The meltdown in Britain's police service has got so bad that I am inaugurating a new service for readers -- Plod Watch, a regular monitor of policing ineptitude. Yesterday, there were no fewer than three examples of this alarming new genre:

1) Government minister David Lammy was astounded when, cradling the victim of a drive-by shooting that he happened to witness on the Broadwater Farm in north London (a largely black area where a police oficer was notoriously murdered some years ago), he observed that the police who arrived waited for more than ten minutes while making a 'risk assessment' before advancing onto the scene. As the Telegraph reported him as saying:

'The community perceive that they were not being policed. I am told police were making a risk assessment, but this has had enormous implications for community relations. If this young man had died, this would be a much more serious situation.'

2) South Yorkshire police has stopped taking statements from some burglary victims to release its officers from mounting paperwork. The Telegraph reported:

'Grahame Maxwell, South Yorkshire's deputy chief constable, said officers found the required form-filling "burdensome" and the time involved had caused the force to re-examine its procedures. He said: "We have to start looking at things we cannot do as we did previously. Traditionally, we have taken a statement at every single burglary. Detections are 20 per cent and eight out of 10 statements are filed and never used. If that takes an hour it is an hour not spent on patrol. It is a process of change. We are going down the line of saying we cannot always send a police officer every time people ring in. What we can do is talk to people."

So that's all right then.

3) Two police officfers were removed from guard duties at Windsor Castle after a Sun reporter drove a van containing a large box marked “bomb” into the castle after minimal examination at a checkpoint. As the Times reported:

'The “bomb” security breach is just the latest. This year Michael Hammond, a conman, was jailed after getting into the castle grounds posing as a detective. Last year a 49-year-old father of two scaled the gates of Buckingham Palace and chained himself to the top of a pillar, and a journalist got a job as a footman after perfunctory security checks.'

Posted by melanie at April 9, 2005