Your Tax Money At Work

Aren\’t we lucky to have such a caring, sharing, police force:

Graeme Deacon was on the M67 near Hyde, Manchester, when he saw the accident on the opposite carriageway. He crossed over and helped the driver to safety. Then a second car drove into the back of the first and caught fire. Mr Deacon helped to free the young driver. Police arrived and offered to drive him to his vehicle. But Mr Deacon said: “The carriageway was empty. I could have crawled across on my hands and knees. There was absolutely no risk. A police officer said, ‘You’ll wait as long as it takes, whether it’s five minutes or two hours. You’ll stay there.’ I went to walk off and three of them pushed me face down in the gravel, hit the back of my legs with a baton and handcuffed me. One said, ‘Shut up or I’ll spray you with CS gas’.”

This is how it\’s done folks.

Think of all those lovely decisions that El Gordo wants to take using citizen juries. This is how they will all work.

H/T Katy.

Wonderful, eh?

The emergency services are being told not to attempt to save drowning people because of health and safety restrictions, it has emerged.

Amid a growing row over the failure of two police support officers to try to save a boy from drowning, both the police and the fire service disclosed this weekend that their frontline staff are instructed not to enter the water in case they put themselves in danger.

Are they the emergency services? Is someone drowning an emergency?

Good grief, what is anyone supposed to do? Call the RNLI out to a pond in Wigan?

Update. And an extremely interesting little note on PCSOs from Peter Risdon. Apparently so many of them are bent that there\’s no time left to investigate real corrupt coppers.

We are privileged indeed to see what they do with our money:

Changes to GPs’ working arrangements and a generous pay rise for doctors have cost the Government £1.8 billion more than ministers bargained for, new figures have revealed.

Just to recap. Our Lords and Masters decided that there should be a renegotiation of the contract by which GPs offer their services to the NHS. Fine, entirely acceptable. Then they underestimated how much work GPs actually did already, offered to let them off some of the most onerous work (out of hourse services), offer bonuses for things they were already doing (vaccination rates etc) and, lo and behold, GPs incomes rose much more than the negotiators planned. So they ended up buying less service for more money and they were so inefficient at it that they didn\’t even manage to calculate how much it was going to cost.

Can someone remind me why it is that we let politicians run such things for us?

Yes, they\’ve bottled pension reform again:

Campaigners accused the Government of double standards after it was announced that all NHS staff would keep their final salary pension schemes.

…

All NHS staff, including new starters, will be guaranteed a final salary scheme under the new arrangements, meaning their pensions will be based on their highest pay during their last three years at work.

We\’re often told that government is better at planning things because it has a longer time horizon than private business does. The truth of that can be seen in precisely these pensions changes. Business is closing final salary schemes as they are indeed planning for 40 years down the road. The public sector still has them because the government won\’t risk short term disorder (and the possibility of a lost election) at the cost of financial problems 40 years down the road. So, err, can we put to rest the idea that governments do indeed plan for the future better than the private sector?

So we have this new sort of Plod, the police community service officer. No powers of arrest, not allowed to interviewpeople: they are there to provide a uniformed body on the streets. So given that they don\’t actually solve crimes, catch crooks, you\’d like to think that they do the \”community\” part of policing, yes? Helping old ladies across the road, taking lost children home…hey, how about helping some kid drowning in a pond? Community enough?

A police leader has called community support officers a \”failed experiment\” which should be abandoned, after it emerged that two PCSOs stood by as a boy drowned because they were not trained to carry out water rescues.

…

Jordon jumped into the water to save his eight-year-old stepsister at a local beauty spot in May this year. Mrs Lyon said: \”If you\’re walking down the street and you see a child drowning, you automatically go in that water.\”

Well, yes, I\’d say that would be the appropriate reaction of any adult to the sight of a drowning child. Whether that adult is trained or in uniform or not. In other news, the basic pay for a PCSO is £16,000 plus paid overtime etc.

Am I being too demanding in thinking that at that price we should be employing men, not mice?

Vicki Woods is on the subject today:

A \”police presence\” is not the same as policing. And PCSOs are not the same as police officers, as reports about the inquest into the death of a 10-year-old boy in Wigan showed. Jordon Lyon was playing near a pond with his sister and both got into difficulties. A 999 call fetched two PCSOs to the scene, where people were shrieking for help as the children floundered. Two fishermen, aged 63 and 66, flung themselves into the pond and managed to rescue the girl, but the two PCSOs stood faffing about on the edge.

When a regular police sergeant arrived minutes later, he dived into the pond and pulled Jordon from the water, but he could not be resuscitated. The inquest was told: \”PCSOs are not trained to deal with major incidents such as this.\”

Oh, really? Neither are a couple of fishermen aged 63 and 66, but they had a go.