The thin blue line - an ex-copper writes

Britain is very fortunate in the quality of the vast majority of our police officers.

Any organisation as large as the police will sometimes make mistakes and the quality of leadership is still paying the price for the consequences of the lamentably successful attempt by Blair's "New Labour" project to introduce politically correct attitudes from the top down into every organisation they could reach.

Nevertheless the dedication and bravery of the vast majority of front-line police officers is amazing and far better than we probably deserve considering how they are all too often treated.

It's not a safe job. May police officers have laid down their lives in the line of duty.

Here in Cumbria we remember PC Bill Barker from Egremont, a hero who lost his life during an episode of flooding while warning motorists that a  bridge was unsafe and fell victim to the very danger he was warning people against.

As one of my school classmates pointed out on a recent post on this blog, another of our contemporaries at St Albans School, Francis Mason, grew up to become a policeman and died tragically young while bravely trying to prevent a bank robbery.

There is a very good piece in the Spectator by Rory Geoghegan who used to be a policeman but is now head of criminal justice at the Centre for Social Justice about the stresses and strains faced by police officers.

You can read it here.

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