Another day.

Another grim set of headlines about boys being murdered on our streets.

And, inevitably, the Stop & Search debate comes back round again.

Depressingly, the prevailing tone has become more and more binary – a back-and-forth argument between those who regard Stop & Search as the root of all evil and those who regard it as the solution to everything.

Both perspectives are wrong.

I was a police officer for more than twenty-five years and there are two things that I am absolutely certain of when it comes to Stop & Search:

(1) It saves lives

(2) It isn’t the long term solution to anything

I haven’t given up on hope. I know that there are answers to knife crime – based on the development of a genuine public health approach, sustained over 20+ years and independent of any form of political control.

But it is going to take time. Time that tomorrow’s victims don’t have.

In the meantime, the greatest duty – and privilege – that any police officer will ever have is to save a life. That’s what we need them to be doing...

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We are called for an unconscious and find the man out cold on his feet near Pope Park.  He is a tall man in his early thirties with a ghost white complexion, standing there on the side of the road, his head nodded forward, arms hanging down swaying.  Another drug user on the nod in Hartford.  I shake him and he opens his eyes and says he is fine, but then he drifts back out.  My partner wheels the stretcher over and we gently push him down onto it.  He wakes enough to again, say he is fine, but he drops back out.  In the ambulance, I check his ETCO2 and his pulse saturation.  The numbers are 66 and 90.  I can stimulate him and the numbers come up a little, but if I leave him alone, he doesn’t breathe well enough on his own.  I put in an IV, which he doesn’t feel.  I take a 10 cc syringe, squirt out one cc, then add 1 cc of Naloxone to the syringe.  I slowly give him one cc of the mixture, delivered 0.1 mgs of Naloxone, a tiny dose.  When he doesn’t respond, I give him another 0.1 mg dose, and soon he is talking to me.  He doesn’t...

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I find myself caught somewhere between incredibly angry and wearily lost for words. 

A week or two ago, Sajid Javid – the current Home Secretary – pledged that, if he became prime minister, he would put 20,000 more police officers on the streets.

Speaking on the radio a few days ago, Boris Johnson suggested that “it is vital that they (the police) are properly funded… I thoroughly agree that we need more police out on the street.” In fact, he agreed with the suggestion that 20,000 more officers were needed.

Yesterday on social media, another of the Conservative leadership contenders, Jeremy Hunt, accepted bluntly that “police cuts went too far.” 

20,000 is of course the (significantly rounded down) number of police officers cut from forces in England & Wales since the coalition government came to power in 2010. (Actually, 44,000 is an even more telling number. It’s the one, supplied by the National Audit Office, that includes PCSO and Police Staff cuts.)

And here we are now, presented...

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A story about the difficulties of de-escalation –

With two other officers, I once had to try to urgently ‘de-escalate’ a situation involving a suicidal man – most of us have had to do this at one stage and I’ve done it more than once. All the other efforts, thankfully, were successful, but this one wasn’t. The incident took place many years ago and I suspect it will be one of the few incidents from my career I vividly remember for the rest of my life.

The man involved had covered himself in flammable liquid and was suggesting he’d set himself alight – we knew he had a history of serious mental illness and were primarily concerned about his welfare, but what we couldn’t do (as police officers) was the one thing he wanted in order to be persuaded to put the lighter down: a guarantee he wouldn’t go back to prison for the serious offence he’d recently committed. And the offence was very serious, committed shortly after his release from prison after serving a sentence for a very similar offence, towards...

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