Mentally unstable

For those with the time, read through the Observer's recent report on mental health. Summary: in-patient care - i.e. for those most vulnerable and dangerous- has been completely ignored by the government, who have channelled all the money into community based schemes instead. Any police officer anywhere will read that report with a sense of impending doom. I for one have lost count of how many people I've sectioned. At one stage, when I was a PC, it was literally one a month.

The short sightedness and short-termism of this government is frankly embarrassing. The whole debacle about PCSO's sums it up. Central london response teams have more PCSOs then PCs according to one commenter on TUPC. Someone please, please prove me wrong but as far as I can tell the only policies and initiatives this government can come up with are short term, poorly thought through, and are designed with the principle intention of making the government look and sound good to uneducated or unaware voters, and bollocks to what difference it really makes to the people who have to implement them.

Check this out. The government has allocated £315 MILLION pounds to recruit more and more PCSO's. 16,000 of them. The government is desperately trying to con people that Safer Neighbourhoods are "extra frontline resources" (they're not), equal "Public Reassuarance" (except if you dial 999, they won't be the ones turning up). And hows this for a quote, from the above link:

".... in some areas community support officers and employees of local authorities such as wardens will be best placed to deal with local problems.
But in other places - perhaps with more acute crime problems - police officers will be doing most of the work"

So where's theres crime.... oh, it'll still be the police officers dealing with it! Why oh why can we not have some investment in PC's? In response team officers? We shall forever be the poor men (and women) of policing. The first to be blamed when it goes wrong, but the first to be relied on when it goes belly up. The government will spend a third of a billion pounds on their latest greatest policing initiative but demand police and response team budgets are slimmed.

I can't stand politicians. I really can't.