Report to the People
19th April 2004
Reliance on Reform
Joining
Bonnyrigg dentist, Mr D Kay and Enfield solicitor, Anderson Fiddler in the
unfortunate business name charts is a company which gets conned into releasing a
dangerous murderer onto the streets and calls itself, of all things,
“Reliance.”
If
even half of the press reports are to be believed, the company’s conduct in
recent weeks gives rise to some serious questions. What sort of training do their staff receive?
What sort of forward planning did they undertake? Why
did this not include finding out little details like where the courts are
situated? And how on earth could a
17-year-old ned outwit their guards?
Of
course, we can’t pretend that everything went without a hitch before Reliance
became involved. But two wrongs
don’t make a right. Any past
problems can never excuse the most serious incident on Reliance’s watch –
the mistaken release of murderer, James McCormick, famously branded an
“animal” by the trial judge. I
can only imagine the distress this must be causing his victim’s family.
But,
the fact that an individual company was apparently unprepared and unprofessional
cannot be allowed to undermine, as some would like, the whole drive to free up
police officers to police.
Although
police numbers have increased, if peripheral duties continually keep officers
away from the frontline, our community is not going to reap the benefit.
The
simple fact is this: if we want more police on the streets, if we want to see
moves such as the team of extra officers which has
been drafted into Larkfield and Braeside, then we can’t have PCs drowning in
paperwork or sitting handcuffed to a shoplifter in the back of a van.
And if we want to avoid that waste of manpower, we need to make better
use of those who can carry out some of an officer’s more time-consuming,
routine functions on their behalf. That
means more security guards ferrying prisoners to and from court; more civilian
administrative staff (we already have 18% more compared to five years
ago); and more community wardens.
This
seems a common sense move to me – and one which has worked in other emergency
services for years. If highly
skilled paramedics, for example, do not drive the ambulances which simply run
patients to outpatient clinics, why are highly skilled police officers needed to
run a service to and from Greenock Sheriff Court?
The
police officers to whom I speak didn’t join up to fill in forms, they joined
up to make a difference. I say let
them.
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