Nick Andrews www.police-recruitment.co.uk
If you are seriously thinking about joining the police, the first thing you need to bear in mind is the fact that the very nature of this role of employment is unlike most others. In other words, it can be very dangerous indeed, as the recent stabbing of four Metropolitan police officers in north-west London proved.
If you do make it to the official training process for any police force, you will find that all courses concentrate heavily on learning how to defend and protect yourself from a certain element of society. We have all heard the news about more and more criminals carrying knives nowadays, therefore, it is inevitable that as a police officer, you are more likely to encounter such thugs now than ever.
Becoming a police officer is not the same as it would have been around 30 years ago or more. Back in the 1970’s, if a police officer found a youth misbehaving in some unlawful way, they could literally clip them across the ear and take them back to their parents for a darn good telling off. How things have changed over the decades – and definitely not for the better, as more and more extreme human rights laws manage to worm their way onto the statute books. Today, if a police officer were to furnish an unruly youth with any form of corporal discipline, you can rest assured that they would be dismissed from their job within a flash of lightening.
This is another element that is concentrated on very heavily within any police training course. Your entire personality is stripped back to basics, in order to find out whether or not you have the exact temperament to cope with such a demanding role of employment. Very often, the training officers will push you to such an extreme, your entire reaction will be assessed to ascertain if you are the right type of individual to become a police officer.
If you contemplate all of the dangers that are prevalent within our society from criminals, it becomes obvious that police training courses need to be of this serious nature. After all, police officers need to be made fully aware of what they could face out on the streets and need to be able to protect themselves as far as possible.
The stabbing of four Metropolitan officers in Harrow, north-west London, was our latest reminder of just how things can become for the boys in blue. Three officers in their twenties and one in his thirties were stabbed with a 12 inch meat cleaver, after they had managed to corner a thug in a butchers shop. This was proof of how little respect there is for the police nowadays and that criminals will go to far more extreme measures to try and avoid arrest.
Then, of course, we need to discuss the growing number of forearms on our streets and the fact that as an ordinary police officer, you would not be carrying one yourself in your everyday duties. More and more people are starting to argue that this gives any police officer a very unfair advantage and it is not reflective of our current society. Our idealistic preference to ensure that the ordinary police officer is not furnished with a gun is merely an insistence to keep us back in a time where far fewer dangers were prevalent to the police force.
Whatever your views on police officers carrying firearms, if you are seriously thinking about joining the force, you need to bear in mind that you will be restricted to an arsenal of rather pathetic defensive weapons. You will be taught how to make best use of these, obviously, but you will always be worrying if the next criminal that you apprehend is carrying a weapon that you could never hope to compete against.
It would seem that it is definitely time for all police forces to drag themselves into the twenty-first century. The United Kingdom is not the sleepy place from Enid Blyton books, as the politicians would all have you believe; alas, our society is under threat from more and more cunning international criminal gangs as our Border Agency continues to fail to protect us and just lets them keep pouring in. This, however, is an entirely different subject and one that we are very likely to tackle here in the near future.
