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Bloody hell.  I chose a really good couple of weeks to go on holiday, didn't I!

So, no juicy first-hand information to share, no insider news, just a slightly educated commentary.

I have, of course, been getting cross at the half-digested versions of facts being presented on the TV news, especially the thin-ness of the analysis around the facts.  16,000 extra police deployed in London tonight sounds fantastic, but no-one's asked where they come from.  The Met don't have 16,000 extra officers lying dormant in stasis until they get charged up and sent out, so the answer is surrounding forces and cancelled leave and rest days.

No human being can carry on functioning at those stress levels for long without rest days, so I worry for those Met officers.  I also worry about the proportion of my force which has been working in London, not only because some of them are personal friends but also because I understand how thin the capacity is back here at the moment.  We simply cannot afford to have a major incident or even a busier-than-usual shift at the moment.

Incidents like the current riots, the Norway shootings, Derek Bird and the Mumbai incident always lead to a round of "How would we have coped with that?" in the mess room.  The debate isn't a pretty sight and the consensus is generally somewhere along the lines of, "We'd be fucked."  The Control Room is ludicrously short-staffed, under-trained for major incidents and morale is low.  When I speak to officers on the outside I find much the same thing: they're totally committed to job of protecting the public, but struggling with kit that doesn't work properly, bizarre and conflicting instructions from senior management and concerns over pay and pensions.

Getting back to today's news, there was the usual round of criticising police for being too tough, or not tough enough, whichever it is this week.  I think the number of arrests quoted on the Six was 150, which shocked my other half ("What!  There were thousands of them, why didn't you nick the lot?") and impressed me ("Blimey, we've only got space for half that in the whole county's custody suites!")

It doesn't matter anyway, because the whole lot will be out on bail this time tomorrow.

That's not just cynical bandwagon-jumping, by the way: on my last run of nights, we nicked the same bloke for breach of time/location conditions (ie: You must not be in Shitsville Town Centre between 20:00 and 08:00) six nights in a row, then on the seventh night Custody refused to take him but told us to drop him off far enough away that he couldn't get back in time to breach again.

The courts are simply a joke to repeat offenders who know how to play the system to get off with a rap on the knuckles.

I have a regular rant on about standards in society, respect for parents, teachers and police which I will spare you because the bloggers who inspired me to start this have said it all far more eloquently than I know how to.  Go read this from Inspector Gadget, this from PC Bloggs and this from Winston Smith, and if you hadn't read them before go back and read the whole lot.

My inner Guardian reader is ashamed to say this, but we've just got to get tougher.