15th August 2011

A great follow up piece from Carole...
caroleandcancer.blogspot.com

Un...bloody...believable.............!

Following on from my post last night about the riots....

This government.... who right now should be listening to our Police, showing them respect and actually talking about other ways to fund the cuts instead of via our Police service.... this government has today appointed an 'advisor' to give them tips on how to handle the riots on our streets and how to take a zero tolerance approach.

So, you're thinking - "what's wrong with that?" Nothing except that he's appointed a 63 yr old American called Bill Bratton to tell him how to sort out this mess.

We HAVE people here that can tell Cameron how to sort out this bloody mess, but it comes at a price......

• We need our Police service to be left alone financially and cancel the 20% cut backs,
• We need our Police to be issued with proper riot gear,
• We need our Police service to be fully supported by this government not ignored and bypassed.
• We need our Police to know that if they need to 'robustly' deal with someone we will not be asking on the news the next day 'Were the Police too heavy handed last night' ....they need to know that they will not face disciplinary action for robustly dealing with rioters - or even idle spectators who really shouldn't be there in the first place anyway.
• We don't need Robocop from the US to deal with our kids - we just need OUR Police to be given the resources and back up to take action with full support, from both superior officers and the government.

After all the plans to slash their pensions, freeze their salaries and put a stop to overtime payments they are now ignoring people who have worked our streets for years and bringing in someone from outside the UK.

I'm seriously shocked by this decision - mind you, it's not the first crap decision that Cameron has made (just think 'News of the World ex editor')...

Bill Bratton has already made a short statement so far he's commented that we need 'more minority officers' and we must 'focus on calming racial tensions'........Piss off mate, this isn't about racial tensions, it's not a race war...and anyway, with the current 20% cuts in place we don't have the MONEY for MORE Police officers, black, white or flippin purple ones.

Police high up in the service are understood to be really really insulted by this decision and I totally understand why.

Their officers stood there for hours over recent days whilst youths threw bottles, stones, fences, metal bars and hours of insults at them....they've retained their dignity whilst the government threw a different type of crap at them and made changes to their salaries, overtime and pensions....and now they are being ignored and sidelined when we should be saying to them 'What do you actually need to ensure the streets are kept safe, how do we regain proper control in the long term?'...

How much more can we really expect them to take before we see mass resignations.....

Sigh...

This was not written by me.