... from Ian Blair's speech to the Police Superintendents' Association discussing the proper response to make- believe terrorists. There are many references to 21st century in this speech. "Principle 3 - is an acceptance that the type of interactions with the public in the 21st Century and the kind of duties that the police undertake in the 21st Century, as required by increasing volume and complexity and deepening customer expectations, require a different and widening skill-set and aptitude than those normally possessed by those who are drawn to be police officers. Police officers are professionals working in a field which straddles many other professions. They need high levels of legal, procedural and technical knowledge, complex problem solving skills, leadership and emotional intelligence. Police officers are not necessarily the best people at customer relations; police officers are not necessarily the best people to work in communication service centres; police officers are not necessarily the best people at carrying out repetitive tasks; police officers are not necessarily the best people as intelligence analysts. There is room for change.
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- a service which is bold enough to explore whether certain functions can be carried out by people on short-term contracts, partially warranted only to do a certain type of the police job, whether that be surveillance officers, underwater search, financial investigators, mounted branch or, even, firearms officers. Could we bring staff directly in from the armed services, give them a certain amount of basic training and then clear instructions as to their firearms duties, so that they would be partially warranted, on a fixed-term contract, to undertake only those duties? The question then becomes how bold we wish to be and how far we can go before we lose the flexibility of officer deployment and make jobs less appealing and less interesting, which would be a mistake.
interesting one example - they were military helicopters at Auchterader |
