Grant Shapps and the collapse of society
Grant Shapps, Conservative MP, has released research revealing that 5 out of 6 police officers have been assaulted in the past 5 years. He was on Today this morning claiming that this meant that society was crumbling and that we should all take a long hard look at ourselves:
“It is only by rebuilding a sense of social responsibility that we can hope to tackle this truly deep-rooted problem. Preventing our officers from being assaulted requires a change in attitude towards our police.”
It’s certainly not good that a lot of police officers have been assaulted but, frankly, this discovery is equivalent to the shocking news that most soldiers have been shot at. The police spend their time arresting (mostly) guilty people; criminals, shockingly, don’t like being arrested and tend to fight back. Would Mr Shapps be happy if we had only gentleman criminals who, when caught, exclaimed “Bother! Well it’s a fair cop guv’” and handcuffed themselves? If you’re going to bemoan the collapse of society at have some relevant data before you do it.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:10 am
That makes you the first person I’ve come across who isn’t surprised that a police officer is attacked at 20 mins then.
Says a huge amount about society and I’ve raised the issue because it’s obvious that we need to think about how we improve society, not just pass more and more legislation which deals with the symptoms, but ignores the underlying problems.
Best, Grant Shapps MP
April 26th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
You have to admit it does say something about society when there has been a 5% rise in assaults on police in the past 3 years. I think part of it is respect for police but more importantly it suggests to me that police are more frequently dealing with violent crime and violent offenders. This is the deep rooted problem.