The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Ruralshire Policing Pledge « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG.

Inspector Gadget writes the best public service blog, bar none. Today he explains the real reasons why the police sometimes disappoint their "customers":

1. You are mad and are asking us to communicate with your deceased grandmother or fight Cybermen in your garden. (true story)
2. You are attention seeking and you want us to bring up your kids,
   sort out your love-life and ‘do’ your ex-partner for texting you.
3. You expect everything to be solved in 40 minutes with no real
   evidence and all criminals to confess in interview. (like on the telly)
4. You are a sensible law-abiding citizen who has a genuine need and are waiting for us to deal with 1-3 above.

Spot on, I suspect. A policeman's lot is not a happy one. The saddest thing about Inspector G's very entertaining writing is how little he clearly has to do with category 4, to which most of us belong.

I cannot recommend his blog enough. It's often funny, sometimes sad and always self-evidently honest. Reading it, as a civil libertarian for whom (thanks to their political masters) the police are often in the firing line, keeps me in touch with the realities of their vital and often under-rated work. It stops me seeing them as the enemies of liberty they so often seem. Every so often his superiors have a go at Inspector G. about his blog. In truth, he does them more good than their entire PR budget.