| Hazel,police budgets have been cut to the bone and we now have 23000 officers short of what we had in 2000.I left Scotland Yard 7 years ago and things then were very tight then.The senior officers these days are college graduates that have had no experience walking the beat.All the old boys that had come up walking the beat,sitting their seargents exams and passing up through the grades have left and the senior officers we have now think the way forward for "modern policing" is to have officers dancing around at Gay Pride.They think that they should be pushing diversity instead of catching criminals.We need to recruit another 10000 officers and get them back out walking the beat and meeting the locals.Policing is intelligence led.And the sooner the new intake of university graduates realise that,the sooner the cell doors will start slamming again |