Theodore Dalrymple is on Radio 5 Live tomorrow at around 2.30pm, talking about our latest title Second Opinion (free extract here). It's the old Simon Mayo show as was, with Phil Williams in the chair. Phil seems a good sort, but I wonder if he'll get the point? I suppose it all depends on whether he has read the book, and whether he stops and thinks about the implications of its scenes being played out in all our major cities, all the time.
PC Bloggs was also on 5 Live over the Christmas break. She was called on to rebut Jack Straw's sugestion that the police are not being held back by bureaucracy but by laziness. (Inspector Gadget also looked at this.)
Bloggs made the point that if she wants to drive a police car to a given address, she has to fill in a form to say she is going to do so via an approved route, which will involve driving down a road where there has been a serious amount of car crime.
This might only take five minutes, but if you add up all those forms and remember that this is only one of many, it becomes more problematic.
And why are they filling in this particular form? The idea is to check that the cops are taking the designated routes, down roads with a history of car crime, and providing a lot of police visibility, thus reassuring the locals and deterring criminals. Which sounds fine until you consider two things:
1) The criminals will just move into the next road.
2. The tools are very blunt. One drunken youth smashing 20 wing mirrors on his way home from the pub one night - a one-off act of vandalism with 20 victims in an otherwise safe street - will skew the stats so that cops are driving down there for the next month, when the regular car criminals are actually active across town.
These two (and Copperfield before them) have long complained about the huge number of forms that need filling in just to deal with a simple shoplifting. Gadget wrote a piece for The Times about it just before Chistmas. I've spoken to dozens, if not hundreds, of police officers from all over the country who tell the same story: It takes something like four hours to fill in the forms. Jack Straw, who has never filled them in, says it takes 'an hour'.
I rang Gadget about this. His response: it might take an hour if it's a very simple case and you can turn off the radio, lock the door and write solidly. But in the real world, there are a great many possible complications.
The trouble for the police is that they are losing the support of the basically law-abiding; check out the comments on the Daily Telegraph website here. A lot agree with Straw, which is startling (given that he represents a party which has lied consistently to us since 1997; Telegraph readers ought to be wise by now).
PC Bloggs was also on 5 Live over the Christmas break. She was called on to rebut Jack Straw's sugestion that the police are not being held back by bureaucracy but by laziness. (Inspector Gadget also looked at this.)
Bloggs made the point that if she wants to drive a police car to a given address, she has to fill in a form to say she is going to do so via an approved route, which will involve driving down a road where there has been a serious amount of car crime.
This might only take five minutes, but if you add up all those forms and remember that this is only one of many, it becomes more problematic.
And why are they filling in this particular form? The idea is to check that the cops are taking the designated routes, down roads with a history of car crime, and providing a lot of police visibility, thus reassuring the locals and deterring criminals. Which sounds fine until you consider two things:
1) The criminals will just move into the next road.
2. The tools are very blunt. One drunken youth smashing 20 wing mirrors on his way home from the pub one night - a one-off act of vandalism with 20 victims in an otherwise safe street - will skew the stats so that cops are driving down there for the next month, when the regular car criminals are actually active across town.
These two (and Copperfield before them) have long complained about the huge number of forms that need filling in just to deal with a simple shoplifting. Gadget wrote a piece for The Times about it just before Chistmas. I've spoken to dozens, if not hundreds, of police officers from all over the country who tell the same story: It takes something like four hours to fill in the forms. Jack Straw, who has never filled them in, says it takes 'an hour'.
I rang Gadget about this. His response: it might take an hour if it's a very simple case and you can turn off the radio, lock the door and write solidly. But in the real world, there are a great many possible complications.
The trouble for the police is that they are losing the support of the basically law-abiding; check out the comments on the Daily Telegraph website here. A lot agree with Straw, which is startling (given that he represents a party which has lied consistently to us since 1997; Telegraph readers ought to be wise by now).
Meanwhile, as Copperfield always said: there are plenty of cops, they're just doing the wrong things, and the reason they aren't coming out to your burglary is because of the bureaucracy Straw and his colleagues have introduced.
Finally, Gadget pops up in Trevor Kavanagh's Sun column today. It doesn't seem to be online, so here's a scan:
Posts
4 comments:
Is this a McNumpty moment for Jack Straw?
Effectively, he's saying Gadget, Copperfield, Bloggs and the rest of them are lying, after all.
McNulty said that about Copperfield and then had to apologise...
Here's hoping!
Actually I fill in the form AFTER driving down the road- get it right! It seems to me Jack Straw has written off the police voters and is after the anti-police voters now...
Ah, sorry. Same difference though!
Anon police commenter, with the comments about Jack Straw: I'd love to post the comment up, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I'm slightly concerned about libel so have chickened out.
But thanks, anyway.
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