Many ticklesome articles in the new Private Eye magazine (no. 1535, 20th November 2020) including this choice one on police recruitment.
As always there’s many a truth spoken in jest.
At present the workload of the average Plod would incline anyone with the ability to obtain employment elsewhere to do so. Truly a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
Nor are matters likely to improve with the new recruits when they’ve finally got some wool on their backs.
The lesson The Ministry of Justice learned to their cost was that sacking every experienced prison officer within range meant that the newer and less experienced were unable to handle the job with subtlety and skill. This caused a further recruitment problem as newly recruited staff also began to leave in droves once they realised the true horrors of the job they’d be facing daily.
So it will be with the new police recruits.
Possibly also unwise to have a large surge of untested youngsters in uniform, pumped up with testosterone and a newly-found sense of self-importance, kitted out with weaponry and the power of arrest let loose on the public.
One can only hope that new recruits will be paired with more experienced officers. But PC George Dixon is long since retired and these days six months or more in the frontline on the force and you’re considered a veteran. Stay for a year and doubtless South Yorkshire Police – the force that loves to hand out awards to underperforming officers – will have a decanter set and tin plaque to pass over to you.
An additional problem. Recent reports in the local press show South Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Police finding themselves and their transport under severe attack on entering some estates in Leeds and Sheffield. Police cars and vans were recently destroyed as they have also been outside of Goldthorpe Police Station in South Yorkshire.
Can it be long before armoured “snatch squads” operating in a similar fashion to those grabbing terrorist suspects in post-invasion Baghdad are sent in to spirit suspects away from troubled estates?
So if you do see such officers on the streets soon be sure to look out for their armoured snatch too.
Legal Babble 