freeinfidel

London’s Metropolitan Police may soon be operating from large, fortress-style bases to which the public will have no access.
While community support officers may be based in local shop-type premises, where the rest of us will be allowed to enter, the bulk for the Met’s forces will be housed in centralised ‘warehouses’, firmly closed to the public but possibly including jail cells.

This is a dangerous move. Police forces, and the Met in particular, are vulnerable to a kind of elitist, isolationist mindset that can become a sort of siege mentality at times.

Within the force, those officers engaged in community work are often seen as ’soft’, or not doing ‘real’ policing. The Met is riddled with an atavistic, macho self-image that sees real policing involving hard men doing tough things. And this leads to the other form of isolationism - the habit of police officers to see the world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.

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