Published on 12, July, 2020
Recently in another thread, a few of us started talking about our experiences at the hands of our police force, in the "Autistic son" thread and the discussion took an unexpected turn, where a number of people stepped up including myself, to pass comment.
Subsequently, an organised assault was made on several of people's accounts, where our complaints and refusal to accept the reframing of truth offered by the pro-police faction was said to be "abuse". I've since spent a fair bit of time talking to my mostly NT friends and acquaintances about their experiences, with our modern police force, and it seems my experiences are not so unique.
Most people I know have very little involvement with the police, and generally are complimentary UNTIL they DO need some help and find out how it really works. Here of course, we are more likely to have interactions with them directly, so there is a greater pool of experience available.
SO PLEASE:
Down vote me. if you believe they serve us well, and up vote me if your think they serve someone or something else who isn't us, the paying public.
If you have any stories (good or bad) which you wish to share, feel free to do that, below.
Tried to do a POLL as requested & got an incomprehensible error message and today is not a day where I feel like struggling with someone else's software. (Having used & administrated forums by https://www.phpbb.com/ mostly, I'm not finding this one easy to work with at all).
Just up or down vote my OP using teh little up down arrows. Be careful though, once you've clicked on up or down, your vote is in and can be changed, but not undone.
It's a yes no question, and both the scores and voters are transparent to the audience.
if you have proof take the story to the media
yes where i live we have an ombudsman that deals with complaints
I have one which they ignore and don’t care they have nearly killed me, bankrupted and lied to the court
Have they ever been helpful in investigating major complaints with deaths eg Hillsboro
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?
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.
Dave if you are regularly having trouble with the police from being autistic it would be good to invest in some sort of health passport you can get one that the police will understand and treat you accordingly.
my link is the exact same as anyone else. just a regular civilian I dont have any special connection of any sort to the police but I like to take a step back and look at situations. If i told you every week i was stopped by police and treated badly you might start to question what i was doing and not believe me saying "i'm innocent the police are the bad guys"
not where i live
Ditto. I'm comitted to the idea of them as a public service, and sometimes will try and be helpful when neccesary, but the whole system they work under does not seem to serve US. That is my opinion based on substantial prior experience.
I live a scrupulously respectable and clean life, (You have to if you want to be in any position at all to "push back" and even obey the vast majority of the laws (and I'm pretty knowledgeable about law, now) but I look and act "wrong" it would seem, to man police officers. They just do not treat me with the respect they treat some other similar people, and they really are NOT on your side as a victim. They seem to believe you have "brought it upon your self" in some way, was what I inferred eventually after my second burglary.
You are right, best avoided until things change.
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?
My Moto is to avoid any unnecessary contact with the police.
Have you been "kettled" by any chance?
Well, yes.
Do you have any links to the police by any chance? We autistic people are easy targets for police as they interpret our unusual actions as criminal.
Difficult to charge the police with criminality and impossible to make a complaint that is looked at fairly.
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.
Yes, I can't help but be reminded of the recent interview I saw with Cressida ***. She is a prime example of a top down problem. How on Earth did someone of her inability ever manage to rise to that position? Ostensibly not through competence.
Good heavens! That sounds terrible.
Police caused my near death and bunkriuptcy for accessing scam website. CPS lied in court. I was genuinely dealing with intrusive thoughts therapeutically.