http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15845535

And then there was this:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15681305

The third officer in a month, and that's just the ones we know about...

I feel sorry for the police sometimes. There are endless hoodies/criminals/general scum who constantly physically and verbally abuse them, but if they react at all those same people go running to the papers claiming police brutality.
I feel that teachers these days have an equivalent problem with disruptive children.

Gone are the days when a clip round the ear would return a ruffian to the path of virtuous living. There is also the fear of legal action - I certainly know that this is the case in teaching. As a society, we are too litigious.

None of that has anything to do with:

• The Met sending undercover officers into green groups and then getting said officers to commit perjury in court. And then refusing to apologise for this.
• Shooting Jean Charles De Menezes seven times in the head, then claiming he had failed to stop for Police etc when it later transpired he'd calmly & quite normally just got on the tube.
• Causing the death of Ian Tomlinson, whose only crime was ignoring the police officers who had wanted to place him inside a "kettle" and instead was walking home after a day's work.
• A close-protection officer carrying on an affair with the Home Secretary's wife.
• The constant & ongoing harassment of photographers and others under "anti-terror" laws. In particular the use of "forward intelligence teams".

I'll feel sorry for them when they stop lying through their teeth & employing underhand tactics.

Do you blame them for doing their job or for the ones who give the orders?

Both. "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence.

True, there are a group of bad eggs in all walks of life, those in the Police are more obvious though.

That said, I personally have a friend who works in the mounted division of the Met, I wouldn't hear a bad word said against her and it's for her I hope that the bad coppers are found and kicked out.

I know of many others who work for the Police who do their damndest to do a good job while random law/reporting/crime logging/etc changes come from above and courts keep churning out criminals they've worked hard to catch and get to court in the first place.

Seriously, on a tangent, when an offender is in court and has a history of absconding on bail why are they released on bail?

I think we have to be realistic and make an allowance for the fact that the police must sometimes do... distasteful things in order to protect us from those who would do us harm in some form. We can't ask our police to be saintly, and also as them to win a fight with the devil. However our penguiney friend also has a point - the police do need to maintain some level of moral authority - we allow them to do immoral things because we know in doing so they protect us from even more immoral people. When they do things that are as immoral as the people they are meant to be protecting us from, then what authority do they have any more?

The major thing the police (and it's not just the met, there are plenty of examples elsewhere too) need to do, IMO, is fess up when they get it wrong. People will I think accept if the police make mistakes but not when they attempt to cover up or mitigate those mistakes. That's when they cross the moral line and lose their right to authority over the rest of us.

Jon

Yup. I'd like bankers to do the same.

Yeah, I agree with that. They're just power hungry bullies when they pull that stunt.