Life experience and training are essential

PM has said that he will recruit an extra 20k officers. But the impression is that we will soon see lots of extra qualified experienced officers on the streets. This is not the case.

To begin with, it is doubtful that the new officers in most places will replace those lost over recent years. Then the workload placed on the police has increased and towns have expanded with more people and property (especially in places like Telford, but also elsewhere) so more officers would be needed just to maintain the somewhat low status quo. The new recruits will still leave the area short of officers.

Perhaps the biggest problems are that of training new recruits and their gaining sufficient experience. New recruits need to learn a lot of “police law”, procedures for dealing with various incidents, legal requirements, record keeping, file production, etc. This is more than a two-year learning time. There will be a lack of facilities and trainers to teach recruits all they should know. Then there is the necessary experience of dealing with people. This akes years to acquire – perhaps five or ore years, and then one never stops learning about human mis-activity.

When the lost officers left the profession they took their experience with them.

Richard Camp, Wellington

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