To think the police are useless?

[RainbowsAndCrystals]

In my 20s I've been around many people that have had bad experiences with them and say how useless they are.

Something happened to me a month ago and it was caught on cctv.

Firstly the police said I had to get the evidence myself. So I had to ask around for cctv ... very difficult when people don't want to be involved and you're someone with zero authority.

Now a month later and they still haven't bothered to look at the footage.

It's so disheartening and almost like they have sided with the criminals.

Okay, so not paying enough is now an excuse to be rude, racist, corrupt, sexist etc? More abdication of responsibility. If they whacked another 5k on the starting salary these problems would disappear? That wasn't what I said and you know that.

Even if there was an outside chance that they had been a victim of crime and had received exemplary service, how come they had and other victims hadn't? Maybe attitude has something to do with it? I've only been stopped by the police once, it was after I retired. Police car stopped me to tell me I had gone through a traffic light just as it turned to amber so no offense. I could have been mouthy and argumentative but I smiled, said hello. I think he was expecting something other than a woman in her 60s as it was early hours of the morning and he probably wondered what I was doing. We chatted about where I was going and why, picking DD up from a party as she couldn't get a taxi and we parted friends. Now someone else could have taken offense at being stopped and got stroppy then the officer would have been less friendly. Then they would have gone off moaning about being stopped for nothing and officer being rude, probably not rude really just not friendly.

I also get sick of the people who moan about traffic stops, speeding, careless driving, drunk driving etc kills people so as far as I'm concerned traffic officers are doing a great job and more power to them.

Back in the 80s when we had rioting and even an officer killed in a riot I was working in a multi cultural inner city area, one day a group arrived from the local community centre with a bouquet of flowers to let us know they appreciated us. We had some lovely officers at that station and half the time they were more like social workers than police officers. I remember watching one PC who was about 6'4" and heavy build walking up the road with a little old lady who was about 4'10" who had locked herself out and he was going to go and sort it out for her. I felt proud of the British bobby and how they would help someone like that.

If your child doesn't come home tonight, if your granddad with dementia wanders off and gets lost or you are running away from terrorists, who will you turn to? I bet a pound to a penny it will be the police.

If your child doesn't come home tonight, if your granddad with dementia wanders off and gets lost or you are running away from terrorists, who will you turn to? I bet a pound to a penny it will be the police

So true**@grannytomine**

I can absolutely assure you, I won't be calling them!
I vowed at the time I won my case and received the pathetic apology letter, that I would never involve them in anything ever again.

Yes, maybe it is attitude.
My attitude when I reported the first serious crime (the beating of a neighbour with an iron bar) was one of extreme politeness. Why would I be anything other than polite.
The police officer while taking my statement, huffed and tutted her way through it and made an offensive comment about because I was a single parent, I must be on benefits.
Yes, it absolutely must be attitude. One of us was polite and had impeccable manners, the other was disgustingly rude.

No idea why anyone is trying to discredit me. I won my case and received an apology.
Not only that, I went on to support other people who were in a similar situation and most of them were having exactly the same issues with the police.
One person had a police officer living next door. He had endured years of harassment including the police officer getting other officers to assist in his harassment. One of them even broke his arm!
He ended up receiving a very substantial amount of compensation and the police officer went to prison.
Never mind. I expect it was his attitude which caused the officer to harass him for years and cause him serious injury.
What terrible people we all must be!

Jux it's not good enough to say there will always be bad apples when it comes to the police. Their very existence is to uphold the law. Of course on a practical level yes there will be bad ones but what people on here are complaining about is the 'brotherhood' mentality that lets corruption fester rather than being weeded out. I actually think the police have got better over recent years mainly due to the very high profile cases of corruption that have meant they've had to clean up. Or at least I hope they have. When my family was a victim of their corruption of the worst kind it ran through the whole force on every level. That was 15 yrs ago and I really hope it's changed but I can't abide by the excuse 'there will always be bad apples' I'm afraid when it was clearly so prevalent. The issue of them being useless is kind of separate in my mind and yes I do agree in this day and age it's more likely to be underfunding than deliberately bad policing.

No idea why anyone is trying to discredit me. Well your attitude on here has been belligerent and you certainly don't sound like you would be friendly. Maybe you come across differently in real life?

We keep hearing how bad police officers are and how they always get away with it and yet you won your case and got an apology and you know someone who got substantial compensation so you must accept that police officers are held to account.

Sorry I don't believe that you wouldn't call the police and if your child was missing I think it would be criminal negligence not to inform them that a vulnerable child had gone missing, pretty similar to the elderly relative with dementia.

Kazzyhoward, yes, and then we'd be getting better service wouldn't we?

How do you want me to come across?! I've only mentioned a tiny fraction of what happened over the years.
Yes, myself and others have won cases but that's after years of hell (6 for me and over 10 for the other person) but we were both lucky that eventually our paths collided with the right people.
Others are not so lucky.
Just to reiterate AGAIN, in the early part of my ordeal, my behaviour was impeccable.
Your comments are quite amusing really as one of the things that used to annoy me the most when I reported the latest incident was the 'you must have done something to warrant the harassment' attitude. It must be a requirement of the job to have this attitude!

Seriously.... apply, go through the training , become a police officer ( preferably inner city London) and show us how it should be done.

But cake you are not accepting that it's not all police who are like that. It sounds like you had a shocking experience with them, I don't think people are denying that. But you can't accept that it's not always the case. Are you trying to discredit me when I say my husband would never behave like that? Are you discrediting PPs who say they had good experiences? Your experience is not the whole.

If you're not happy with the service you have received on this occasion you have every right to complain. I disagree that they are useless. They are massively overstretched and under funded, facing even further cuts. They also spend a lot of time making enquiries knowing they are unlikely to result in a lead when they could be doing other things like attending 999 calls. I hope your son is ok btw.

I think it is.
As I said before, I went on to support people who had similar issues to me and it was the same story, over and over again.
If people are getting good service or there are good officers out there, why is it so hard to find them?
It's not as if you can call back and ask for someone better is it?
You get what you're given.
Myself and my neighbours obviously couldn't always wait for our neighbourhood team to deal with the issues (they were the best), so we saw a whole stream of different people over the course of 6 years and they were all absolutely the same!
It was like you were battling two lots of perpetrators.

One day I was just coming home and I went to put my bike away, whilst my 2 children and my nephew waited. My neighbour mounted the pavement in her car and drove towards them. They dived out of the way and she skimmed the wall and her car ended up stuck in mud so it was there as evidence.
There were 7 witnesses. She obviously knew she was stuffed so called the police and told them I called her a dirty pikey. I didn't.
I got a visit from the police to talk about what I'd said to her. 7 people said otherwise and the car was stuck in the mud. I then got two further visits to talk about what I said to her and a threat of arrest.
So, that was 3 police officers in a row, who despite 7 witnesses speaking up and the car stuck in the mud were desperate to make me out to be a criminal.
When 3 officers can turn up for one incident, all with the same attitude, you can't really blame me for thinking this is the norm!

But it is not everyone's experience. It's just not. No matter how often you say you "think" it is, it's not. That's fact.

Not everyone's. Of course it isn't but more bad than good experiences.
Don't forget when comments are made on police pages on social media, most people gush about what a great job they do without having any experience of dealing with them at all.
It's like they are not really qualified to make the comments they are making, as it's not based on any experience they've had.

All of my experiences with the police have been bad - generally rude, sexist and racist. I think, like a lot of public service jobs, that it's so hard due to underfunding and lack of resources that all the good ones who actually care about people burn out and leave the profession - leaving all the shit ones to flourish.

I also remember a time when after each call to the police, you used to get an independent survey person call you to ask about your experience (it must have been some sort of initiative they were doing at the time). It wasn't relating to the crime, it was about the treatment you received.
I was particularly negative and apologised to the woman for my responses (it was probably after my children were nearly killed). She said not to worry as it's all she'd heard all day!
Not a single positive response from victims of crime (not just general public with no experience).
That's what she told me. 100% unsatisfied customers.

cake that truly is bizarre.

When I found a missing toddler in a busy inner city area the parents, faces wet with tears were overjoyed, when I disarmed a man with a knife who was threatening his partner she was full of thanks and relief, when I chased and caught a knifepoint robber through an inner city estate the victim was full of thanks. I could go on and on to be honest but I won’t. As I say. I’m leaving

And when my neighbour was out in the street with a can of petrol telling us. That we were all going to burn that night, we just got told to try and keep our heads down.
If only you'd been there!

it's not good enough to say there will always be bad apples when it comes to the police

Especially as the full rendering of the phrase is 'a few bad apples will spoil the barrel' - which is actually rather apt. From the Birmingham 6, through Hillsborough and Stephen Lawrence to officers' complicity in the phone hacking scandal and the killing of Ian Tomlinson, there has been a culture of cover up, closing ranks and protecting their own, that is more corrosive than the actual incidents in the first place. The police lost the moral right right to tell people to obey the law, as they seem to see it as an obstacle to be worked around when their colleagues are involved.

Boysof totally agree. The police on this forum are clearly the good ones and it's sad that they've left or are in the process of leaving. I am grateful to those great officers that joined for the right reasons and I can see it must be angering to read people slagging off the police as a whole. However coming from the other side, to be wronged by the police eats you up in a way that wouldn't from having an ongoing battle with any other member of the public or organisation because not only do you have the stress of the situation at hand but the sense of injustice piled on top. In the end, once the situation at hand is resolved, it's the sense that you were wronged and the police that didn't do their jobs or lied or engaged in other criminal activities are still in their jobs, on their massive pensions that leaves scars. When you have lost everything and gone through 6/7 years of hell and no individual from the other side has been reprimanded of course it will colour your view so I totally get where cake is coming from. My father became a shadow of the man he was, it was terrible to watch. I often think of Doreen Lawrence and admire the sheer strength that woman had to fight that wall of corruption every day for all those years.

I get that some people have had awful experiences with the police, I think that is terrible, however, the increase in reports of corruption is because it used to be swept under the carpet, it no longer is, every complaint against the police is now being recorded. It used to be ignored and covered up. We are now fully accountable. I've had complaints where I've had advice, once a woman drove through a road closure at me, she complained a banged on her window in an aggressive manner when she was within inches of hitting me and that I was abrupt. I was, she had almost hit me while I was directing traffic. Also, I referred to the 'brotherhood' thing in my last post. It does not apply to screwing up, I'm currently breaking up with my husband, he was an officer till last week, his misconduct was the final straw.

Your comments are quite amusing really as one of the things that used to annoy me the most when I reported the latest incident was the 'you must have done something to warrant the harassment' attitude. It must be a requirement of the job to have this attitude! If everyone you meet is unpleasant, if everyone thinks you have an attitude do you think you might just be the problem?

You are absolutely so desperate to discredit me (in true police style).
Despite me mentioning this before, I will reiterate again. This was only when dealing with the police.
This doesn't happen in any other aspect of my life.
I'm sorry you are having a problem understanding this!
Also, I thought you'd gone off in a huff yesterday!

No I didn't go off in a huff? I'm not on here 24 hrs a day. Maybe wishful thinking on your part, you don't like people who have a different view of the world do you.

I really am not desperate to discredit you, you do such a good job yourself. Just to reiterate AGAIN, in the early part of my ordeal, my behaviour was impeccable. Comments like this speak volumes.

Oh well, we'll never agree and I still absolutely hate the police, so nothing has changed!