When I heard that the minimum entry level educational requirement for a future bobby on the beat, copper, plod, rozzer, filth, old bill, bizzie, pig, peeler, or woodentop was to now be a degree, my heart sank.
Firstly, this excludes many hundreds of applicants who weren’t privileged enough to go to university, and secondly, it removes the potential for sensible policemen, policewomen, and police non-binaries.
You see, one of the things that happens to those who work towards a degree is that they lose any type of common sense or instinct. It’s bizarre, but true. Somebody who has stayed in education to the point of obtaining a degree qualification, has exchanged that qualification for the stripping away of the natural abilities and sensibilities that policing requires.
With few exceptions, holders of degrees with no other experience of the world beyond education are a waste of space. This is true in most places, and tends to indicate why Government departments and agencies are in such a mess. They are being run by people with degrees and no experience of the real world.
Indeed, they tend to have a most bizarre vetting and interviewing process during which the already incompetent check out the candidate’s ‘competencies’. In the end all they can employ are other headless chickens. Nobody with the ability to observe, understand and rectify issues gets a job. Everybody is of an identical mindset and experience. There’s no new blood or new knowledge or new experience or new ideas or new solutions brought to the organisation. That’s why such agencies are in such a mess.
And that’s what worries me about the future of the police service in the UK. If it is filled with nobody but the tossers that infest other local or national governmental organisations, then we are fucked.
What the police actually need are savvy sensible new recruits who know what they are doing because they have lived in and come from the real world, not the false world of nothing but education. If policing, at least at the entry level, deals with the streets, then you need people from the streets. You need people who understand first hand the horrors of domestic abuse and drink and drugs and crime.
Those who have lived a sheltered life and only know the safe world of academia are generally not suited to be police. This requirement for a degree to police the streets needs to be stopped!
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