Why are police officers now afraid to do their job?

A court verdict last week on a Met Police officer will have a lasting impact on all police officers in the country. An impact that has seen officers lose confidence and virtually become too afraid to do their job.

For those of us who do not realise how vast this impact is, here is a scenario clearly set out by a serving Met Police officer to give us an insight.

It’s the middle of the night, you hear a smash down stairs.You get out of bed, run downstairs and see someone standing in your living room.You grab your phone and dial 999.

The police arrive a short time later and tell the ‘suspect‘ they’re under arrest on suspicion of burglary. The officer handcuffs the ‘suspect’ to stop them from escaping and escorts them to a custody suite.You’re happy because you called the police and they did their job.

But the next day you get a phone call telling you the ‘suspect’ has been released with no further action being taken against them and the arresting officer is now under investigation.

You’re shocked. Why?

You’re told that the arresting officer shouldn’t have assumed that the ‘suspect’ smashed your window and broke into your house, there’s no witnesses and the ‘suspect’ says the glass on their clothing was from when they stepped in through the already broken window. You’re told that the ‘suspect‘ was an innocent passer by and just popped in through the broken window to warm up from being cold outside and had not committed a criminal offence because they only entered as a trespasser, a civil offence.

No one saw them break the window, so the officer should have just told them to leave, as this was *obviously* a civil matter. But they didn’t, so instead the officer is being investigated for assaulting the suspect by handcuffing them because they should have known the matter was only civil and therefore they didn’t have a use of force under S117 PACE 1984.

Later that day, you see a headline saying that

‘The police need more training on how to deal with simple trespassing matters’.

But, your window’s still broken and you were terrified someone was inside your house without your permission, and you had no idea what they intended to do next, so were you wrong to be happy they were arrested?

Now you wonder, how we got here?

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