'Ello, 'ello, 'ello...

Mark Polin gave his first interview to the Daily Post the other day.  It's clear from the result that he's very skilled at PR and - given the Police process generally - has probably enjoyed a good career as a bobby.  But the Police are in a very interesting situation when it comes to their job.

Ostensibly, the Police are required to uphold the law and nothing else, and it would be wonderful if things were that simple. But they're not.

Every single individual in North Wales has a different idea of what constitutes crime and what should be enforced. If that sounds rather sweeping, however, consider this: the same person who demands the death penalty for the drunken yobs making a row in the early hours is often the same person who exceeds the speed limit each morning because they're late for work, who 'forgets' to mention those few jobs for which he was paid in cash to HMRC, who condemns the driver in front for being a moron while he, himself hasn't yet learnt how to signal on a roundabout and who would never dream of 'shopping' a friend.

Of course, we're all guilty. We all break the law at least some of the time and there's a good reason for that. We actually have too many laws in the UK and most are written in a language not that far removed from Chaucer's. But there's more. On 15th October this year, John Baron MP asked “Answers to my Parliamentary Questions show that between 1997 and 2000 each page of primary legislation received on average 14 minutes of debating time. By the end of 2006 that figure had almost halved to just seven minutes. Will the Government therefore increase the amount of time available for scrutiny of legislation or introduce less but better legislation?”.

What Baron had picked up on was that the time allocated for the discussion of legislative items had halved in ten years, and the reason was - he believes - that the government is introducing an excessive quantity of new legislation.  The government simply creates too much,  and does most of it in a reactive fashion, all too often pandering to the whims of the tabloid press. All the criminal legislation, of course, has to be learnt and then enforced by the Police, which means that they spend a massive amount of time attempting to chase up things which never used to be illegal but which now are. Mark Polin enters the CC's role at a time when it's becoming increasingly politicised, horrendously over-burdened and when the public perception of the police in general has never been quite so low.  This in addition to the fact that many of us now no longer know when we're breaking a law, there's that many of them.  We wish him well, but he has a broad church of opinions with which to deal.

Meanwhile, little Jonny's just nicked some apples.....