And chances are, they never will be:
Deborah, who runs a nail salon, says her mother never got over the thousands of pounds worth of devastation caused by police to her home, in which drawers and cupboards were ransacked, pipes removed and her stair lift derailed. Officers even stuck their fingers into Rosemary's home-made Christmas pudding in their futile hunt for clues.
What the hell did they expect to find?
'They turned our homes into a crime scene,' says Deborah. 'They cut a hole in my mattress. But they also helped themselves to tea and coffee and used the radio.'I'd have spat in the milk...
'My mother never got over the shock of it. She was shunned by the community afterwards. She once went into a cafe and people moved tables away from her. She asked the police about counselling and they laughed and said: 'You're not a victim.' 'But she was. The victim of criminally incompetent Dorset Police officers.
"...they helped themselves to tea and coffee and used the radio."
ReplyDeleteTheft and abstracting electricity are offences which can lead to arrest and criminal records. If these allegations are true, then it shows the calibre of Dorset Police, especially as there would have been a senior incident officer present. Perhaps lawyer time is applicable?
Penseivat
Julia, of all the accounts of our police being mismanaged this one appalls the most. Something like this would never have happened a few years ago. Our police have been taken over, they see crimes where there are none, they ignore crimes where they are politically sensitive. They fail to see the obvious when they realise that they may be on the wrong track.
ReplyDeleteThe disappearance of local police stations, the centralisation of forces has brought about a separation of them from us. The incompetence and political fawning of senior officers must be stopped, here and now. These Augean Stables need to be cleaned out, starting right at the top. Local forces, recruited locally must be returned.
Andy
ReplyDeleteThis is (unsurprisingly) merely proof that the police have long been 'taken over'.
Prima facia evidence that both Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" and Conquest's "Three Laws" accurately describe what has happened to the entire institution (and in fact the entire administrative and judicial branch's of our government).
They don't work for, represent, or even care what you or I want/think. They work for, etc. their constituents ... each other.
As early as the sixties, many of us could see where the plod bandwagon was taking the country.
ReplyDeleteAlmost five decades have elapsed since I first published police criticisms and began my public speaking vis-à-vis misuse of the law by a regime which placed its own interests first. I recall the many illegitimate attempts to silence me with hostile derision from police sources which masqueraded as public support for the status quo. Police rejoinders to my activities grew nastier and very disproportionate. The prevailing Jobsworth attitude was buoyed by my own efforts to make the forecasts more widely known. I have endured libelous insults, threats of arrest, a dozen contrived prosecutions (none of which succeeded in a criminal conviction) and conspiratorial harassment focused on me as a targeted motorist. There have been many latent police attempts to damage my business interests and domestic life. And the West Yorkshire police database (local) has besmirched me with every known taboo. Together, these abuses of office have served as collective confirmation of responses by an evil Emperor to my honest, finger-pointing.
The moral of The Emperor’s New Clothes is that citizens must be willing to speak up if they know the truth, even if they become a victim of the same Imperial abuse, Jaded.
"If these allegations are true, then it shows the calibre of Dorset Police..."
ReplyDeleteIt should be instant dismissal for that alone...
"...of all the accounts of our police being mismanaged this one appalls the most."
For now, Andy. For now. I'm sure it won't be too long before something worse comes along.
"Prima facia evidence that both Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" and Conquest's "Three Laws" accurately describe what has happened to the entire institution..."
Sadly true.
"As early as the sixties, many of us could see where the plod bandwagon was taking the country."
I'll have to take your word for that. For me, it was the late Eighties.