Message:
Message: Harriet Harman speaking about the fact that the rioters blame the police for the shoplifting riots in London this summer:
“What is clearly needed is a targeted programme of community engagement and police training to improve the relationship between young men and the police”
Here is Inspector Gadget’s (probably rather less expensive) guide to improving the relationship between young men and the police:
When you are stop-searched by a police officer, you should:
1. Stop
2. Be searched
3. Either – the police having found nothing illegal – go about your business and have a nice day
or – the police having found stolen property, illegal drugs or a prohibited weapon on you – get nicked.
That is the sum total of the ‘community engagement’ lesson for today. Your relationship with the police, if you have nothing illegal on you and you behave as suggested above, will last about six minutes.
There is no need to suck your teeth, call out the rest of the street, flip out three fingers of your right hand and shake it in a kind of weird threatening gesture, continually shout about harassment, call the police officer nasty names and shuffle your feet whilst rolling your shoulders like a boxer and refuse to cooperate.
You see, the thing is, unlike Harriet, we actually know the game that is being played here. Angry young men deliberately make the stop-search process hard for themselves and for us as a diversion.
Either they have something illegal on them, they want to make a fuss so we won’t search them when they have something illegal on them or they simply hate us because, gulp, we are the only people who ever say ‘No’ to them and who will not be diverted by the subsequent tantrum.
There really is very little more to it than that. I don’t buy the theory that it’s not that they get stopped, it’s how they are treated when they are stopped. I don’t buy it because over the years I’ve witnessed so many searches where the police officer never even gets the chance to speak before the bad attitude starts.
These are people who misbehave. They misbehave in school, they misbehave at home. They misbehave on the streets. They cause problems for their parent, for their teachers, for each other and for you and me. Police officers are the only people capable of saying ‘No’ to these people and they don’t like it.
It’s no more complicated than that. I make no apology for sounding grumpy about this, but I’ve had enough of people who have never tried to actually deal with these people telling us how to do our job. It’s why we are in such a state in the first place.
