Wear you uniform to work day. Why stop with the police?

By David Higgerson on Sep 5, 11 07:41 PM

A PCSO on duty with two police constables. Not...

In politics, so I've been told, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors. They're clearly aware of that at the think tank Policy Exchange, where their way of getting more out of the police would be inspired, if it wasn't so utterly stupid.

In a nutshell: the Policy Exchange believe police officers should wear their uniforms on the way to work. Somehow, they work out that this would equate to an extra 1,200 police officers on the streets of London. Their working out, I guess, involved multiplying the average journey time to work by a policeman multiplied by the number of days in a week they work multiplied by the number of officers in London, divided by the number of contracted hours a police officer works each year.

Simples. But wrong.

Asking police officers to wear their uniform on the way to work doesn't create an extra 1,200 police officers. At best, for the bean counters, it potentially gives a couple of free hours of work on top of the normal shift.

But does a policeman, travelling to work on the bus, do if he or she spots a crime being committed? It's fair to assume that they won't have their radio with them, or their CS spray, or, if they have one, their taser gun. What we effectively have is a police officer being asked to do their job without the tools to do their job. That's not safe, or effective.

Part of Policy Exchange's argument is that seeing a policeman in a uniform reassures the public. I'm sure it does, but I'm not sure I'd be that reassured by a police officer who wasn't equipped to do their job if required to leap into action.

It just isn't workable. But that doesn't seem to bother the Policy Exchange, so why not go the whole hog. Lets have firemen walking around in their fire uniforms. They'll know what to do if they see a fire - it doesn't matter if they don't actually have a fire engine or equipment to put the fire out.

What about hospital consultants. We could have them walking around in their hospital scrubs, ready to perform keyhole surgery to anyone taken ill on the street. Only they wouldn't have the equipment with them to do it.

For people meeting up for a drink with chaps from the Policy Exchange, I'd suggest a bulk purchase of T-shirts which say 'I'm with stupid.' Because, lets face it, for an organisation described as a 'think tank', not much thinking appears to have gone on here.