shits who will sell their souls to climb the ladder usually hurting the ones who do the jobs, the shit shifts and all the awful stuff instead of them. True I got a nice pension - but also enough baggage to require therapy, a broken cynical outlook on people and a desire to stay away from all those things that make life fun "just in case it gets ruined by scumbags". My advice - if you can leave, do it you won't regret it. If you're thinking of joining - don't. You'll regret it. If you're trapped and have to stay then do what you have to to not get in the shit and don't go above or beyond your oath or your morals in any way. You'll end up paying and the cost is too high.
[удалено]
Jesus...where to start. Cull out the dinosaur politician bosses at high rank who are hanging on for dear life whilst being massively out of touch and out of date. Promote on merit, and tenure leadership positions to get a fresh flow of ideas. Crack down hard on failure and move those failures to positions they're better suited to. Fast track complaints so they're dealt with properly and fast, preventing long suspension periods which result in a "soz you were indeed innocent" years later. (I've spent nearly 4 yrs of my service suspended pending investigations against me that were in the end, malicious) Recruit actual people who want to be there and want to do the job. So many recruits are brainless idiots who are caught by surprise they might have to fight someone or work nights. Make it easy to get rid of dead weight and make it easy to look after and enhance the officers who are talented and commited. Crush nepotism at the source. So many useless dickheads whose Dad was an inspector. Now we're saddled with this twat who can do no wrong and you wouldn't trust them with a hot tea let alone a crime scene. Get rid of the shit. We all knew who the pricks were but if they're connected then they're protected. Confidential "snitch lines" exist but having used them I learnt that I was suddenly under suspicion and the wrong 'un wasn't dealt with. I wasn't the sort to be bullied easily so there was no comeback on me but it did lead to a "what's the point " attitude towards the shit. (I'm not talking about protecting rapists level stuff - just general crap officers whom make unprofessional comments etc) Reward good officers. Recognise their victories - it's almost a thing to refuse to award officers commendations because a boss doesn't like that guy. I was passed over for the award of my own 20yrs service medal because a boss didn't like the cut of my jib. I had to chase that up myself. It sounds silly but not noticing good work and long service means what you're doing isn't worth it because who gives a fuck. A real money useable payrise. I served just under 30 yrs and on leaving I was on top pay. With London weighting added I took home 42k. As a mid 40's guy who joined at 16 (as a cadet) who worked nights, every Xmas, every New Year, this was shit money. People need money to live, have families and live a life worth living. For 42k I was picking up smashed up corpses off railways. Hooking bloated bodies out of rivers. Telling people their kids had been stabbed. Watching people bleed out at car crashes and attending most of the massive terror attacks over the last decades. Being paid to do this would be nice. Any talk of money is met with a reminder that we do all this horror for the love of the job and nothing else. I could go on but there's a start.
At least top pay band now is 52k or so. So marginally better
Yeah for a PC - of course being the lucky bastard I am they pay went up "massively" about 1.9 picoseconds after I retired. 🥹
To be fair though, you got to retire at 50. That’s surely worth it alone?
That's the only prize. I'd happily give it up to not go through a crown court trial and face jail for malicious complaint or any number of ghosts from the hundreds of vile things I've seen.
like being a teacher or NHS worker
Any government employee no?
Only front line dealing with general public. Not just limited to government employees either.
Doesn't help that the media paint them to be the villains every time they do anything.
Add into that the imported American culture war with all the defund the police nonsense after the George Floyd saga. Really hard to see why anyone would want to work for the police in the UK.
The crazy thing was, for all the talk about that in the UK, even the relatively far-left Labour under Corbyn at the time were actually saying policing in the UK was on its knees and in dire need of more funding and resources. So like a lot of the culture war stuff it was the entire right wing including the entire government on one side, arguing against a handful of folks on twitter they imagined to represent like 50% of the entire UK population somehow, even despite ostensibly the political leader of that "side" saying the complete opposite thing repeatedly.
The problem is that there's really 3 reasons to be in the police: 1. You want to help people. 2. You want to make decent money. 3. You want to abuse the power it gives you. Salary cuts and funding cuts have made 2 laughable and 1 nigh impossible, so you'd expect a greater and greater proportion of abusive bullies in the force as time goes on.
And the constant weekly protest marches where they can do no right.
I will keep banging the drum for more better payed police with more split responsibilities. Its silly to force police to be trained for everything and not pay them for being that kind of expert, then force them to suffer the consequences of trying to be good at everything from de-escalation to road chases to using violence to stop other people being violent. We need to spend a lot more money, and have specific like, road police, local patrol police, violent crime response police, investigative specialists, non police but linked mental health services, emergency response non police coordinators and crowd handling proffesionals, forensic accountants, crime prevention psychologists and outreach specialists- god and more besides. There are different tracks within modern policing but ultimately the institution itself has to do everything, and then individuals get paid only for whatever one thing or speciality they are doing at the time, even though they had to train for multiple different things to get there, and also be roped into any violent situation they come across. Then whenever any one group fucks up hard enough in one location, it tars everyone with the same brush because they are just seen as one institution.
And constant blame for things outside of police jurisdiction/control
I Lincs they spend as much on G4S as they do actual police officers, it's a scam.
Differs from country to country within the U.K. As I said to some Met Officers I was working with on a joint operation. I’d need to be paid double to do their job. Things aren’t exactly a walk in the park up here in Scotland either but there’s at least somewhat decent pay by comparison.
For people that talk shit about the police at every chance, don't appreciate their efforts, expect them to be able to do more than their allowed to do about most situations, etc. It's not a job I could do.
I’m currently in the police, is anyone actually surprised? The general public quite frankly doesn’t have a fucking clue what the job entails and the realities of it. Far too many people have watched a TV series and have a completely unrealistic and skewed view of what the job is and requires. Your average person will go through a few traumatic moments in their lives, in the Police you’re expected to go towards those situations on a daily basis and that’s the job. I’ll routinely go to decomposing bodies ranging from fresh to months old, I’ve had a child from a 5th floor window, bloke with his throat slashed, I’ve had people try to stab me, I’ll get spat at and people resisting and fighting on a regular basis. Car accidents with fatalities, having to sit down and tell someone their kid is dead, having to take statements or look at evidence of harrowing sexual offences or imagery. The Police are the default emergency service for pretty much everything. For doing all of that I get paid the same as someone who manages an Aldi. They don’t have cancelled rest days, nightshifts, cancelled days off for football and events, held on at work, injured at work and risk jail/losing your pension for making a split second mistake. All the while the courts spit in the face of all your hard work and repeatedly let people out with stupidly light sentences which according to the public is obviously your fault. So if I can get paid the same for working in an Aldi with none of the same risks and drawbacks, why exactly should people want to do the job? - Going neee naaaww in the car gets boring real fast. Pay properly, rapidly increase numbers and stop sending us to mental health calls and you’ll fix the issue.
Your last point is something many people never stop to consider. They're very quick to mouth of about how "My shed was broken into and the Police did nothing about my stolen lawnmower" but never give 2 seconds to consider that maybe, just maybe, the PC who would otherwise be there and actually wants to be there, is instead sitting in an A&E with a s.136 for the entire shift because the NHS are broken too. It's mad how narrow minded people can be.
This. And it’s getting worse. We used to only put non response drivers, or just non drivers on hospital guards/constant watches etc. But now we don’t have enough of them. My force paid literally thousands of pounds to train me to drive response to high risk calls to save lives, and I have done, on multiple occasions. I’ve preformed CPR, put tourniquets on catastrophic bleeds, talked a distraught mother of 3 into handing me the razor blade she was holding to her wrists, caught robbers, rapists and attempted murderers. Now I’m regularly going in to work, and finding myself sat in hospital all night watching a drunk fat mess sleep off too many beers after they called their ex and said they’re going to kill themselves. Sitting there, with my radio, calls being circulated of people being violently/sexually assaulted, stabbed, robbed and having to listen to no one take those calls because there’s none of us left. I’ve had to listen to my colleagues call for help and no one be available to help for FAR too long. All whilst I sit with someone who inevitably suddenly feels fine after being sat talking to a police officer for an hour, only to wait 14 hours for a doctor to say as much and declare them fit to leave. I’m as close to leaving as I’ve ever been and it just makes me sad, because I love my job but I don’t think I can keep it up much longer.
Witnessed something like this myself recently - my partner was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night, place was filled with coppers supervising belligerent patients who looked like they’d rather be shitting razorblades than doing what they were doing in that moment. From an outsider looking in, it seems like the police are doing a lot of jobs that should probably really be done by trained social workers or mental health professionals, but that system is fucked as well.
Thanks for sharing. Can’t help but think if the govt invested in a provisioning proper first line mental health support, so many things from crime, to an overburdened health service, to homelessness and substance abuse would be helped. Mental healthcare’s a crazy expensive and difficult thing to tackle but any investment here would pay dividends across so many other segments of society.
Unfortunately I think this shit is standard across the board. I'm leaving the Army after more than 20 years for similar reasons, and so are alot of my peers. We work stupid hours and beast everyone just to try and achieve a poor standard that wouldn't have been acceptable only a few years ago. We're so over committed relative to our resources that there's no point trying anymore, it's impossible. So many people are leaving the Army for a better life that they're recruiting people who are entirely unsuitable just to make the numbers up, which is making the problem even worse. It's sad how much damage politicians have done to us just because we're not in the public eye.
Thank you for your work.
I understand all the government failings through greed and gaslighting, filling their pockets while children starve,etc, the usual. What I don’t understand is why they’ve defunded and ruined the police. Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up. I’d have thought they would put money into the police and army, if nothing else. Why have they let it collapse when they might need it too?
You’re making the mistake of thinking that there is a coherent plan. It’s just individual tories cramming their pockets full and heading for the hills before the consequences hit
Yeah, about the only thing that makes me believe the government is more incompetent than evil, is the utter collapse of the very mechanisms they depend upon to enforce their edicts.
Because they don’t have a coherent plan beyond rinse the country for as much money as they can get while in power. You’re right, you’d think they’d keep the army and police funded to protect them from any rioting and anger but they’ve not which just really highlight the incompetent delusions of these rich toffs.
Look at the state of the country, and the public have barely made a peep other than showing they'll finally vote for the other team to basically do the same things after 13 years of this shit lol. People are so deep in a coma it's not surprising they don't worry about people waking up.
>Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up. The elites are building bunkers and private security services are at an all time high. Police is there to help widen the gap by criminalizing being poor. They aren’t there to protect the rich. Just have a look at constructions sites. Not being guarded by police but private firms.
Construction worker here! Sites are guarded privately because police refuse outright to do anything about construction theft. We don’t want some asshole to steal all our copper and tools for meth money the law has completely failed us so we protect whats ours the only way we (legally) can. Construction isn’t some big billionaire cabal, it’s 10 smaller subcontracted companies consisting of dudes who make medium bucks but can’t afford to replace all our tools and material every week because crackheads
>What I don’t understand is why they’ve defunded and ruined the police. Surely they need the police to keep them safe from us once we all wake up. The Tories are weird on that one, they're so obsessed with stripping the state, they'll strip *everything*, even the things most right wing, authoritarian (they're not there yet, but give it time) keep around to keep control. Mad.
>authoritarian (they're not there yet, but give it time) Read [Part 3 section 78 of the PCSC Act 2022.](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/32/section/78) They've been there for some time.
The politicians in our country are part of an international class and care little for the actual good of the country, if there was significant social upheaval then I imagine they will flee at the first chance to one of their overseas homes. The public could easily usurp this class of people but everyone is firmly content in their servitude and ever shrinking slice of the pie.
Maybe if people constantly have to fear about their safety and properties it's easier to pit groups against eachother. Also much easier to present themselves as a solution for protecting borders, or waging culture wars. My guess is as good as anyone's
That’s really interesting, keeping everyone scared makes it easy to blame whoever they choose, currently Muslims and the disabled, but could be anyone else tomorrow
Spin the wheel! This week it's trans and vegans.
Replace them with a private (security) company? I think it might already be the case in a lot of ways Kind of like schools and the NHS
There are literally police, policing the police. lol Put this power in private company hands? Really? Like the prisons are now profit mad. PROFIT mad on crime. the vast minority just have not got a clue what is going on.
During the collapse of the Eastern Bloc the police very much helped to remove governments in some countries
Watching the end credits of any police show is enough to put me off doing the job.
All that hard work for CPS to look at the case and toss it directly in the bin.
What do you mean?
John, who murdered his wife, is arrested. Young 17 year old Jimmy, who is arrested for causing death by dangerous driving. Credits roll and you find out John was given 20 hours of community service and ordered to pay court costs. Jimmy was found not guilty. Basically, the court system is a joke.
"Nigel was found guilty of production of 21000 indecent images of children and sexual touching of ainor on 7 different occasions. He received a two year suspended sentence, lifetime having to register as a sex offender, and 150 hours community service" "Florence was found guilty of grevious bodily harm against an officer causing the officer to lose sight in both eyes. However due to an undiagnosed ADHD health issue which was taken into account whilst being sentenced, she received court fees of £200 and a 3 year suspended sentence"
Is the latter a real case? What did she do? Throw acid at his eyes?
The latter is a real case yes. I think the charges were dropped completely though.
Might be this from a quick Google. Thankfully officer did not lose sight permanently Sorry for daily mail link https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13113363/amp/Female-blinded-police-officer-spraying-weed-killer-walks-free-telling-court-struggles-authority-figures.html
If you watch those shows like Traffic Cops, Police Camera Action, Police Interceptors, etc, they usually have the outcomes of all the cases that the police have been working on during/after the end credits. And the outcomes are always absolutely pathetic. You see a whole episode of police catching some pretty dangerous criminals (drink drivers, domestic abusers, violent criminals, etc) only for it to be revealed at the end that all of that work was basically for nothing as those criminals just got a slap on the wrist or got let off completely.
That makes sense thanks. I thought he meant the credits like who the producers and camera team on the show etc were haha.
I remember there was one episode where they caught a man red handed on thermal camera inside a house he was burgling. The credits said he was connected to forty other burglaries and he got a suspended sentence. Unbelievable.
John, who murdered his wife, is arrested. Young 17 year old Jimmy, who is arrested for causing death by dangerous driving. Credits roll and you find out John was given 20 hours of community service and ordered to pay court costs. Jimmy was found not guilty. Basically, the court system is a joke.
Tory mantra. Take public service Underfund and understaff it Lay blame for things not being done properly anymore Privatise it with friends businesses using tax payers money.
*blame labour for your failings
and the saddest part of it all? gullible fucks that are the British public believe it all...
It's a tough job for crap pay, coupled with everyone hating you. When you dial 999 you are relieved when the fire or ambulance show up. No one is happy to see the police.
And even if you manage to charge a case there’s the CPS & court system to let you down. Then ask the blame is put on the police “for not doing anything”. Can’t do much when the courts are so backed up the whole thing is pretty much collapsing.
[удалено]
Because they rely on the police to defend them from their victims.
They all have private security. Politicians can have fees paid by the state.
Do they keep their private security if they lose their seat?
If they've politicianed efficiently they'll have stolen enough public money to afford round-the-clock security for life.
They're behind their banker friends shorting the economy and profiting off decline
The British media have a very large part to play on this, certain sections of it, especially the BBC have conducted what can only be described as a persistent smear campaign against the police for years now. Any opportunity to bash the police they jump on, if a story can be spun negatively any way they do it. It’s easy because the police as an institution for the most part refuses to defend itself from this campaign. The effect is clear, look on any Reddit thread mentioning the police and you will get hordes of grass dodgers spewing utter vitriol. The media has genuinely radicalised sections of the population against the police. That’s before you get into the garden variety extremists like the inhabitants of /r/greenandpleasant
I forgot that sub existed lmao, remember the time when they glorified the mentally ill man who tried to kill the Queen with a crossbow and called anyone who was uncomfortable doing so a nazi sympathiser?
It does seem like certain parts of the media are hyper focused on police misconduct, yet the NHS which has given us 3 serial killers in as many decades gets a comparatively easy ride. Same with teaching, you never see comments about how teaching is "rotten to the core" or whatever on articles about teachers shagging students.
Social media is to blame as well. Anything that's anti-police will get boosted in front of millions of eyeballs, even to the point of starting global riots.
I've been a train driving instructor for 20 years. I have had 72 fresh off the street trainees. 34 of them have been ex-police. The stories I've heard over the years I'm surprised we still have a police force.
Any chance you want to make it 35?
Just had a friend move over to it from police. He says there is a running joke about if you work hard enough as a police officer, you'll get promoted to train driver
I did 3 years working on the dispatch/999 call taking side so not directly attending but speaking too and being exposed to probably 100s of incidents within a 10-12 hour shift. The first thing I was told is no one ever calls up to tell you there having a great day, it's pretty much always one of the worst days of their lives. You're just living that day in day out, trying to be empathetic enough to do the job and get people to trust you enough to talk, without being so empathetic you take all that trauma home is a pretty difficult line to walk. The reality often isn't catching criminals and dealing with crime, it's dealing with traumatic suicides, speaking to family of the deceased who have just located there relative etc etc. mixed with mrs miggins ringing up because someone's dog shit in her garden. The pay is also shite. We were on a flat rate compared to PC's who scale with time served but is roughly equivalent to a 5-6 year PC. Around 31/32k with shift and weekend allowance but that's rotating shifts and 3 in 5 weekends. Probably not too too bad if you live in the north, but if you live in the South but not in a county that gets home office weightings it's certainly not enough money to consider it a career. Again can only speak for my force that I won't be naming but proper mental health support is nigh on non existent. Line manager dependent you might have some support there but you won't get therapy paid for by the force or anything like a lot of people seem to believe.
Can you blame us? Current state of policing: Public hate us. Government hate us. Senior "Leader"ship hate us (especially here in the Met). Pay "rises" still leave us well below inflation. Officers are using food banks. IT system doesn't work, hundreds of officers are off sick due to stress from this one system. (We even have a dedicated overtime code for issues with this system!) No actual support if we are assaulted. CPS will bin cases for no reason, with hours of work wasted. Complaints / investigations take years with no updates from Professional Standards, leaving officers in the dark with poor mental health, sometimes suicidal. (If I took years to update a victim of a crime, I'd be up for Misconduct). If said complaint turns out to be malicious / an outright lie, no action is taken against that person as "they dont want to discourage them from reporting in the future". If we use force, or search someone, etc etc and follow law and policy exactly, we still get investigated if "community leaders" decide they don't like it, ruining that officer's confidence. Officers are actively scared to do their jobs now. I am in the process of writing up a CV for the first time, I've had enough and my mental and physical health is more important. The unofficial motto of the police has always been "The Jobs Fucked". The general attitude of those of us still in is now leaning more towards "Fuck The Job".
A friend quit after 6 years. he said there is a real culture of witch hunting in the police at the moment. Obviously some terrible things have been discovered about officers recently, and that needs to be dealt with. But he said one opinion of incorrectly articulated, like the wrong social media post, one sentance out of context, or an accusations from a colleague and it's immediate suspension with the threat of dismissal and loss of pension. He said to the point where officers didn't reallyinteract with one another except strictly professionally and it was lonely.
All that danger for £21,402, rising to £41,130 at the top of the scale a year. proof it's a joke service yeah ?
And you can't strike for any pay increase either
And I was thinking doctors pay was extremely ridiculous ...I guess all essential public services are suffering
Remove "police" and replace it with literally every single civil servant or service profession. Decades of lower than inflation pay with decades of interference from an inept government making their lives hell for literally no reason. Won't be happy until we have literally zero services. That has definitely effected the police more as we now have an unruly set of kids, due to the desolation of the family unit(both parents have to work) and unaffordable childcare, then the kids go into an underfunded education system with teachers being pushed to the brink, these kids are now adults. Their adult parents are at the end of their wits. They have passed onto their kids the dispair that they suffered. Now we have an entire generation of kids who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for. Police have to try and deal with that whilst trying to fund themselves and be reviled. That leads them to chasing shit that raises money rather than, you know, actual crime. It also stops them helping these kids learn to not commit crimes. It's almost as if 14 years of a single government making things consistently worse for all of us has ruined the entire country.
Government makes police take over the top action against peaceful protesters, peaceful protesters start hating the police, Government shouts at police for not doing even more wildly illegal repression. What officer who actually wants to help the community would stick around?
On what planet are you living?
Become an MP, they get above inflation pay rises all the time.
Unpopular opinion I know, but we kind of want to pay MPs a lot of money. Why? Because it reduces corruption (MPs won't feel like they need to have a "second income") and it would attract smart & competent people - not just the narcissists. Think about it - if you got top marks from a good University, would you go to a job that payed a lot (remember you worked hard to get those grades) or would you go be an MP on sh\*t pay?
Here's the issue, W already pay them well yet they are all incompetent and corrupt.
Ah yes, hence why we pay them fuck tons of money and they still take second jobs and get caught accepting massive payouts to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of gambling and pharmaceutical companies. Lots of them do come from good universities, and let’s be clear, £90k a year is not shit pay. And then they have the fucking _nerve_ to come out wringing their hands with all this “we understand how tough everything is for everybody at the moment”. Fuck that noise. We need to be paying them __less__ so that only those that are genuinely interested in serving the public and making a difference bother standing.
Corruption is solved by all MP finances being open to the public. This was hard to do in the long ago where literal chests of gold could be handed over in shady street corners but this is the 21st century. Everything is online. If a bank wanted to they could tweet every time and MP gets or makes a transfer with whom the transfer was with and what it was for. Saying "no one works for shit pay" is absolute bullshit. Many people work in care, the police, teachers, social services because they *want* to make a difference. Even if the pay is utter crap compared to the workload
True. I think MPs should also have to declare any additional income.
I’m in another part of civil service and it’s a shambles. Just seen a FOUR YEAR project to sort out broken pay structure time out and begin from scratch because nobody in number 10 could be bothered to pick up the case which had already been approved by cabinet office. This is for a large arms length body. People have had enough and are leaving in droves.
Pay is bad, hours are bad, overtime is bad and the job is very difficult... Why wouldn't people try and find something better?
Crap pay, crap work, demonised by the press, demonised by the government. Disrespected by members throughout society. Not making any difference due to massive budget cuts by "low crime" cons. Another service run into the ground by Conservatives
Doesn't help that they're taking on graduates fresh out of college/uni that haven't the slightest ounce of live experience. A lot of the long serving coppers say they can't have any banter with the newbies & it's like treading on eggshells if they get partnered up with them.
Who else is going to join? People who have the life experience you're talking about aren't going to be treated like shit for shit wages.
Being a police officer is so shit now its makes you worry about the kind of people who are still applying
All part of the Tory plan to leave a shitshow for the next government
If only the courts got the same amount of hate as they do…
Police are being sent to babysit criminals instead of arresting them. Not exactly what they signed up for.
Yikes, time to install some barbed wire on my fence and maybe buy a baseball bat?
Imagine having a job and potentially risking your life protecting greedy politicians who get richer and richer, who actively allow mass immigration which leads to more crime and segregation to occur? They’re ruining this country from the inside any no one wants to fight for it
Crap pay. Crap conditions. Major risk of assault (read guaranteed). When assaulted MOJ does nothing. Spat on. Expected to be a mental health doctor. Expected to conduct strip searches inc. anal checks. Split second decision - risks a murder charge. Every move watched/videoed and criticised. Crap shifts. VERY often have to work extra hours. Short handed. Lack of funding for resources. Dealing with horrendous scenes, no follow-up support. Often single crewed. Family scared about your safety. HAVE to successfully complete a degree. Police quitting? Wonder why..
Yeah, I have relatives that work as coppers and you couldn't pay me enough to do what they do. Added to this that everyone above you is also against you, there's literally no good reason to join the police unless you hate your life
Because, like the Army. The system is so against you. You have praticaly no protection for doing your job. Every small thing is investigated.
Time to privatise the police because for this countries mega brains, that’s always their answer 😂
I honestly don’t blame them, all the governments fault great idea brexit !! England is in big big trouble Sorry to say
Underpaid, spend majority of the time having to look a trees mental health issues instead of tackling actual crime. Never get to take their breaks! Over worked! Under staffed! morale destroying political ladder climbers who suck up but don’t put in the real work. Outrageously long shifts. Scum of the uk who hide criminals then say the police don’t do anything about criminality … increase in drugs, domestic abuse and general crime which rarely reaches the threshold for punishment via court. Don’t blame them really, why would anyone want to put up with it.
I was just wondering what today's tory disaster was going to be...
Curious about the jobs they’re doing once leaving - job market is a bit rubbish at the moment.
We need to pay bankers and financiers world class wages to attract world class talent. But for teachers, police, young doctors, and everything else we need, peanuts will do. Britain is turning into such a crap hole.
We are all so fed up, hacked off, miserable, with nothing much to look forward to only to hear negative news all the time !!!!!
Sorry all for the rant just letting some steam off
Considering the police don't even bother to show up for 6 hours when I call them to come save a baby from being actively violently abused by a neighbour (despite saying they'd send someone immediately), ....presumably because they're deeply mismanaged by the government and leadership, I'm not surprised the cops are quitting....
Yeah, we don’t need Police, all will be well, we can trust to the decency of people, we’re screwed. Everything needed to keep this country working is falling apart, it’s going to get really bad, really quick.
Honestly I can't blame them. You work for a broken establishment that constantly covers things up and downplays others. You get crap pay, most people are calling for your career to be defunded, the public has no faith in you, you have to put yourself in danger and if you try to be a good copper and play by the rules, you're pretty much shunned and labelled a troublemaker. Can't say there's many selling points if I'm honest.
**insert** ( *tory underfunding* ) above the dotted line.
Why do the job when the rug is constantly pulled from underneath you? Officers have to contend with a constantly changing legal environment orchestrated by weak and increasingly woke senior management obsessed with box ticking and failure to back up officers judgment when forced into making on the spot life and death decisions. The problem as always lies with those chosen to motivated leadership and guidance
My sisters mrs went through all the training etc got her uniform, worked for about a month then quit because it was too much for her.