Thanks to Steve Pendlebury for nominating this week's Wankers.
Last week, Dorset Police wrote to shopkeepers in the area to advise them not to call them for any shoplifters unless they've stolen at least £75 in one go. So kids in shops can nick cans of beer, chocolate, crisps, cheap DVD players, CDs, DVDs .... well, if it's kept under £75, practically anything.
Oh to be a kid in Dorset! Just think - when we were kids, a shoplifter, indeed any kid that did anything wrong, would get a clip round the ear, marched home and his parents would give him a clip round the other ear before asking the policeman what the hell he/she had done. Now the police do nothing and the parents will probably want to give a kid a handshake when Little Johnny comes home with a knocked-off DVD player.
And the reason for this sad abdication of responsibility? "We haven't got the manpower ….".
So far, so bad. But there's more, also from Dorset.
A driver passes a speed trap. He approves of speed traps, so he gives them the thumbs-up and pips his horn. This was not, you understand, a display of disapproval but a thumbs-up for upholding the law.
And the police reaction? He was chased by no less than seven policemen (yes, seven members of the force that told shopkeepers they were short of manpower). They stopped him, lectured him, and fined him £30 for 'inappropriate use of the horn in a moving vehicle'.
The GOS says: Some might say that the motorist got no more than he deserved for being a self-righteous tosser. But there is a serious problem here. Where I live, the local traffic police told a road safety meeting recently that they couldn't enforce every single 30mph speed limit, so they had adopted a grading system. In other words, some plod makes a decision which speed limits are important and which are not.
The job of the police is to uphold the law. Now, there are sensible laws and there are stupid ones (rather more of the latter, lately). Just as there are sensible speed limits and stupid ones. But it's not any policeman's place to decide which laws he feels like upholding and which he prefers to ignore. OK, we all understand that he won't always be successful because there are only 24 hours in the day and there just aren't enough of him, but that doesn't mean he has the privilege of re-writing the law. The law's an ass - but it's the law.
I seem to have wandered onto my old hobby-horse, speed limits, so while I'm here … what's the point of having speed limits decided by men in cheap suits in County Hall? Wouldn't it be more sensible if the police decided what the speed-limit should be on any stretch of road? They're the ones who are going to have to scrape up the bodies. Some of them are highly-trained drivers and probably have a better idea of what's safe and what's not than some shabby little desk-jockey. And they know, apparently, just how many speed-limits they can realistically enforce.
But that doesn't mean that the Dorset Police are exempt from being … you've guessed it …. our Wankers of the Week!
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