Unfortunately, in many countries packing isn’t even an option for ordinary citizens. Pity there aren’t more like the Swiss….they ALL pack. What was their gun crime rate again…?

To be fair to the police, one of the basic problems as I see it is that they are asked to enforce laws that are unenforcable, political, or are not supported by the public.

I’d be far more sympathetic to this point if the police were not every eagerly and aggressively leftist, politically correct, and in all other ways a part of the problem. They simply are not a bunch of heroic stiffs reluctantly enforcing the political class’ will, against their better judgment, and with tortured conscience.

Nobody is actually forcing the police to harass people for openly political reasons–they exercise tremendous discretion over whom they choose to bring up on charges, and whom they seek to haul in for violating “diversity” dogma, and what have you. They aren’t innocent, period, precisely because they are a creature of the Labor party, who protects their privileges in return for kickbacks in the form of “donations.” Enforcement of unpopular laws isn’t their problem, in the main. It’s refusal to enforce the popular ones.

PeterT, keep on deluding yourself. Keep on enlarging government, expanding its mission, pouring ever more money into it, searching for the holy grail of competent, honest, public servants. What you are getting now is only a sample of what is rapidly evolving into a totalling controlling government subjagating you to its ever expanding power.

The increasing pressure on defendents to “make a deal” (confess to get a lesser punishement) is already incredibly corrupting (people who are INNOCENT are being pushed about).

As are other changes in the way the law works – for example in fraud trials.

The process (including the judges) appears to be less and less about getting to the truth – and more and more about ticking boxes.

one of the basic problems as I see it is that they are asked to enforce laws that are unenforcable, political, or are not supported by the public.

If they feel their job is so difficult, they can always change occupations. No one is holding a pistol to their heads and forcing them to be police.

one of the basic problems as I see it is that they are asked to enforce laws that are unenforcable, political, or are not supported by the public.

That may well be the single most basic problem. And not just in the UK.

PeterT: Police spend a lot of their time dealing with things like domestic violence, too, and this must be absolutely ghastly a lot of the time. It’s undoubtedly a very hard job. But that doesn’t change the fact that given that they are given powers to use violence that the rest of us do not have, it remains necessary that they be held to higher standards of integrity than other citizens – not lower. This requires accountability, and this seems to have been lost.

On the other point, one of the best preservers of liberty would be a constitutional bar on those employed or receiving income from in any way (inc pensioners and private contractors) the government from voting.