I heard him waffling away on the radio about scrapping Rangers v Celtic matches because of the trouble AFTER the games. He says there’s little during the matches but domestic violence and assaults have recently ‘grown arms and legs’ (another badly chosen metaphore since that usually means it’s all exaggerated.)
He's in charge of a police force with the remit to police the nation. It's not being policed. On the railways staff can't get coppers to attend incidents involving morons and when they do they just send the thugs off with a ‘word in their ear’.
They will escort 200 football fans onto trains and leave it to the guard on his own to police them back to their home towns. A case of ‘get them off our patch’ policing policy. Town centres are already no-go areas after 6pm for normal punters unless you want to chance a beating from packs of feral neds.
Yet, citizen Joe steps out to drive his car without a side light working properly and four traffic cops appear to detain him for an hour; and speed cameras ensure he never gets from A to B without the stresses of breaking some minor traffic law resulting in a massive fine and penalty points that push insurance costs up to stupid levels.
Miscreants, thugs and murderers are merely ‘sent on their way’ with not so much as a warning let alone a caution. Victims are blamed for being in the wrong place at such times and the big wigs sit behind their shiny desks looking for headlines.
They want to close down all boozers, stop night clubs opening until dawn, so hey, why not shut down play parks for kiddies cus that's where human interaction starts. But on the subject of OF matches they won’t broach the subject of sectarian schooling in Scotland: The very vats where bigotry and suspicion are fermented. The solution is always to cut down the whole tree that bear the fruits of society and not hack off the branches that cause the damage.
Take an OF match. 50,000 people attend a football match. 100 act like idiots AFTER the games so it's the usual story. "Ruin it for 49,900 law abiding citizens to save the coppers the trouble of rounding up the 'known' half wits and banging them up."
This offbeat Plod is just looking for a cheap headline.
It’s time for the police forces to enforce the law. Lock up the muppets on all the streets and let citizen Joe enjoy the freedom his forefathers fought for.
Botil