Too many chiefs, and not enough beat constables lets yobs run riot

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=477112&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=255


Newsflash No 1: Two thousand police officers, some of them armed, surrounded a huge sink estate where drunken yobs were on the rampage, hurling beer cans and overturning cars.

Riot squads broke up the mob and confiscated hundreds of knives. There were 47 arrests.

Newsflash No 2: The British Airports Authority, faced with a threatened invasion by climate change demonstrators, called in the police.

The desk sergeant said that due to lack of resources, there was no one available to deal with peaceful protesters at present, but he would try to get a community support officer on a skateboard round in the morning to try to talk some sense into them.

Newsflash No - Oh dear. Whoops.

Sorree - I've got those items the wrong way round, haven't I?

What happened was that I was quietly perusing my notes at the bus stop when a 14-year-old lout barged past me to be first in the queue, leaving me sprawling in the gutter and my notes all over the pavement.

Reassembling them, I see that the 2,000 officers were looking after the interests of the Spanish-owned BAA, and that the community officer on the skateboard would be looking after the interests of the cowering residents of the sink estate.

Less talk and more walk for police is the answer to cutting crime

Silly me.

So can one of those loquacious chief constables who spout as if they were auditioning for a season of Any Questions kindly explain how the Old Bill consistently manages to scrape together legions of bobbies by the tens of hundreds to keep order on a peaceful demo, yet never seems to have the 'resources' to patrol the evermore dangerous estates?

The school of thought that believes we are on the verge of anarchy in the city centres and sink estates is itself verging on hysteria.

Yet those who believe the opposite - the school of thoughtlessness as we might call them - are whistling in the dark.

They are fond of that word 'anecdotal' to dismiss the dangerous state of our streets.

A fracas is 'anecdotalhardly worth a decimal point in the statistics.

Yet before the anecdote is told, it involves an ambulance-ride to the A&E Wing or possibly even to the morgue.

Knives are now used in one in five muggings, which prompts Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, to ruminate that ministers have been tackling the problem in the wrong way: "The Government has embarked on endless law and order initiatives, yet knife-related robberies appear to be increasing."

Could that be because there is hardly ever anyone there to stop them?

The plea for 'more bobbies on the beat' has become such a clichÈ that it raises titters in police canteens.

Yet chief constables burn midnight oil dreaming up wheezes to keep bobbies off the beat.

Put the drinking age up to 21. Banish teenage yobs into care.

Grant another amnesty. And - this from a would-be chief constable - a three-strikes-and-you're-out policy.

Why three? Whatever happened to one?

What we want from the chief constables is less talk talk and more walk walk - on the beat.

Oh, sorry - they've got to round up their finest en masse to take photographs of another demo.

DES RES

The job of flogging the already discredited, £500 home information packs goes from one minister to another like a game of pass the parcel.

Yet does any of them know what they are talking about?

It is a pity we are not back in the Sixties when a famous estate agent,

Roy Brooks, was cock of the property roost and a Labour man to boot.

He got where he was by the unusual device of telling the truth.

He could have advised those greenhorn ministers.

When he died in 1971 his two partners compiled an anthology of the best - or the worst? - of his delightful advertisements.

Alas, I have space enough to quote only a couple, to give you the flavour:

'Fashionable Chelsea. Do not be misled by the trim exterior of this modest period res with its dirty broken windows: all is not well with the inside.

The dÈcor of the 9 rooms is revolting.

Not entirely devoid of plumbing, there is a pathetic kitchen & 1 cold tap. No bathrm, of course.

Rain sadly drips through the ceiling.

A thriving community of woodworm; otherwise there is not much wrong with the property . . .'

'Clapped-out early Victorian villa.

Semi-detached so you can get your motorbike round to the dirty patch of weeds which passes for a garden. 3 bedrms & room for a bathrm, if desired.

Dirty, dark brown varnished woodwork dating back to the General Strike. Quiet backwater abutting hospital laundry. . .'

You get the idea. What? Oh, just one more, then:

'Wanted. Someone with taste, means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill-repute in Pimlico.

'It is untouched by the 20th century as far as convenience for even the basic human decencies are concerned.

'Although it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof, it is still inhabitable judging by the bed of rags, fag ends and empty bottles in one corner.

'10 rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard . . .'

Roy Brooks' small ads in the property columns of the Sunday papers read like an estate agent's suicide notes.

Yet his houses sold like hot cakes.

A lesson there for Her Majesty's ministers tinkering with the property market, whose efforts to sell houses more quickly are moving like cold blancmange.