How often have we heard the moan “this country’s getting more like America”? This thesis would surely be proved true on the day our police force becomes routinely armed. I am delighted to say that in anticipation of this event, the pound shop police play set comes complete with a hand grenade – no whimpey little guns for our boys in blue – no siree! Our PCSOs can lob a pineapple at the next shop lifter they spot – that’ll teach ’em!
Just as I was writing, truth proved itself once again to be stranger than fiction with Children’s BBC programme ‘Cop School’, where this week a group of young children training alongside the Metropolitan Police learn to run out of control and deal with public order disturbances in:
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.
Now my house is getting a bit full of sociological specimens, so I’m delighted to announce the first person to email me with the correct answer to this simple question will win this very police play set: Q. What was the name of the Police Officer filmed pushing Ian Tomlinson to the ground during the 2009 G20 demonstrations? Mr Tomlinson it will be remembered died shortly after and the officer wasn’t charged with anything.
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