Security at any cost?

This article has made me think about the vast quantities of money that go into police operations. Basically £1.2million was spent supplying police officers to guard a cordon round a school. I have previously commented on Operation Overt which is currently costing the Met about £1million per week, much of it on overtime for other forces who are guarding their cordon. The cordon is vital for a fingertip search of woodland where nothing has yet been found. Except some stuff found by a member of public nowhere near where the cordon was anyway.

If anyone is interested, a source tells me that the current cordon in the woods is running on the basis that a few trees are sealed off and guarded while expert fingertippers search it. Then it is unsealed and a new bit of wood which was previously unguarded is given the same treatment. For those of you uninitiated in Scenes of Crime, this means that should anything be found in those bits of wood left unsealed prior to the search, the defendant could claim in court that someone put the stuff there after the incident in question. In layman's terms, this search is a WASTE OF TIME.

"WASTE OF TIME", police definition:

• A vital element of a modern day police service.
• It includes work involving vast amounts of manpower for the likelihood of little result.
• The work is undertaken primarily for the sake of public image.
• In general it means a PC somewhere not seeing his or her family for three or four months but getting several thousand pounds from Sir Ian Blair's pocket.

As a non-Met officer, I propose scrapping any operation funded by the Met and using the money to make my life better. This could include giving me a panda car that does not stall if the revs go above 3000. Or, Blandshire could spend the money encouraging people who do not want to be police officers to join up.

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