To all those wondering why police aren't investigating crime

Good pension and early retirement though. And you get to drive round in pretty multi coloured cars and dance at events like pride 👯

@Georgeskitchen ·
There would probably be a drop in mental health issues if the government/police got a grip on the enormous drug problems that we seem to have acquired over the past few years

How should the government/police get a grip on drug problems?

She can’t do the Macarena in a tutu. 😉

@Florenz · Today 15:05
Too many people join the police for the wrong reasons nowadays, they just see it as a career, not a vocation. They couldn't care less about crime or the victims of crime.

To be fair, the same could be said about nurses doctors dentists. No vocation just a career structure and a pension

Maybe, but I don't know that you are really getting to the root of this.

If you believe that local police did not deal in the past with local, non-crime issues, you are wrong. They did, whether it was captured statistically or not.

I suspect that what is part of the issue is that we expect a whole lot more care for people overall. Hospital visits are a good example, people did not in the past have anything like the same expectations for medical and hospital care. Partly because there was a lot less that could be done. Older people were most typically kelp at home, life was not extended to the same degree. People lived close to their younger relatives more often.

That's not a bad change necessarily but it is expensive and requires a huge amount of infrastructure.

I think we've created a situation where communities are much less self-ordering, for a variety of reasons but we can see this in all kinds of research. People are not happy, they are lonely, they don't have extended family or community networks, they don't know the people who live nearby, many are transient. Plus drugs has made a huge, huge difference. And our attitude to drugs has changed. Patenting has changed. Schools are unrecognizable.

When the social order changes and becomes so unstable it is going to be difficult for services to contain problems.

Same.

The ones local to me are too busy telling people off for not calling male paedos in dresses stunning and brave.

In the meantime the house down the road was burgled and it took the police 4 days to attend.

I don't think there is anything wrong in joining the police because it is a good career with a pension and so on. Doing a slapdash job once you're in because you really just want to be a desk-jockey but you have to go on the beat is a whole other thing.

The answer, as we all know, is a combination of a lot of things, starting with proper funding of all services (including but not restricted to: the police, the NHS including mental health services, social services and education). Another thing that society needs to get a hold of is the idea of more personal responsibility to go along with all the lovely rights we have now. and so on.

And we need those organisations in receipt of public funds, to be efficient and effective in how they use them.

The NYPD has created a special unit for mental health calls, made up of EMTs and social workers.

www.police1.com/patrol-issues/articles/nyc-expands-program-that-sends-emts-social-workers-to-mental-health-calls-8XWeKrucFBmxgXgo/

Interesting. Especially as NYC was the cradle of zero tolerance and broken window theory.

Starting salaries are closer to £24k and they go up very quickly. They are also paid a lot of overtime. I am not saying it’s not deserved but they aren’t poorly paid compared to paramedics/nurses etc

That's nice, what can we do about it? I suspect a lot of people don't even bother calling the police unless desperate to be honest, they fully expect them to be useless. I was mugged at knifepoint and they didn't give a shit, in fact I was made to feel it was my fault for daring to be using my phone out and about.

I think in many of these incident a crime is being committed - however, the police fail to act in these cases because they perceive the issues to be mental or social care issues - this isn't actually very helpful.

I don't know that anyone has any real idea about the answer to this question. Which is maybe why there is so much emphasis on other things which really don't touch the issue.

But I have a suspicion that the answer would be found in things like - encouraging, socially, things like stable families with two parents, discouraging young women from having babies from different fathers and relying on the state to fund them.

Which sounds even to my ears terribly old fashioned - but all of the research seems to indicate it is the things like this that are likely to make the biggest difference.

But they aren't about social investment in police or social workers or even health. It's about social attitudes and I don't see us changing those any time soon.

You’re a call handler. Who do you send the police to?
a) man on a ledge with a bottle of pills
b) man whose car’s been stolen

Maybe in your force. My closest relative is a PC and is taking it in with overtime. With annual leave and rest days it feels like a good deal. Again not saying undeserved but loads of jobs do not pay overtime or get the same amount of time off.

*raking

I always read your posts with interest, vicar several of my family members have been in the police so I see both sides. I know that, when my dad retired 20 years ago, he said it wasn't the career he entered even then.

But please don't point the finger at schools. We are in the same boat when it comes to picking up the slack from other agencies (largely the woefully underfunded social services and child mental health services).

Unless you are being called out to teach children literacy, numeracy and about the Ancient Greeks, you are not doing any part of what should be our job!

@ChilliBandit brutally arrested?! I saw no brutal arrests. Just 6 officers on one person. Which they have been taught as the SAFEST way to arrest someone to cause minimal injury to suspect. I had friends at the vigil who were there to pay respects and also I have a sister in the met all of whom said the police only stepped in when the crowd started getting rowdy and the flowers trodden on. But don't worry, you carry on pulling whichever bits of the media you can to fit your narrative. Let me guess, they are all rapist murderers too? 🙂 No one nowadays can be bothered to do their research into incidents and form their warped opinions based on what they have seen be shared on Facebook and the media, which, by the way, make their money giving you the juiciest headlines possible

Surely lots of crime is mental health related?

Send the police to the person whose car has been stolen if there is a chance of doing anything, dusting for prints if their house was broken into to steal the keys etc. The police used to know who all the criminals were on their "patch". If they wanted to know something, they'd only have to twist a few arms to be able to get the necessary info. Now the police are far too detached from the people they police to be able to be effective.

The police also need to prevent crime, in the same way the fire brigade help to prevent fires. Some of that will involve dealing with neighbour disputes and attending to people with MH emergencies. However, by the time there is a MH emergency like someone trying to jump off a bridge there's likely to have been multiple points of failure by other services.