Dicing with Death

I have to laugh at the furore which has been whipped up in England and Wales - in response to the Government's plans to open up and modernise police recruitment practices.

At the moment, to become a senior a senior police office, you have to serve your time as a 'bobby on the beat' - which, of course, excludes lots of people in civil society.

People who may have chosen a different career path in life - learning different life skills - and for whom chasing youg criminals down the street is not a desirable or even viable option.

So it seems to me that introducing a system of 'fast-tracking' candidates in certain situations is a good thing - in principle - because it will shake things up and encourage people from different backgrounds and experience to join the police service.

But the opponents of change want to keep things as they are - thank you very much - which means that you've got to start at the bottom - and slowly work your way up.

Thus ensuring, as far as possible, that those who eventually get to the top are properly 'schooled' - that they become 'one of us' rather than 'one of them'.

To help illustrate the panic amongst the police establishment here a quote from the recently elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Gwent - Ian Johnson - who was a former chief superintendent until he retired in 2010.

“The idea of parachuting someone with no policing experience into a senior officer post is at best ill-conceived meddling, and at worst could lead to the public and police officers being put at more risk of harm.

“I’m not overstating things when I say that someone joining the service as a superintendent is actually dicing with death; it shows a complete lack of understanding by the Government of what superintendents do. To think that someone could join as a superintendent, which is an operationally critical role, without policing experience and have responsibility for investigating murders, rapes and serious incidents defies logic.”

Now this 'dicing with death' language seems outrageous to me - but it is often used by people who fear what they regard as outside prying eyes - and who say that things will go to the dogs, if we mere amateurs don't just agree to 'leave it to the professionals'. 

I remeber when I was a Member of the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) - the professional and regulatory body for all teachers in Scotland.

At one point we were discussing the arrangements for appointing a new Chief Executive when - in what was clearly a pre-planned move - a number of members proposed that one of the essential criteria for the post should be that candidates must have several years experience as a head teacher.

Now I nearly died laughing at what I regarded as a deeply cynical ploy to rule out - at a stroke - a whole raft of eminently well qualified, experienced people.

Because the role of chief executive, in my view, was a management one - which required leadership and other skills, but not teaching experience - never mind several years of experience as a head teacher.

So there you have it - when essentially conservative, reactionary groups of people want to oppose change - they say that you got no choice but to leave it to 'us professionals'.

If not you're dicing with death - or possibly playing with children's lives.

What a load of old tosh.