POLICE. Do they serve us well? - POLL!

for every 1 bad police experience you see there are 1000 great experiences you dont hear about. police helping kids get home going to communities and being a positive experience. there is a guy who has a facebook page and he is a really respected officer in his community. 

not to forget most of the time the bad experiences with police context is always missing. some of them you see the camera footage and the police cross the line for no reason but other times the person provokes and doesnt listen which makes police feel they are hiding something.

every experience ive had with the police has been fine. stopped and searched many times and not once have they been forceful or aggressive i comply and they do their job appropriately then i go home safe. if you have nothing to hide just comply. if someone breaks into your house or comes to attack you you can call the police they come to your aid.

a lot of these times people have let social media warp their perspective on police or they have not been compliant with police which creates a hostile atmosphere. also its good to know your rights just dont be disrespectful about it.

Vesters, thank you for your input. I am glad you feel you have had good experiences interacting with the police, although you only actually describe being "stopped and searched", which I'll grant you can be an amusing experience, if you get the right copper, but generally, I've had some pretty disgusting interactions with the police mostly as a victim of crime.

Some good ones, when I've been a "useful & intelligent bystander", and some truly awful ones back when I was a "minority of interest" A motorcyclist in the seventies / eighties. Oddly enough, on the very few times I have been caught doing something properly naughty, the police have treated me like "one of their own" almost., which confuses the hell out of me.

I personally hold that the "venn diagram of society" consists of three separate groups; Consisting of the Police, the criminals & US the prey. A Chief Inspector, who fell prey to me presenting this view to him at a social occasion, blamed "Home Office Guidelines" rather than choosing to attack the validity of my model... 

What about that?    

what do i make about it? stop and searches might be amusing experiences to you until someone feels they are being violated then we end up with a police officer being forced into a lose lose situation because someone is getting irate and disregarding the officer. 

people who are victims are in a vulnerable situation so i don't blame them for feeling like the police haven't done enough but there is only so much the police can do with their resources

i don't know if you are talking solely about 30 or 40 years ago but police now get held to account especially with all the cameras etc, the majority of them care about justice and doing the right thing. maybe there was more corruption but like the police chief said they are just doing what they are told to do. i couldn't walk into your business or workplace and tell you to operate out of the intended guild lines or you'd get fired. even if it was more moral or right.

I try to see things from that perspective and judge an individual on an individuals action.

what do i make about it? stop and searches might be amusing experiences to you until someone feels they are being violated then we end up with a police officer being forced into a lose lose situation because someone is getting irate and disregarding the officer. 

people who are victims are in a vulnerable situation so i don't blame them for feeling like the police haven't done enough but there is only so much the police can do with their resources

i don't know if you are talking solely about 30 or 40 years ago but police now get held to account especially with all the cameras etc, the majority of them care about justice and doing the right thing. maybe there was more corruption but like the police chief said they are just doing what they are told to do. i couldn't walk into your business or workplace and tell you to operate out of the intended guild lines or you'd get fired. even if it was more moral or right.

I try to see things from that perspective and judge an individual on an individuals action.

I started with a rude word. let's be more constructive.

Here's what I did. I immediatey as required, ceased all drone activity, and clearly advised the policeman that I had done so whilst apologising for my activites causing him an issue. When the CAA clarified the law last Christmas, my small toy drone activities no longer became a hazerd to aviation, which was the original reason given for asking me to stop flying in my back garden.

This impediment to my micro aviation aspirations removed, I wrote to him again to ask him if he felt there was any reason I should not resume my activities, which were now no longer held to be a breach of the law or health and safety. 

I have not enjoyed the courtesy of a reply, unlike the Civil Aviation Authority who were very quick to respond and assure me twice, that my proposed acivities are in full compliance.

Now, here's the thing. My only actual offence ever committed in six years of drone flying over my own back garden occurred the day I exceeded my usual very small flying area. It was the day I finally mastered the flying and spacial perception issues I'd been having well enough to fly a big figure of eight high up in the sky instead of the usual timourous hovering. ON a previous attempt I'd lost the same model to a gust of wind and inconvenient high tree, but having replaced teh copter and practiced a lot more this was my big day, where I could fly a bit further away and retain control. So I did. Briefly.

A couple of days later I had at my partners front door a policeman asking me a lot of questions which eventually boiled down to "someone thinks you are using your copter to spy on their kids". After getting shot of him and his stupidity, I screwed up my courage, and went door to door wth a questionaire/agreement form and canvassed my neighbours both who I already had informal agreements with, and a whole slew of new ones, and won myself an "agreed flying area" in some cases with "land away permissions" and "Photography" permissions, so as my competence and capabilty improved, I had places to do that stuff. I found that everyone was very positive about my drones, some were perfectly happy for me to get "nosy" if my proposed casual FPV flying showed backyard intruders. In practice what very little photograhy or vieiwing I have manged has been astoundingly good at NOT observing people or anything thing else in great detail, which is exactly how I like it. So. I've got my flying area sorted, peopel haev been unexpectively supportive, my little drones apparently aren't bothersome, more of a curiousity it seems. So I keep on flying like I told the policeman I would.

Until I make the foolish mistake a year later of calling my local Airfield. Now, I've both worked at that airfield as an aircraft engineer and flown in an out of it as a private pilot, and I'm not in it's zoen of influence legally speaking and I fly my little drones cautiously about a kilometer off set from the extended centre line of the runway, and we'ev co-existed wthout any incident for 4 years or so, but I want to test fly a bigger one, (which back then I could, legally) It's like a bright orange small football with the arms sticking out and I know it could be seen in the distance from the air to one side of a departing aircraft. There were already people flying drones irresponsibly, just starting to make the news, and although completely within my rights as tehy were at the time to make these flights without asking anyone for permission, it seemed almost a proffessional courstesy to make myself known to the airfield and ask if they'd like to be notified when  flew anything "visible" so that if soem timorous pilot in teh circuit made a rperot they coudl reassure him! (I really did, as a (lapsed) pilot that was the right thing to do... They responded by misquoting the law I already had researched and checked and told me to cease and desist immediately. I put them right, backed up by the CAA, won my right to fly then the "Gatwick drone incident" occurred. 

At 09:00 hours exactly teh day tehri ATZ was extended as a result of that hoax, the airfield wrote to me to say "NOW you really can't fly over your back garden you little oik" and I got into with them until the policeman rang me up to tell me that not only had someone accused me of "voyeurism" but now I'd pissed off the local airfield, and was BREAKING THE LAW and if I flew anything again in my back garden he could come and make entry and seize all my gear!! HE was EMPHATIC that he could and would do this.

Hence me wanting to make sure that now the C.A.A. have clarified that my tiny copters pose no risk to aviation, and hence are not covered by the reguations, I am now legally good to resume my flying. 

BUT if I do, will PC oppressive be back in force to enter my long suffering partners house to seize my gear? It's hard enough keepiing a long term relationship togetehr as an Autist as it is, having the old bill trampling through her house won't make that any easier at all.  

Was that enough clarification?

1. They often DO NOT run into harms way. Like the time when two of them had (presumably) one criminal bottled up in my litttle shop hed just broken into and "Went to look round the back according to witnesses allowing him to escape!" That's the only forst hand account of thsi sort of police hehaviour I have becuse it happend to me directly but i've collected several anecdotes form others that suggest they aint as brave and public sprited as they make out.

You post includes an element of "propaganda", enforced though paid advertising both overt, and in your T.V. programming. Reality, as a few here are trying to tell you, is somewhat different for the vast majorty of real people who have serious life altering interactions involving the police. And it needs to change.

When seconds count the police are usually minutes away, so much of the real heroic stuff is actually done by the public. I watched the police heroically tasering a distressed man outside my window at 3 A.M one morning, and that police person pressed the button, too often for my taste after any "fight" had left the man. In fact it appears that life itself had left him at one point....

I don't hate pur police by any means and recognise that on an individual level a great many of them ARE making huge personal sacrifices to "fight the good fight", but the original question POLICE. Do they serve us well? Does seem to have sparked some thought and discussion. For those of us who think they do not, it is a refreshing change to see some of the issues get a fair airing for a change.

I did nearly fifty years of trying to be as polite, helpful and compliant as possible. I think I finally snapped with the arson incident.

I appreciate you actually testing the assertions that some of us have made with your poll of 28. You did much better than I genuinely would expect with a random sample from working or otherwise respectable members of the general public. I've read and heard some right horror stories, that fit with my own experiences, and believed the problems I and others have experienced to be widespread. 

Lets see how this goes, onwards. It's the most interesting & balanced discussion I've seen about policing for a while. It's forcing me to re-examine long held beliefs about one aspect of life. I'd like to be less annoyed about the service I've received and more optimistic about future encounters, I really would. 

The odd part is that I've found myself receiving far better and more respectful treatment on the few occasions when I have actually been doing something wrong!

You're right, and I rue the day that happens. As a matter of interest I've done a straw poll amongst friends and acquaintances on this topic. Out of 28 people, only one has had a bad experience with the police (and that turned out to be her own fault because she went at them with attitude when they stopped her over a minor driving offence). That could be because the police actually aren't as bad as people try to claim or it could be because those I've asked are honest, upstanding citizens who behave well, either reason would back up the idea that they do a good, fair job in the main, unless provoked.

I've spoken, in the past, to another, now-ex, acquaintance who had had a run in with the law, was tapered, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police van. He wasn't happy. I listened to him tell me how coppers were all bent, he hadn't been doing anything, he hadn't tried to resist arrest etc, etc, etc. Then he casually mentioned he was holding a knife which he wouldn't drop, when asked, "because it wasn't a weapon, he was just preparing vegetables, and was still holding it when he answered the door, and he was in his own home". And that they "overreacted". Now, to me, if you're standing in front of a policeman with a knife in your hand, and they ask you to put it down and you refuse to do so, repeatedly. That would make them think you would use it as a weapon if you felt like it, and justifies being tazered!

To I Sperg now, if anyone had seen that particular altercation from their window, they probably wouldn't have seen the knife or heard the exchange clearly and could then come to the conclusion that the police were being heavy handed. This illustrates perfectly the fact that unless you're there in the thick of it, you have absolutely no idea what's happening and why anyone does what they do, just from observing from a distance. Also, admitting that you like to wind them up negates your assertion really. Try NOT winding them up and see what happens, you might be pleasantly surprised....

i'm not keen to argue. that is not true. you can win the discussion or be right or whatever it doesn't change my day or feelings. my goal was to offer a different perspective that maybe the police are not the enemy.

Well having our experiences reframed by someone who is not involved, DOES provoke a response!

Utter tosh. I'm sorry but that does not fit MY experience at ALL. In the case of the drones MY rights were trampled on repeatedly, with increasing levels of threat until I gave up trying to enforce them.

The guy I watched them taser 3 or 4 times into unconciousness was putting up no resistance, just complaining and crying about something and actually obeying the shouted orders as far as I could see from my window.

When I ran a secondhand shop and tried to "work with the police" as you suggest is possible, they could not have been less interested although they did try to intimidate and entrap me at one point.  

Your posts appear designed to provoke a response as you have now repeatedly accused those who have raised complaint of dishonest reporting. 

You are now already typing a reply before I've even finished editting/completing this entry! It's the price I pay for posting when I said I'd leave the thread alone, I guess. 

I'll go and read it but I won't reply. You have so far failed to prove that they serve us well. You use strawman arguments like "I don't buy it when someone says they have literally 100% bad experiences with police because there is always more to the story and no one wants to admit they were winding up the police." (for the slower readers I'll deconstruct this little gem) 

It's called a "strawman argument" because our protagonist sets up an imaginary person which in this case is the person who says they have had 100% bad interactions with the police. (Who ever says that?? Even I have had a couple of good interactions with the police, we all have met that copper who is genuinely doing a good job. THEY STAND OUT). This is a form of "misdirection" towards the mythical and (obviously unreasonable) complainant which slyly devalues the genuine testimony of genuine complainants.

I've already admitted that I deliberately and with malice of forethought like to "wind up the police" when they come at me hard, because frankly, a bit of verbal pushback is the citizens only legitimate defence, and even then you need swordsman like verbal skills, and an advanced knowledge of the law to pull it off. So this sentence in addition to the sly strawman argument is also factually incorrect, because in a previous post I've admitted to doing exactly what you say you never do. NOW, I'll go and read what you've written, but I am disinclined to argue or deconstruct any further, because you are clearly very keen to argue.

I'd rather be doing other things today, other than exposing slyly dishonest posting techniques, whilst the weathers nice. (I'd like to fly a bloody drone to be honest, but the stupid and oppressive people won that one. Until 2025 when the circumstances change in my favour...) 

There are treatises about how people like to misdirect people on internet forums, when they do not like the truth they are reading, but if you deconstruct their posts there will always be lies and false accusations against others embedded, just as in vesters posts above.

Now I'll include a primer for others into this fascinating area of dishonesty and obfuscation, grabbed at random from the internet. It seems to be reasonably comprehensive and accurate, based on the speed read I just made.

 https://archive.is/9Vcub

There are other far better resources, for those who want to get good at countering sly disinformation which is currently coming from mainstream sources in increasing quantity as well as being injected wholesale into the field that used to be called Science. I've had to get up to speed in this stuff, because I've been doing a little bit of work in the physical sciences, in the areas where we are more ignorant. Sorting out those who genuinely have a little more insight than a rock, from the dishonest the mad and the bloviators requires one to learn to separate the genuine from the sly. I also did ebay scam busting on a voluntary basis for about a decade. 

Let's just not lie and misdirect eh?

There is no design to provoke a response. You keep capitalizing MY experience. You having a complete history of negative experiences provokes my brain to think maybe the catalyst is you. That is all.

We have all met people who blame the world for everything bad and take no responsibility so when people say 100% of the time its someone else in the wrong. I tend to zone out as no one is completely exempt is blame.

Utter tosh. I'm sorry but that does not fit MY experience at ALL. In the case of the drones MY rights were trampled on repeatedly, with increasing levels of threat until I gave up trying to enforce them.

The guy I watched them taser 3 or 4 times into unconciousness was putting up no resistance, just complaining and crying about something and actually obeying the shouted orders as far as I could see from my window.

When I ran a secondhand shop and tried to "work with the police" as you suggest is possible, they could not have been less interested although they did try to intimidate and entrap me at one point.  

Your posts appear designed to provoke a response as you have now repeatedly accused those who have raised complaint of dishonest reporting.

we will get to a point where police will wait for the crime to be finished before offering help and get to a point where they will avoid getting involved because they will be blamed if something goes wrong. 

even firefighters to get bricks thrown at their trucks because they get a negative reputation. I dont buy it when someone says they have literally 100% bad experiences with police because there is always more to the story and no one wants to admit they were winding up the police. Ive seen the police monitoring videos where they stop people in their car and the people provoke the police as much as possible. being snide to police is far from being compliant and just letting everyone get their job done then moving on. 

as you said your job/hobby results in many encounters with the police and not once did you get treated badly probably because you complied and didn't try elevate the situation. 

your drone use may be completely legal but some people like to push their rights and infringe on others often pushing situations to be worse. im not here to try to convince you of anything other than i am personally sick of this narrative of the world is against everyone. people who have had no interaction with this police end up with a bad story about them. 

if we work with the police they work with us thats all. its not hard. ive never innocently been walking down the street then attacked by the police but it seems like those who hate police have stories like that and it just doesnt sound realistic. they always skip out part of the story or misrepresent the actual event.

"I see this as a customer service problem, where we are paying for a service and receiving little or nothing for our money, and worse, the people delivering the poor service think that THEY are the heroes in the story!".

I think you'd soon see a real difference, for the worse, were the police not doing their job. How you can say that they do little or nothing is beyond me. When there's an emergency, THEY are the ones running TOWARDS it, whilst everyone else runs away from it! Just think of the Manchester bombings or the London terrorist attacks. Even on an average Saturday night, THEY'RE the ones in the middle of all the fights and drunken brawling in the city centres, whilst the rest of us are tucked up safely at home. Every time they're called out they have no idea what they're going to be facing, yet they go, time and time again, ON OUR BEHALF. Even just attending a domestic dispute can mean they end up facing a maniac with a knife. Criminals (and even Joe Public) are becoming increasingly armed with not only knives, but with firearms, whilst the police have little more than a can of pepper spray and a nightstick. 

PC Andrew Harper - killed whilst trying to stop the theft of a quad bike.

PC Keith Palmer - killed trying to stop a terrorist.

PC David Phillips - killed by a stolen truck whilst on road traffic duty.

PC Andrew Duncan - killed by a speeding driver he was trying to stop. 

PC Nicola Hughes - killed in a gun and grenade ambush

PC Fiona Bone - killed in the same incident as PC Hughes, above. 

PC Ian Dibell - killed whilst OFF DUTY, trying to help a neighbour.

These are just a handful of those that have been killed or seriously injured for JUST DOING THEIR JOB. A job most people wouldn't even consider doing, these days. And whilst attending seemingly innocuous incidents, for the most part. 

So yes, they ARE heroes, though most of them wouldn't say they were. Without them our society would be anarchy. 

In my plentiful interactions with them over the years, I've found that if you're pleasant to them, they're pleasant to you. If you go at them with an attitude, or become defensive over simple questions, they won't be happy (no one would, facing stroppy members of the public, day in, day out. Being on the receiving end of insults, being spat at, having things thrown at them.... just for doing the job we want them to do!). 

I've been burgled several times, I've been assaulted by an ex-partner, I've been in a car accident, I've been stopped for having a tail light out, I've been stopped for having no MOT (pre-computer days. I had one but they thought I didn't), I've had countless interactions with them as a professional photographer, taking photos on the streets or other areas where members of the public or security guards have complained. Not once have I had a bad experience. Not once have I been treated badly. During the times I've needed their help, they've excelled themselves, often going above and beyond (during the second burglary the guy leading the investigation actually came round to see us twice when he was off duty, just to update us).

So no, I don't think they do little or nothing for our money!

I've spent my life looking at things AS THEY PRESENT THEMSELVES TO ME, and credible witnesses who are not me. You clearly have had either a different experience, or you process it very differently. And my poor quality experience is ongoing. They can send policemen around to my house to threaten me about my then fully legal and compliant drone use, because someone has suggested that I MIGHT be doing a crime, they can send SIX policemen to tell me my small fire is causing too much smoke, but when Romanian children having smashed down 30 feet of my perimiter wall and smashed up 1/2 a meter of bottles I'd painstakingly collected and are now "playing" in my half erected building endangering themselves, (I'm not even angry about the damage, kids will be kids, but one of them is gonna get hurt soon enough). I've got a shedload of witnesses, this is definitely happening to me and my poor bit of land and I've not ASKED FOR IT, except by going to work on the land and painstakingly picking up and sorting out the rubbish. The policemen who previously was so keen and powerful over my drone flying suddenly becomes "unable" to act.  

So no, not just 30 years ago. I've received a continuously poor service which is ongoing today.

As has my elderly neighbour who was beaten to the extent that I now hear his walking stick all the time, whereas previously he did not have one, who he tells me the system is also treating as responsible for his own assault! I now have to mow his grass, which I'm happy to do, but not happy to HAVE to do, because he cannot any longer, and he used to enjoy it. I try to do it to his standards which are higher than my own. The criminal beat him so bad just whilst he was getting off the bus! Mind you he used to work alongside the police as an ambulance person, and he has his own tales of our policeforce on the job.

(This is a real effort, giving enough facts for the transparency and truthfulness to be obvious, but not enough to identify myself or the people in the worked examples, which would of course violate the forum rules, and I've already survived one attempt to have me booted off this forum, for countering police propaganda & outright disinformation with facts and examples..) 

I'm waiting for people to fill this thread with actual examples of when the police saved the day for them. I've been told by people who hold your perspective that I have a "bad attitude" which makes me draw false conclusions for so long now that I can't help feeling it must be true, so I keep asking a variant of this question to different people, and I meet many like yourselves who will passionately defend them, but I never hear real examples of the brave police actually making things BETTER for anyone. Indeed, I almost unfailingly in the real world hear of similar experiences to my own!

I see this as a customer service problem, where we are paying for a service and receiving little or nothing for our money, and worse, the people delivering the poor service think that THEY are the heroes in the story! 

I feel like I've been a victim of "gaslighting" for the first twenty years, until the reality of the police/public relationship finally became undeniable. I was lucky, the realisation came to me slowly, it came to Phillip Alcorn all in a rush one evening, and the massive cognitive dissonance he experienced that evening, broke him psychologically. 

3 groups: Police, criminals and their mutual Victims. US. The Police and Criminals I have met and "interviewed" for want of a better word, view each other with respect, and both groups look at the "civilians" with contempt.

Here, where I am surrounded by Autists although there may be agendas there will also me a lot more honest & transparent people, because that is the "Vulnerability" we carry.

It's also a lot harder to suppress the truth or promulgamate a lie with the consent of this particular audience... 

I've clearly got a strong bias, so I'm going to try my best to leave this thread alone now, and let other voices be heard for the month or so the poll has left to run. I'm also holding off trying to look at the scores until July 4th, when I'll get some actual, independently supplied numerical information to help me re-evaluate my own position.

I assume I get to see the votes, when I place my own vote?