TRIGGERnometry - Are the Police Losing Public Confidence? - Chris Donaldson

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Chris Donaldson is a retired police officer who spent more than 30 years policing the streets of London. He has substantial experience as a firearms and public order commander, having been selected for the MET’s Territorial Support Group and SO19 firearms unit. Chris has also served as a Chair, Board Member, and youth mentor for several charities focussed on serving young people in the inner city of London. Follow Chris on Twitter/X: https://x.com/trojan1963 SPONSOR: Express VPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've seen this term being used again and again, which is two-tier policing. Do you think that is a fair criticism to make of the police at this point? I can see where the sentiment comes from, definitely. If you're looking at demonstrations, you'll never get consistency all the way through the country. All the different forces are never going to be consistent. British police officers are held accountable for American police action. It's not the same the other way around, that's for sure. I think firearms officers, a quarter of them have handed in their blue ticket.

Why is it fire arms officers have said we're not doing it? If they get into a difficult situation and they have to make a split-second decision, they don't feel they're going to be backed by senior officers. This is dangerous. Chris Donaldson, you are a go-to guy for all things policing in this country. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. Great to have you.

Always a pleasure. It's always great having you on. Obviously, a lot going on since we last. I think we spoke to you last during the pandemic, actually. So it's been a while. And there's been a lot of stuff going on recently to do with policing. What's your sense of just where we are in terms of the, the relationship between the police and the public, how people feel about it, how the police

feel about the way the public feel about them, you know, the state of the way that we think about each other? I think there's big differences now, isn't there? Because historically we've had a problem, or the police have had a problem with minority communities, yeah? And now there's another community that they seem to have a problem with, and that's conservative communities, yeah, which is totally different than the past. Historically, it was traditionally the West Indian black community had significant issues

when rights have gone on from that. Now we have right wing or right wing extremists, conservatives, whatever you like to call them. I've got a big problem with the police who they don't feel they're represented. So, yes, things have changed. Things have changed because of higher profile officers who've let the service down. You know, murderers, rapists have hit the headlines. and tarnished the police and everyone who works for the police, which is a shame. So they're fighting different battles, lots of different battles, more battles, in fact, putting

out more fires than they did in the past, definitely. And one of the things, like, you, I think you know us well at this point, you know that we're never coming at it from a pointing the finger at all police officers at all. And, you know, the Manchester airport situation is a very good example where I looked at the videos that have been released and I was like, there's no way this is the full context. There's no way a police officer is going to behave like this, knowing those cameras on him, unless there's been some kind of very serious incident prior to that. But so many people jump to conclusions.

Yes. Do you think, you know, you're obviously not in the service now. Do you think it's almost impossible now to do that job when anything you do is going to get clipped out of context, shoved on social media, and then you're in trouble? You have to realize that as soon as you join a place, you're very, very, very conscious that you've got this uniform. on and everyone's looking at you basically. Yeah, you know that as soon as you walk out first day. The difference is now, obviously, everyone's, everyone is a reporter, everyone's got a phone, yeah?

And you could get involved in an incident and quite often policing is messy. If you actually, one of those officers who actually get their hands dirty, you know, a lot who don't, yeah, but a lot of them who do get their hands, people who make the difference, these are people I'm talking about, yeah, who actually will intervene and trying to disrupt groups with knives and people who are actually making the pain for the rest of us. It can get very messy, yeah? And in isolation, it doesn't look good. The optics are not very, very good sometimes.

In the past, we'd have that little roland or whatever, and it wouldn't be on social media. Before you got back to the nick to make your notes and justify your use of force, you're already being judged on social media for whatever way they want it to be. And that's very hard to undo. It's very hard to undo,

but you have to be aware of it. And it's a different world that you live in. And it is difficult, but it's different. It's just different more than anything. You've got to know your powers very well. You've got very, very confident of your powers. And don't be shy to use them and know that this could look bad, but I'm going to adjust for it.

And more than anything is that my senior officers above me are going to, or the PR machine that should be supporting policing, are going to try and rebut whatever it is coming out. Often doesn't happen there. That's the thing is like a lot of the time you see police officers who I've never been in a situation where I've got a firearm. No. Someone's punched me in the face. Punched my colleagues in the face.

I'm having to restrain those people. Then and then the people who are supposed to back me, they're the ones throwing me under the bus. Well, this is a big problem to a lot of police officers on the ground level. I come from fire arms, probably all the backgrounds. There are two areas that get most people in police officers in trouble or the most difficult areas of policing, really. As far as public's concerned, anyway. And you want backing from senior officers. You want back in from senior officers.

And it matters. And not just senior officers, the PR machine backs police and should be counteracting things. Obviously, they're bound by legal restraints, whereas people on social media aren't, you know. So there is that concern. But, I mean, the Manchester issue is a difficult one, is a difficult one because that officer won't be judge.

If it's put it this way, if it was judged in the court of public opinion, he'd probably be fine, yeah? But he's not going to be judged in the court of public opinion, he's been judged by the law, yeah? So if individual parts of his action, he's going to have to justify, I'm not saying he won't in looking at the whole whole thing, but he's going to have to justify each action. That's what, that's the standard that a police officer is hanging. It's different.

I've not spoken to anyone who hasn't said. oh yeah, I think that was okay, you know, as a police, as a member of public, think, you know, what happened to him before. But that's not how he's going to be judged. He's going to be judged by the law. And each individual used to force he's going to have to justify. And I'm sure, you know, he may well be able to do it. Yeah. Chris, do you think part of the problem is as well is that people go on Twitter or X or whatever and they see an American officer behaving in a certain way? Then they'll see an American officer from another city in America, maybe even thousands of miles away behaving a certain way. Then they'll see a British officer behaving a certain way, and they will go, all police behave like this. Yeah, yeah, I understand what you're saying. Because what is quite unique, though, is the British society and British police officers are held accountable for American police action.

It's not the same the other way around, that's for sure. You travel to America, you know what I'm talking about. There's no way there's going to be a demonstration on the other side of the problem about police action in this country, no matter what it was, in all of my time in policing, no chance, yeah. However, whatever action happens in America is directly affects policing, indirectly or indirectly, affects police in here, rightly or wrongly, in my opinion.

Black Lives Matter, do you know, that was, you know, George Floyd, it was a police action on the other side of, well, it bore no resemblance to policing here, as far as I'm concerned, yeah? and yet we had to suffer the replication. So, yes, people do. But they often look at policing through an American eye anyway, through drama and films and stuff. Even when I've worked with writers with drama here,

and they're speaking in American language, I said to them, that's America. It's not how we talk about policing here. And they've got it, even they've got it in their heads. they've got in their head. They're talking Americanisms because everyone's got this vision of policing being in America. We're not armed which still astonishes

most police officers in the world actually. I still astonished that the majority of police officers here aren't armed and how brave they are to go out unarmed in quite a violent environment to be fair, an increasingly in violent environment.

So yeah, you can't talk about policing in the same way because it's totally different. The rules of engagement are totally different. Their backups are totally different. Their law is totally different. But people often do, you're right. And Chris, we've seen this term being used again and again, which is two-tier policing.

Do you think that the people's criticisms, which is normally white working class people, making this criticism, that they get treated harsher than if ethnic minority gets arrested. Do you think that is a fair criticism to make of the police at this point? No, not really, obviously not, because the pendulum is swung, isn't it? It used to be the black community can be around about being overplaced, and now it's the white community, or sections of the right community saying that,

they're unfairly treated. You can't win, really, can you? It's, I can see where the sentiment comes from, definitely. If you're looking at demonstrations, it looks like particularly right-wing or extremist or far-right, whatever label you want to give them. their demonstration seems to be, it appears to be more robustly policed than, say, for instance, the Black Lives Matter where everything has come from, everything stem from the way that was.

And the police have already admitted they made some mistakes. Police in Black Lives Matter maybe should have been harder. I think they should have. Have they admitted? I haven't come across this. Well, yeah, the senior officers have said they were mistakes made, particularly in taking the knee. That was a mistake. Yeah.

100% mistake. And I think that officer knew it was. because he put his colleagues in a big problem. And it entered into that area of politicisation, you know, and should you be involved in anything that kind of, and you shouldn't. I think I emphasised that way back in my first interview, that you need to stay, the police need to distance themselves from politics. And of course, people would argue that Black Lives Matter wasn't politics,

it was human rights, but I distinctly think it was a political movement. So, yeah, there have been mistakes made. And public order particularly is very difficult. For instance, you could look more aggressive when you're policing a smaller group of people who maybe turn up with a drink in them or whatever in them and have got people amongst them that are known for violence. You may approach that demonstration in a more aggressive manner or seem to be, you know, you're tooled up, you've got more protection

and you look more aggressive. When you've got 100,000 people who are predominantly, sober, yeah, but they've got, you're dealing with a different dynamic, which is signs that are offensive or gestures that are offensive. Sometimes it's better to slow time arrest them, yeah? It's better to pick and choose your time to arrest them through, identify them through facial recognition and maybe slow time arrest those people. People want to see that batter and go in because you did it to us, you know, that kind of thing. It doesn't work like that. And it's more than two tears of police and this, there's, there's, there's, multi-tears of policing. You can, you know, depending on your, the intelligence to get, the resources, all kinds of things, factors go into a briefing, which are all public documents if they can be, you know, interrogated. And the briefings that you get before you go into one of these demonstrations are filmed, yeah. So everyone knows, it's no secret. No one's going to say, right, we've got the right right, we've got right, boys, girls, get stuck into them, you know? No one's going to, no one ever said

that. No one of us said, right, we've got some slight left-leaning demonstrators here. We need to back off them because we believe in what they believe. No one says that at any briefing. But I can see the perception. I can see the perception because the media, and your algorithm feeds you what you believe already, remember, you know? So it certainly looked, the optics weren't good in some of the right wing moves. But I can understand that on the ground the operational decisions they were making, you know, because it's easier to go into a crowd of 100 and extract people than it is to a crowd of 100,000, you know? Well, for me, the comparison would be not so much, look, the BLM thing and your point about,

say, pro-Palestine protest, where you've got, like you said, 100,000 people. I understand that while actually in some situations it might be desirable to communicate that certain types of behaviour is unacceptable, you don't have enough police officers to go in there and do it. I get that. But what we had prior to the recent riots was the situation in Leeds, where people in a minority community were burning things down, burning down buses, etc, etc. They didn't get the same treatment. That's what people were pointing. Yeah, yeah, I can understand that. And it's like, well, it's like football matches, isn't it, the inconsistency in a VIA and a light level? You'll never get consistency all the way through the countries. All the different

forces are never going to be consistent. They've got different resources. They've got different experience. You don't know who's on the ground available at a time. You don't know who the governor is making the decisions to go in. And you can easily find inconsistencies in any organisation easily. And the policing is out there and it's more public than most. And everyone would want to see people who break the law be dealt with on the same level, you know, go in and arrest them. They're burning things. So I don't care what colour. I've never cared what colour. I've never worked with any public order officer who were particularly concerned about the colour of the law breakers, not at all. They're trained to deal with, you know, when you're, when you're, you've

volunteered to be a public order officer, which is a higher level of fitness, high level of scrutiny, and you've, you've passed tests to do it, and you're extracted from your normal duty and you're, and you'll lose a lot of your own public time, personal time, you don't get to a demo, I think, oh, you know, but they are blacks, so we need to keep off them. It's about, the governors above to direct that group. That's what I'm getting at, though, Chris, because I don't think, look, speaking to people, I think lots of people are frustrated with policing in this country. They're frustrated with crime not being investigated.

We talked about this last time, in burglaries, all sorts of things. And increasingly also, and this isn't a policing issue, but a lot of, when the government goes, you know, we've got to make sure we're prosecuting rape, right? A lot of people who don't have a good case against them get taken all the way to the court just so they can take a box. All of that's going on, people are frustrated. I don't think most people in this country, is my sense at least,

are annoyed with ordinary police officers. No, no, no. I don't think so at all. But to a lot of people, this is really the question, right? You say no one turns up to a public demo or whatever, thinking, oh, these guys will go in harder or whatever. I suspect that's true. I totally accept your point.

But in terms of the way many people see the entire structure of society, where we have diversity initiatives, coming out of every orifice and all of this other stuff going on. The question is, is there one of these people with a rainbow land yard sitting in the commander's office somewhere going, you know, Kyrgyzama or, you know, Rishi Sunak, whoever, has told me we need to crack down on this? You know, let me give the orders so that we really make sure we do our job this time.

No, I don't know about the landyards, but I can say you... But you know what I mean, don't you mean? But I... There is politically interference, 100%. physical interference. There are phone calls between senior officers and politicians

or people in power asking them what their actions are, put it that way. What are you doing about this? Absolutely. It's been said by the Inspectorate. One of the Inspectorate's findings was undue political interference.

A lot of senior officers or senior commanders are saying they feel under pressure from political, significant political beings. So yes. But then that hasn't really changed. I mean, if you go back to the Iranian siege where the commissioner was summons to the home office to give

what you can do. There's no difference, really, but it's just a little bit more overt now, I think. There's no way your commissioner without having to answer to the mayor or the home office. And I don't think anyone would expect any less. What my worry is, and I can't really evidence it, is that they've been undue, sometimes they've been unduly. They feel too much pressure from political. And if that political personality is not entirely honest or has got some other motives, put it less well, dishonest motives, then it's not, it doesn't make policing look that good, does it? Because

policing is there, the police, those people behind that, those decisions aren't going to stand up and say, oh, sorry, it was me. The police officer, the commissioner is going to have to stand and front it out and take responsibility for whatever they've done. Because a lot of people are frustrated because they will point to, you know, certain groups who have been allowed to, in their eyes, get away with behaviour. And then they'll go and they'll point to a case like the grooming gangs, which I think a lot of this anger and frustration stems from, if I'm being honest, where they feel those communities, understandably, feel betrayed by the authorities and the police.

Right. Yeah, I can know those gripes have been going for a long time and it's well documented that it could have been dealt with definitely better by the police. 100% and those people should have been brought to justice. But they're more than that, isn't it? I mean, going back to the 80s, there's a lot of, there's been a tension up in the north of England, particularly and some communities between the white community and the Asian community, definitely. I know that. I've witnessed it. However, the grooming gangs, you know, there were mistakes made 100%. There are grooming games of not just Asians who don't meet justice. I can tell you that for a fact. But that particular angst was going to run and run. And until there was a satisfactory engine, some people made political gain out of it, definitely. I can see that the very sad murders of the three girls

up in Southport was horrible, horrible shocking. But it got overrun then by the asylum issue, the immigration, the migration issue. No, everyone forgot about the girls, which is really, really sad, really sad. But it was a tension that was building, obviously.

It could see it from decades, not to. It was a tension that it was building. And I don't think the truth of the actual incident matter It was just going to be something, wasn't it? If it wasn't that, it was going to be something else. And yeah, you have to be, as a policing, not getting into the politics of it, but it's policing. You have to show an even hand,

and it's really hard to show an even hand, especially with social media, because I can show, if you say it's black, I can show you said it was white sometime, you know. So if social media aren't against you, then you have to take control of your image, I think. I think the police need to get on the front foot and actually get out.

Sometimes they do. Some individuals, it's left to individuals, to clarify different actions. And what that didn't happen actually, by the way, this is the facts, yeah. Not everyone looks for the facts because you just want to believe what you want to believe sometimes, don't you? But I think the police need to get a grip of their PR machine and get out there and support. Clarify incidents as far as they can quickly as they can within the law, because obviously with that particular... that particular incident, the assailant was described differently than it actually was,

wasn't they? And they wanted to say it's not what you think it is, but they couldn't leave him because of his age. Yeah? So they were restrained. So that time was delayed because of the age and the restraints within the law. However, they need to get a grip, I think. They need to get a grip of their PR machine. And not just for the sake of the public, who want clarification in these.

things for the sake of the officers who have to deliver their dreams yeah they need to support them quickly because if I'm not a if I'm a officer who just thinks I like being a police officer but I don't want to be labeled this or that if I just make put an effort in and and I arrest them and I'm not gonna do it I'm just gonna back off and the figures have replicated that don't they they're not there's not as many arrests not many stop-and-search and these people are getting away with literally murder sometimes when they should have been intervened

And that's because of more confidence, I think, low confidence. And it also speaks like you were saying as well to this relationship with the public. Do you think part of the problem is that the public don't understand what it's like to be a police officer? I think the public's perception of what it's like to be a police have comes from drama, if I'm honest. And at a moment, it doesn't depict the police very well. I'm not blaming drama because I like drama and I quite often advise on drama. But, yes, 100%. There is no Hill Street Blues anymore.

You know, there's no bill. There's no realistic depiction of police policing, really. You know, when I say realistic, they're both dramas, but they got to the core of what it was like at a day-to-day basis of being a police officer, which is hard. It is hard doing early slates and nights, long shifts, and then taking one, the caseloads,

detectives having really an awful lot of caseloads. after them. If they took one in the village, obviously you get a gold-plated service, but they've got lots on their plate. They're trawling through hours, hours of CCTV. They're quite often inexperienced, because the experience is a big problem in the police at the moment. So, yeah, it's a tough job that you have to be dedicated to, and some people just think, you know, it's too much. Now, I'll go home, I'm all over social media as a racist, and I'm not. I'm just trying to do my job. So maybe I'll do something else, you know? So, yeah, it's a big challenge at the because we need good people to be police officers.

And I think part of the problem as well, and correct me if I'm wrong, is a lot of this stems from Theresa May stint as Home Office Secretary, where I think it was 20,000 police officers she got rid of and 18,500 support staff. What impact did that make on the police and their ability to deliver? Well, yeah, it was a major blow to policing, but that was Australia. That was her excuse for it. I think it wasn't, Theresa May's attitude. towards the police didn't help either. It wasn't just the cuts.

George Osborne and the Home Secretary at time decided that they could cut police in. It was without any effect, and public services got cut, not just policing, public services got cut. And Theresa May's attitude, when she was warned at a Federation conference that, you know, we have challenges particularly in and around terrorism, and she said there were cryomorph, and then obviously within a few, within a year, I think it was, there was the 7-7 incidents and the terrorism incidents. They're understaffed and they need to be staffed. They need to be refunded, not defunded, but the police need to be refunded quickly

because we're all going to be unsafe. Yeah, we need more. They need the police stations, we've realised now, actually, people do like a police station in their community. Yeah? So we need to rebuild them. We need to get them back up and money. We need to replenish.

Not the targets. Yes, we've got a hole of policing, but we need to get good people. police officers. One bad police officer, as we found out, can tarnish the whole of the reputation of a lot of people. And it takes years. And it's going to take years to recover from the last one. Yeah. So good police officers, I don't care what color or sex or religion they are. Just good police officers, they need to go out, people who are committed to a challenge because it is a challenge. That's what got me in. I could have done many other things. What was I doing as a 19-year-old black kid from East London joining the police that allegedly was, you know, racist. No, because

I thought policing's worth doing. And I like a challenge and I don't like boring jobs. So I did it. And there are lots of people out there who do it. I know I speak to lots of people, intelligent people, driven people who want to be police officers. We do need them. We need them to take that challenge up. We don't need them to be labelled and castigated every time they do in action. And I know most members of the public look at people, well, you're Yeah, they deserve that. Yeah, but unfortunately, they're not there when they're in court. And at the moment, there's a big purge internally of police officers who are falling slightly below the standard on an occasion and getting thrown out and getting harshly treated.

And that's trickling through the service, you know. Sorry to interrupt you, Chris. What do you mean by that? Well, at a moment, obviously, there have been concerns raising standards. That was the thing. winning back trust and confidence. And the political powers to be, believe that winning back trust and confidence

in the public is showing them that they're throwing out police officers for sometimes minor incidents. That's not the way to win back trust and confidence. I know, I believe that, yeah? The way to ring back trust in was where my car went missing. Oh, you got it back and you got the person arrested.

Oh, okay. I got raped. Did you convict that? Yes, I did. are good. That's how investigating crime effectively

will win back trust and confidence being a good police officers being robustly treating people who break the law stemming the flow of violence in knife crime

that's how you win back trust and confidence it's not by throwing out people for dodgy WhatsApp messages yeah and particularly if those officers are good that trickles through the service and you think wow well hold on a minute

So you're going to interrogate my WhatsApp messages when I sent a message when I was drunk at 2 a.m. in the morning and you're going to throw me out because I've done that. So I think the balance needs to be struck. And I'm not, I know for a fact a lot of officers are not happy the way they've been treated internally. Definitely not. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list. Not one more. With Carvana, it is. Just go to Carvana. Carvana.com, and to your license plate or Vin, and get a real offer down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises, just an experience you can trust. Like your offer? Accept it. Schedule pickup, and we'll come to you with a check in hand. Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today.

Pick up fees may apply. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because it speaks to actually a bigger issue, which goes beyond the policing, which would just seem to be slowly becoming a country where our thoughts are now being police, so to speak. And that's WhatsApp messages. I mean, there's a private communications. As far as I'm concerned, yeah. You know, so if someone behaves inappropriately in their job,

that's a perfectly good reason to be dealing with them. What do you make of the fact that the police are increasingly involved in people's thoughts, people's opinions, people, you know, praying outside of abortion clinics, all of this stuff that just seems to me to be, I see that as does going in an oral direction. I don't know if you do. Well, it's, yeah, it's not right. It's not something the police have been getting involved. Obviously, laws are made, and they have to,

and sometimes they encourage to enforce those laws, as we know, yeah? It's not always just the police, is it? It's the criminal justice system. Oh, of course, yeah, of course. But, yeah, it seems like a total waste of time and resource, in my opinion, it is, but they will argue that those things are influential. Going back to Southport, you know, a couple of dodgy, tweets

inflamed the situation some people weren't even in the country and they inflamed the situation I think a couple of them were one of them in a holiday in Cyprus and someone was sat in in Pakistan but it managed to flame it or you know to inflame it so yes

and no yes things like that which incite riots are really important and they should be prosecuted as far as I'm concerned but praying outside different you know these things I think distract the police from their core duty And you mentioned as well, Chris, that, you know, I know that this is how you feel about recruiting officers and it's irrelevant what their skin color, sex, et cetera, is. But there has been a big drive recently.

And one of the things, look, I hate asking this question because it makes me sounds like some kind of misogynist, but I've seen a lot of incidents where a female officer has been unable to, you know, has put, frankly, herself or her colleagues or members of the public in danger because physically she's not. up to dealing with a six-foot-four violent criminal. It's not to say all women are banned at the job at all, no, no, no, at all. Nobody's saying that. But this is just a lot, I'm just telling you that's what a lot of people are saying. I said an interesting thing that you've brought up there because I've seen some of them clips and you think, oh, you know, maybe, you know, that could have been dealt with different or that more robust and I would like to be more physically fit.

However, I can tell you for a fact, 30 years placing. I had a, I had a partner for four and a half years on a territorial support. the riot squad, but it was a female, yeah? And I'd go into pub fights, and it still happens now. Bizarrely,

not bizarrely, it's an inherent goodness in us. Men, particularly, won't hit a woman. Even the most hardened men. I've seen women defuse situations in policing that no man could ever have done,

and it still happens now. A woman has different skills going into hyper, yes, she might not be able to wrestle with a six-foot-bore guy, but I guarantee she can speak to and listen to him better than most blokes.

Yeah. Those aren't seen on social media. That's a fair point. But I can tell you, from actual experience, you know, that women have a different, a fantastic way of dealing with

high pressure incidents. Yeah? And people respond to them totally different than a bloke. Blokes right up in the face, it's all physical and, you want some, I'm physically, you know, I'm next to you know,

we're holding on the floor, you know, for a traffic ticket, you know. But with a female going into, In pub fights, I've seen it. I've seen blokes go, pull their footbett and stop. I've seen women talk to really violent people and they listen to them, they won't listen to a bloke.

They have different skills, yeah? But on the, and social media they're judged by one level, and that's physical level. Oh, she didn't put him in his shoulder or put him in an arm lock, you know. I've seen men do that and not be able to physically, you know, the physical level of some police officers sometimes, you know, maybe I'd like them to be fitter. However, it's such a narrow level that you're judging women by.

That's a really good point. And that's why I'm asking the questions that a lot of people are thinking about because you have the context to be able to explain stuff. When you talk about PR, I actually think it's less about PR. It's more about communicating things like this and explaining things to all the members of the public because I think most members of the public are on the side of the police. Of course, yeah, I think that. I've always thought that, to be fair.

In your day-to-day, in the community, know that. That is 100% so. So I guess what I'm asking you is do you feel that in terms of recruitment, we're hiring all the right people for all the right reasons? I think it's just struggling recruitment at the moment, just having people. Just the numbers. Just the numbers at the moment. It's just, you know, we just need good people to join the police at the moment because they're being put off. And the numbers are, I know for a fact that one, one force had one applicant in two months, you know, recently. Yeah. That's horrendous. us, yeah? So we need good people. It's not, we can't get picky about what sex day or what religion

they or what colour there at a moment. You need good people to volunteer for this difficult task and it is a difficult task. So how's that going to happen, Chris? Well, you need to relaunch the image of the police and the political influences need to jump on board because it affects them, yeah? We had a mayor that spent a lot of time kicking the police or fanning the flames of anti-police rhetoric. And obviously recently realized that that's not a good idea for a mere, especially if you want people. I think I said in my first interview,

you can't on one hand say the forces institution and it's full of people who shouldn't be there, oh, why don't you join? You know, you can't have it in the sense of both ways. You're going to have to get on board and black the police and tell people that there is a challenge there, but there is a good job to be doing. A vast majority of police jobs are good.

Yeah, if you're going to say that the Forge an institutionally racist, people aren't going to want to join. Strangly enough. Strangely enough. And they're going to be one of them. Yeah. No. You better decide what side do you're on

and you better decide that you're on the police's side if you are in charge of a city, particularly. Yeah. So, yeah, things you have to change in the political point. They've got to stop scoring cheap political points off of the police, you know, because they're I know good people in the Federation, but they're toothless, aren't they? They can't never withdraw their labour.

I mean, there's been hints of it with the firearms teams withdrawing their blue tickets when people realise, oh, hold on, it's a voluntary skill, isn't it? I didn't realise that. Or public order. I think they've lost, I think Firearms officers, a quarter of them have handed in their blue ticket. A third of public order officers have handed their taser ticket in.

These are voluntary skills. This is dangerous, by the way. So they better get on board pretty quick, and they better start backing their officers. They better start recruiting good people and they better start talking about the police in a positive way. There are plenty of good stories out there

they can push. But it's easier to jump on the bad stories. Why is it? Why is it firearms officers have said we're not doing it? You know, taser officers, for one of a better way, putting it on doing it.

Why is that? I think primarily because they don't think you're going to get back to the person, if they get into a difficult situation and they have to make a split-second decision, they don't feel they're going to be back via senior officers.

And that needs to stop. It needs to change big time. You know, because this is, we need people who hold the tasers. Because as we've seen, you know, in that heinel incident when a guy murdered the child and it was a female officer, tasered him first, and then

another officer taser, that was a violent murderer who was restrained by a taser. In the past, before, old people like me, we didn't have a taser. We'd just have to who's the biggest rugby player, let's see, you distract him, I'll jump on him, and we'll wrestle all that knife away from him. That's what we had to do.

We had no body armour either, yeah? So, Taser, we need officers to have Taser. We need officers to take that very difficult job of firearms, because, you know, we're going to be increasingly challenged by firearms, I think, in the next few years, particularly with terrorism. So, yeah, we need those brave officers to take those, and they need to be backed. And those senior officers need to not worry too much about their career

and get in front of the TV and start backing their troops. Do you think it's always a bad apple, which gives the rest of bad name? Because when you were talking about the WhatsApp, it came to me about people getting, you know, getting reprimanded, losing their jobs, their careers being destroyed because of WhatsApp messages. Immediately I started thinking of Wayne Cousins, the murderer of Sarah Everard, the former police officer,

when people knew him in the station as the rapist, apparently. And then you go, and then you think, well, that's just an overreaction to that particular police officer. And it's police officers like that that do so much damage. Really, really terrible damage. And it takes an awful lot to undo that damage. And every now and again, you're going to get another one of those, unfortunately, because there's so many employees. And you can't, you can't police people off duty. You can't, you know, you don't know what they're doing off duty.

when they go out of the neck, put the handgun, you can't follow it, you can't be expected as a supervisor of running. You should know what they were doing for the next 12 hours or whatever, eight hours, you know. But we used to have a system in the past where we were in training school for 20 weeks. It was like a golfish bowl, you know. And you would be, although, yes, there were people who got through, but for 20 weeks you're going to have to be someone you're not. It's very hard.

Then you'd be spotted pretty quickly. Dodgy nicknames, if... Because I understand what they're saying about him being called rapist. I don't know what the reason for that was, but there's a lot of dodgy names in the place. You get nicknamed for all kinds of reasons, and some people don't even know what the nickname came from. But it's not always based in facts, put it that way.

I was called a lot of names, but none of them were based on facts, I can tell you. But yes, going back to, yes, those people let down. And do you know what? The serving officers are even more disappointed than the public when that happens because you think, oh, no, here we go. Everyone's going to think I'm a rapist. Everyone's going to think I'm a racist. You know, it's just a kick in the teeth, you know, for all the good officers and management out there.

And it's just, you can see, you know, when Mark Rodney opens up and he gets a phone call, guess what we've got now. They're human beings, that's the problem. And they're going to be people amongst them who don't fit that standard. or don't make that standard. And it's also as well, people not realizing that when you do a job, like working in the police or you're a doctor, I remember when I was teaching at really tough, rough schools in really deprived areas of London,

you'd have a really dark sense of humour. And I remember in the start from, we used to say things, and you go like, if someone actually heard that. Yeah. Well, yeah, Gallo's humour, that is common in the services, the armed services particularly, and the emergency services,

the kind of humour that got us through really dark times, you know, some awful... You turn up sometimes you're the only person you were the only person, you, ambulanceman or fireman, and you had the same sense of humour. You go all over the world, in fact, I've just come back from Brazil and with a load of...

working with some Brazilian police, same sense of humour, trust me. Exactly same sense of humour. It's dark and it's really not... Good for public consumption. However, amongst you, it was acceptable, always acceptable. Not so much now. I know people are getting disciplined for uttering things that aren't politically correct.

I know that for a fact. And they're getting trawled through for years in discipline because of things they've said that in the past would have been acceptable in a jokey way. I know that for a fact. So, you know, community changes. You can't just keep, you know, I can stay about what we did, but it may not work now. But I can tell you it's a high stress job like policing, like teaching. And sometimes you let off steam with humour.

And as we know, humor's been almost deleted in many sections of the media. So I think that's a great thing. I do. Well, it's coming back to your point about the senior officers not back in the junior, that's something we hear a lot. We have police officers who watch the show. show messaging us, particularly people, the lower they are on the ladder, the more they feel led down by the people at the top. And it's, I don't think it's just the policing, to be

honest with you may. I just look around. Everyone is terrified of a bad headline or a bad, or a tweet. Like, you sometimes have like whole like fororees based on the fact that like three people tweeted about something. Yeah, yeah. And you just go, maybe we can just ignore the fact the three people treated something, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a big problem, but everyone is terrified of bad publicity now. Absolutely. You know, and I just don't think you can,

I've never run a police force, but I don't think you can run a police force that way. Well, you can't. You have to be pretty thick skin from the start. If you're going to be an effective police officer from the day you start, you better be thick-skinned. If you think everyone's going to love you, forget that. I laugh sometimes when I see some of these

kind of promotions, recruiting, targeting, particularly black and minority of Nick officers, and telling them how they're going to represent their community and how the community they need them there. Yeah, great. It's good to see black officers and white officers and Jewish officers and all the, but I can tell you, for a fact, there'll be no rose petals put in front of your feet

when you walk into the first black kids' family and you're going to arrest him for robbery. I can tell you, they won't be going, oh, thank God. You know what? Well, you're black. That's right. It's okay. How long is he going to do it?

15 years, okay. No, no, no, there's none of that. If you're actually going to be policing, you're going to be the same colour. It's going to be blue and it's going to be your uniform. That's it. And if they hate you, they're going to hate you. And they hate you even more for your black sometimes.

I know that. And so you better have a thick skin. You better not be too sensitive wherever people like you or not, but you will know that you're going to make a difference, that's for sure. Chris, before we wrap up and get some questions in from our audience, Actually, one thing I wanted to talk to you about, you mentioned having just come back from Brazil. You get to travel quite a bit now

and look at how things have done in other countries. You know, what do you see? How do we compare? What can we learn? What are we doing well? You know, all of that sort of thing. Well, every time I travel, I'm glad to come home, put it that way. I'm really pleased to be British,

and I'm really, really happy I live in England. You know, so the more I travel, I can tell you that. Brazil, I was with some really great colleagues in Brazil, police colleagues in Brazil, fantastic. We were around the American football match they had in Sao Pala. And I saw, I witnessed a demonstration, probably about 150,000 people on Independence Day there, all dressed in Brazilian shirts, which is quite a spectacle.

But they all demonstrating about freedom of speech, and particularly at a time, I'm not sure if it still happens, that Twitter or X had been withdrawn from their circulation. They were pissed about that. and they were demonstrating there was the last straw as far as they're incursing into freedom of speech

and it meant a lot to them and I thought of myself wow you go back to England we've got a lot of freedoms and we got a lot of freedoms that we should protect and everyone has to be part of that I think conversation

whether you're right, left or whatever everyone's got to be if it's going to be balanced we all need to we can't just point fingers as out of you're doing it again we all need to take part in it I think because

our freedom of speech is cherished and I think it should be protected. Within reason, within the law. You can't just go slandering people left, right and centre, without expecting to be, have them to have a legal recourse. But there are things we need to not censor as much as we're doing now, I think.

And in Brazil, they are amazed the way we live. They're just jealous a lot of times, you know, other than the weather, obviously. And the football team. But, yeah, they are jealous of the way we are. We can't believe that we're, the police services unarmed. They can't believe that, um, that we can walk free-de, really.

Women are quite safe. We don't have large, um, favelas type things. We don't, we have homelessness, obviously, but we don't, and we have poverty, but we're not in a scale that I've seen in, in places like that. Beautiful country and beautiful people. And Chris, reading between the lines, and now this is our second chat, Am I right in thinking you'd like to see a lot more armed officers on the streets of the UK? I'd like to see the same quality of armed officers, but certainly more,

because I think we've got some challenges coming down. Tell us more about that. Why do you think? Because a lot of people, let me just say this quickly, a lot of people feel they worry about police officers having firearms because, and I'll tell you why, they may well be wrong, but this is why I think, Man, Francis, jump in as well if you think I'm not misrepresenting sort of the ordinary man in the street view correctly. they feel like they look at America

where there are, there's lots of gun violence and they sort of forget that American citizens have guns, they just look at the police officers shooting people, etc. And they worry that there's a kind of escalatory dynamic. The more armed the police, the more the criminals are going to tool up and it just never ends. That's kind of how people feel.

I think they should be confident. Why do you think it's important? I think it's important because it gives the confidence, it gives the officers on the street more confidence to deal with issues that are maybe grey as far as dangerous concern instead of backing off. I was an officer for eight years and I turned up regularly to normal police and incidents. Oh, by the way, if you don't agree with him, I've got a gun, no, not that, but it gave officers confidence, more confidence. I'm not saying they're going to be using them, but I think with terrorism and the world away it is now, it's only inevitable that we're going to get some kind of blowback in the future.

And I think having better trained armed officers, the same standard. I mean, at the moment, they may very few mistakes. The armed police in Britain is envied throughout the world. Trust me. The restraint that we show and the way that we are scrutinized is the envy of the world. Totally. Well, look at the Manchester thing. Whatever the officer's actions, in most other countries,

those guys who would have been dead a long time before they were being mistreated. Definitely. So let's look at it in that way. We need more officers who are trained because that's where we go in. Where we want to go? There's going to be more armed incidents in the future. That's for sure. We're an island so we can, we've restrained.

We've banned handguns way back when because of Hungerford and other other incidents. But we've, it's inevitable with Europe and the amount of people that are coming. and terrorism, you know, conflicts throughout where we're going to get some kind of blowback. So we need officers who are trained and have got the mindset to carry a taser and a gun in the future, not less, more, I would say. I mean, this is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but what is it about an armed officer that just, apart from the obvious, that is so much more effective when dealing with a particular situation?

Because I'll be honest you, Chris. When I'm walking through an airport, for instance, if I see an armed officer, I actually get a little bit worried. I'm like, well, what's going on here? You know, has there been a threat? That's a British way of thinking, obviously, because we're not used to guns. And that's good, isn't it? That's good. Yeah. But in my expect, the training that goes into carrying a gun is so intense and teaches you so much more about judgment.

You'll put through so many more fences. The more people, to that standard in the police, I think, is a, a good thing, not just because they're carrying a gun, because they've been tested, their judgment has been tested to quite an intense degree. You know, I came from, what is MO-19 now, it used to be SO-19, and the officers I work with, they're the easiest of most professional I work with, you know, and firearms officers generally go through a higher level of scrutiny and fitness. I would increase the fitness level, purely because it gives you more of a chance.

It gives you more confidence when dealing with violent criminals. are often quite fit some of them, you know, and it gives you your colleagues more chance. So I'd increase that. It's not going to happen because generally, the level of fitness throughout society has dropped at that level. My boy was in the Royal Navy,

and their fitness levels had to be lowered to get more applicants in. So that's sad in diamond on society. But I think increased fitness gives you more chance and gives you more confidence in place, and that's what I think. It's interesting that you say that because, I mean, obviously the repercussions

for a badly trained fire officer is very extreme. But you say that they're more highly trained. In what aspect? So you're talking about, is it things like conflict resolution, for instance? Conflict resolutions,

fitness levels, judgment, your judgment, and the knowledge of your law, of use of force particular. You have to have a very detailed knowledge of use of force. And I think I see some police and incidents that obviously social media is not really that reflected

but I see somewhere of things. So if you knew your law, particularly your use of false law, a little bit better, you may well be more confident. And the more you know, the more confident you are generally. So yeah, it's a higher standard like public order officers, higher standard detectives, that kind of thing. If you raise the standards of knowledge and fitness and judgment and test their judgment regularly,

then you're probably going to be more effective police officers. I think. Do you think we need a higher salary therefore for police officers, a higher starting salary? If you want better quality, you're going to have to pay people. You 100% need to look at that. They need to increase that to attract better people. For instance, if you're a detective now, you're getting courted by lots of people. You know, fraud. I mean, 50% of all crime, less, just lower than 50% of all crime is committed online now. Yeah, so your skills as a detective, particularly in fraud or online fraud, is going to be wanted by lots of people. Banks and trucks.

Absolutely. So if the police need to attract these people, by the way, because if 50% of all crime is online, less than 50% of it, then we need a new kind of police officer, didn't we? A cyber savvy cop now, don't we? who can look at these things and are good and is comfortable online because that's where a lot of people think, I don't need to rob a bank, I can just do it online. There's a lot of vulnerable people who don't know their skills are online,

and they're very vulnerable. And it's a lot easier to do that if you've got the skill and the knowledge to rob someone than it is to knock them over, isn't it? Chris, it's fantastic having you back. It's always great to get context and an issue. inside perspective on all these things because it clarifies a lot you know it's very easy i think for all of us now we live in the modern world where video particularly is such a powerful thing you can see three video clips and suddenly you know everything about everything you know so it's

great having you with your background experience to come in and just clarify it a little bit we're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in the second before we do we always end with the same one which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be Tottenham's win against man united oh sorry Sorry. Okay. That's fine. We can take that.

Okay. All right, head on over and check out Chris's answers to your questions. Is it true that these days in order to get promoted above Sargent, it's necessary to have a record of, quote, upholding DEI standards against colleagues? Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

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