Council Tax and the Police Levy second edition (From Croydon Guardian)

Council Tax and the Police Levy second edition

10:18am Monday 28th January 2008

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With such conceit that my three score years and ten plus had left me with, I thought I had done a reasonable job in showing how the Surrey Police Force wasted the funding they receive from our hard earned taxes.

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Their Public Relations Department cannot be reading this blog or surely they would have responded or hidden themselves away in shame.

Instead I have seen elsewhere another whinge for more money to waste, and a Staines Local Guardian report and photograph of a visit to, of all things, a Sunbury Nursery.

A policeman in a flat cap, a policewoman in a bonnet (or is it a bowler?), and all the very young children in a variety of toy head-gear. At least three of the only eight children in the picture had real policemen’s, helmets.

I do hope there were more children there but missing them out of the picture, if there were any more, was a monster PR clanger. They will hate the Police for ever, the charge being discrimination. A big police van was there of course to provide the ‘bells and smells”.

All joking aside, the Surrey Police Force must surely have had a million and one more useful things that they could have done with those personnel and resources on that day or indeed on any other day.

The article claimed that the police wanted to “help build better relations between police and children“. I suggest that the later such young children have to face up to the darker side of life that is the ‘bread and butter’ of police force work the better.

Such harmless cartoon police characters as they find in their picture books, along with ‘Thomas and The Fat Controller’ , Wendy and Bob the Builder and Postman Pat and his cat is more than enough at that age.
They are unlikely to remember the visit next week, (apart from those missed out of the photograph), let alone, hopefully, in the several years that will passed before they are tempted to stray off the straight and narrow.

The reported quotation: “ I am hoping that by visiting schools, children can have a contact at the police who they can discuss concerns with”, is frightening.

At worst shades of a police state, at the very least most inappropriate. Police have no discretion, and should have none, in how they act on any information received. There are far more appropriate people and organisations for a child to approach, who are able to exercise some discretion, or at least there used to be, and they would, I hope, give better advice.

Over the years I have seen police visits to Primary Schools reported but never before to a nursery.

What I would really like to see reported are police visits to secondary schools with an agenda spelling out the devastating effect that even a single conviction can have on a youngster’s future life, and what a life of crime really entails for most, if not all criminals. Why do we not see such visits reported and not just visits to the ‘good’
Schools?

For a real meaningful effort to tackle teenage vandalism, in all it’s forms, more funding might be justified, but only when there are fewer obvious signs of it being wasted.

The Policing Surrey Magazine is another thing that needs to go for starters, or have I said that before?