The police are not bad people – they’ve just had common sense brainwashed out

October 15, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Alan Johnson walk around an inner city estate in London this week. Police who fail to deal with anti-social behaviour have been branded 'ludicrous' and 'ridiculous' by Johnson

www.dailymail.co.uk

In very many ways Britain is a better country than it used to be. Yet one appalling way in which it has become worse is how we have become a ‘pass by on the other side’ society.

Those who help someone in distress are no longer regarded as doing what any decent person would automatically do. They have become ‘have-a-go heroes.’ Helping has indeed become brave because there is no longer the safety in numbers or the backing of the law.

If you intervene against loutish behaviour will the other passengers on the top of the bus support you? Or will they look at their shoes? When the police turn up, if they do, whose side will they take?

The case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled daughter after years of persecution by yobs on the estate where she lived, shows has terrible the problem is.

It is not just that individuals didn’t help, thinking they would leave it to the authorities. It is that different bits of the state passed the buck to each other – the district council, the county council, the police. Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council, for example, styles itself: ‘A borough to be proud of.’ To quote the pop singer Heather Small: ‘What have you done today to make you feel proud?’

The Home Secretary Alan Johnson is the man the police are supposed to be accountable to. He is supposed to be in charge. But he has been grumbling away like the rest of us.

Johnson said: ‘A police officer saying at the inquest that anti-social behaviour is no longer a police matter, it’s for local authorities, it’s ludicrous and ridiculous. It’s just totally unexplainable how a police officer could feel like that but it suggests there’s a mindset there.’

He says the Government has been ‘cruising’ on the issue. Progress has ‘stalled.’ He thinks perhaps some more targets and initiatives are needed.

But under this Government it is not a matter of progress having ‘stalled.’ The problem has got far worse. The ‘mindset’ he talks about didn’t happen by magic.

It is not that police officers are bad people. They went into their profession to fight crime, to protect people, to make society better. Yet when they start work they find common sense brainwashed out of them. They find they spend their time ticking boxes on forms spewing out of the Home Office at a demented rate. Half of the police on the beat are Police Community Support Officers without the power to arrest people (apart from citizen’s arrest which we all have and which they heavily discouraged from using.) Read full article…