The ‘public’ control themselves; criminals ARE a lower caste…..and DO need to be controlled!

Are they? So now we need to define the word ‘criminal’.

Do you ‘borrow’ pens from work, do you speed in your car or occasionally answer your mobile phone when driving? Just a few examples…

At least you used the word ‘some’ in you diatribe rather that smear the entire Police Force with the same brush!

Well, it must be statistically impossible for the whole police force to be corrupt…isn’t it?

You’ll have to forgive me but I only recognise three of the names that you listed…

Hmm.

Well, I went through your list of eleven people who ‘died at the hands of the Police’ and there is certainly cause for concern in most of these cases, BUT…

I did not say ‘died at the hands of the police’. I know that some of those did not die, but not for want of somebody trying.

…you did have to go back thirty-five years to 1979 to get just these eleven cases (there will be more obviously). And then there were cases of accidental shootings and mistaken identity, and as for the rest, well, as a sample of the ‘public’, they weren’t all exactly as-white-as-the-driven-snow were they?

There are more cases; I grew bored.
It is the accidental and mistaken cases which, in some ways, are the worst – it could just as easily been you or some other innocent member of the public, not even someone who (in your opinion) deserved it. And those who you believe to be scum – were they armed? Did they actually pose a threat at the moment of death? Or were they executed without trial, because a trained marksman was apparently so scared that instead of doing his job properly he shot an unarmed naked man, or a man with a mobile phone, or a man with a freshly restored table leg in a plastic bag…

Don’t get me started on that other ‘wonder’ weapon of the police service, the taser – a blind man with his white stick mistaken for a rampaging Samurai sword waving loony, anyone? How about tasing an epileptic on the floor in the middle of having a fit?

Yes, the Police could do better. No, no Police Force can never make any mistakes (especially given the circumstances of armed stand-off with potentially armed criminals or terrorists). So where do you suggest the Police go from here?

I guess you are going to tell me – it is your question, after all…

Better training? More money. Stricter recruitment policy? More money. No firearms? More dead Police, criminals and public. (So more money.) Same money? Fewer Police and more crime?

Why not properly declare a police state and destroy the illusion?
Look, I have had a police gun pointed at me by lazy coppers who went in like Rambo because they couldn’t be bothered to make enquiries: not proper, but any (see a previous thread).
You know that thing about give a man a fish…? Well, give a man a weapon of some sort and the macho gene kicks in: much better training would work wonders, but then you might be reguilding the already guilded lily.
But whatever solution is used there needs to be absolutely no accidental deaths of innocent or unarmed people – they are you and I and (to mash up an applicable quote from Boris) we have done nothing (no amount of pilfered Biro’s, even) to deserve a death sentence.

Anybody can sit at a keyboard and say the Police killed people they shouldn’t have; anybody can say they wouldn’t have made those mistakes…..anybody.

Indeed, unless they’ve been accidentally shot dead by a subsequently very apologetic police officer.

But while Police Officers are human beings, just like anybody, they’ll make mistakes.

And some of those mistakes are really dumb, the kinds of mistakes that wouldn’t be tolerated in – say – the army. And they get away with it!