Law and Order is the subject for today. This week myself and seventeen others started a course, each Thursday for four weeks, called CAPP, Community Awareness of Policing Program. We will learn what it is like to be a Police Officer, if it’s at all possible that you can learn this in virtually four days! Each day we will experience different aspects of policing and what it takes to function as a member of our Police Force.
We will take part in a series of ‘briefings’ that are typical of what our police face each and every day. We will be taken through scenarios based on real events that highlight just what it is that these people face every day.
Our first briefing was with the Marine Area Command. Some of us took command of a practice search and rescue operation based on a previous real search and rescue event. We had to work with information provided and co-ordinate the search and rescue experience. On the whole we did ok but we learnt just how hard it is making life and death decisions with ever changing circumstances.
Our situation involved an overturned yacht with possible survivors and weather conditions worsening as the hours ticked by. Interestingly enough, later in that day as we were visiting the Public Riot and Order Squad, we were given news that the very team we had worked with that morning were now engaged in a search and rescue operation trying to locate two people who had fallen over board from a holiday cruise ship in Australian waters.
I have long been aware of the amazing job that our police force does. I have been fortunate enough to have been asked over the years, to participate in a number of initiatives started by local or state police forces.
I have also participated as an ambassador in National schemes associated with youth, anti drug awareness programs and initiatives trying to address the growing number of teenage runaways, the homeless and suicides. All these programs were conceived, implemented and driven by our police force.
Recently I spent a week with members of the local police from St. Mary’s district, in co-operation with members of the Army, in a very successful program called ‘Boot Camp’. Boot Camp involves a group of committed young constables and some very experienced Army personnel striving to make a difference in the lives of a group of dysfunctional teenagers. These kids were from the local area and were ‘known’ to the police. The members running this initiative were there because they cared.
Sadly we have all witnessed the changing attitude towards our police by some members of the public. We have seen the erosion of public respect and the esteem with which they were previously held. We have seen the interference of politics into the everyday job of policing and the gradual but insidious decline in their numbers and budgets. We have seen police stations close down when at the same time we are told that police presence is vital to keeping law and order in the local community.
A fact of life is that as we grow in population, we must maintain the services that we rely on to serve us, the public, in the ways that we need..We will need more police with better, modern equipment to keep pace with the community at large but most importantly we need them to be ahead of the bad guys. My old enemy, ‘political correctness’ has, I believe, gone a long way towards eroding the effectiveness of our police force, hamstringing them in a variety of ways. This is best demonstrated in the way certain sections of the community treat our police officers while they are exercising their duty.
Their duty, which they take very seriously, is to protect us, the public, from harm, Whether it be from crime related to our own irresponsible behaviour, from others breaking the law or situations where innocent members of the public are placed in harms way.
We have all seen the shameful way members of our police have been treated by some members of the public with assaults, shocking verbal abuse and complete disregard for the officers themselves and the obvious disregard for the laws of the land.
These scumbags often seem to be immune from prosecution. When they are brought to justice they hide behind all manner of excuses to avoid punishment. They cry poverty or a lousy upbringing or religious consideration or diminished responsibility due to drugs or alcohol. Our courts often override the evidence presented by police and grant them light sentences thus sending the message that it’s ok to break the law as long as you have a ‘good reason’ to do so.
I am so sick of people who set out to flout the law and then bleat the loudest about bad treatment at the hands of the police when things don’t go their way. I will always support the right to protest but save me from the ‘professional protesters’ who seem to turn up to every protest. Most of them, I suspect, are not working a job giving them all the free time they need to attend any protest that happens along.
Gandhi proved that peaceful non confrontational protest gets the best results because you don’t lose the support of the general public. As any old protester will tell you, if you don’t have the support of John and Betty you are just a radical with little or no real support which is why so many of them turn to violence.
Light sentencing means that the policing that brought these criminals to justice is rendered as of no value. It follows that this appears to the general public that our police force doesn’t matter and therefore that we, the law abiders, also don’t matter.
We have a chance to turn some of this around at the next Federal election. The real rot that we must rid ourselves from, can and should start with the election but what we can and must do is adopt a mind set that says we have had enough and we will not tolerate it anymore. We will no longer support what we know is a bad idea.
I, personally, have had a gut full of the disrespect shown to the men and women of our police force, I’ve had a gut full of ill mannered, badly behaved radical whatevers using members of our police force as punching bags and recipients of foul language. I’ve had a gut full and I’m going to do whatever I can to turn this rotten situation around. I’m going to be part of the solution not part of the problem.
Until next time, go peacefully into the world. Go with your God.
I remain your friend, Angry.