How we laughed back then at this prophetic sketch by Fry & Laurie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6CkltzGAxY

Now this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17246432

The story originally broke in The Guardian.....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/02/police-privatisation-security-firms-crime

Who can be as selective as they want to be when reporting controversial policy. Not unlike some other newspapers regularly quoted on here.

Interrogation of both articles provides the clues..

Guardian..


BBC


That said we do need to be on our guard clearly something is afoot.

1. Companies running such private police would have enormous potential to abuse that power for their own ends, your house sits near a plot needed for a new Tesco's? "morning Sir Tesco police" , would be equivalent to giving large companies the power of the medieval barons and land owners (not that they don't almost have that already anyway!).

2. We already pay for the police, a little something called council tax, and there is at least an ability to challenge the local council over costs etc under normal democratic due process.

3. Police forces need closer integration not more fragmentation, we have a patchwork of different Police authorities all of whom make different buying decisions and different equipment, look at the cars and other equipment the Met uses and they can be very different to Greater Manchester or Glasgow, which ok can be an advantage in some cases fitting equipment to suit local needs but can be unhelpful in others where they need to inter-operate with other forces.

4. Private businesses have to make a profit, stands to reason they will hire anybody, and the cheapest, before the Metropolitan Police was set up London had night Watchman who were usually old retired guys who were pretty inaffective (the original "Old Bill" if you like).

5.Most police authorities have a basic training regime which takes several months and still Police officers get themselves in hot water, whats going to be the result of private police who will probably get 2 weeks training at most, no first aid training etc.(police are often first at accidents quite often, not trained to paramedic standard but most at least know how to slow bleeding till the paramedic does arrive).

This is the result of the gradual desire to cut costs for policing first with PCSO's and now with this initiative.

Both Germany and Holland have security employed by the local council's to take care of petty crime, vandalism and vagrants etc. but in the UK we already have PCSO's for that kind of thing, can't see the likes of G4S doing it any better or cheaper

I am more than happy for non uniformed staff who are directly employed by a Police authority to take over back room duties and even some front line work. Surrey Police have used 'civvies' to collect data from burglaries for years, rather than tie up a proper copper. However, outsourcing essential/emergency services to private companies is completely different.

The Govt have bungled the outsourcing of the forensic science service and London's fire brigade came close to a huge embarrassment before Xmas when the private company who supply their fire engines, ladder and hoses (and emergency contingency service) went bust.

There is also the issue of security - making sure data held by the Police (from PNC data to do with car owners, right through to criminal records and terrorist information) is firewalled & kept away away from PLCs and their directors (who may not even be British)

Come on dont lets mince words, I speak as somebody who as an 8 year old moved out into the Country from Fulham, then it was busy like a new town, Employers like Nestle's, Kraft Cheese, HMV, the Gramaphone company, Eairy Aviation, houshold names, that have been priced out of the area, due to the close proximity of London Airport that daily had hundred pass through, except they stopped! it was buzzing, traffic came to a standstill, so they built a byepass, and that grinds to a halt as well, even today they are grabbing every open space to build even more dwellings, it is choking too death, and still it cant be seen, they are building more and more dwellings on green belt land, and before you say they cant, a way around has been found, by building liesure facilities, leaving for a few years the replacing them on other green field sites, thus leaving them to be demolished to create yet another brown field site, for example the swimming pool, Hayes Stadium, the football club, where does it end? south side of the Uxbridge road once open as the shelters were underground, now high rise flats, how long before the flood plain along the river is built on?

_________________
Its not always the biggest and the bestest, its them that make the least mistakes.

I agree with Geezer466; the media can be very selective as to how, or even if, it reports a story. Some media outlets are more selective than others; and none are totally reliable. So far we have two somewhat differing and incomplete reports as to what is really going on as far as the privatising of the police is concerned.

I also agree when SOT says that some of the back-room duties can easily be carried out by non-uniformed private employees. The problem is, any successful move to introduce cost cutting privatisation into the police will inevitably increase the calls for ever more privatisation. We have abundant evidence as to where privatisation of essential 'services' can lead – to foreign ownership. Foreign ownership means loss of sovereignty over that service; foreign ownership of the police really would be the end of Britain.

I believe that there are some very real problems within the police service/force, where political correctness has been a higher priority than preventing crime and prosecuting the criminal. There are indications that the police have adopted a role that is more at enmity with the law-abiding general public than being a genuinely protective public servant. The police have taken on the threatening appearance of a paramilitary organisation. Add privatisation and the greed factor to this mix, and the end-game is anybody's guess as to the final outcome.

Sadly, because none of the three main political parties are concerned with the opinions of the electorate, no account of public opinion will be taken as to what the final form of the police should be. For sure, there will fabled cries of 'unfair' from the apparent Left, and 'too expensive' from the pseudo-right; but neither side is really concerned with truth, or justice. Globalisation is the aim of all three political parties.

The simple truth, it probably matters very little whether the police are privatised or not, because Britain has effectively had her sovereignty handed over to foreign agents - both Parliament and our courts are now subservient to those agents. As recent news reports show, neither the courts nor Parliament can decide whether to deport an enemy agent from our shores when a foreign 'court' says "NO".