After reading this article on theregister.co.uk and the original article regarding the arrest mentioned, a discussion about the UK becoming a police state with a colleague started. Their final statement was an interesting definition of a police state I’d like to share with people:
“A police state happens when a new police officer is earning more than a first year nurse” for those too lazy to follow the links the following psuedo C code should help…
if (£20,397 > £19,166) {
police_state = TRUE;
}
This is an interesting definition, and one I’d never heard before, it does however make a great deal of sense. When a government decides to pay new police officers more than nurses it is giving the incentive to policing over health care, it’s then pretty obvious that abuses of power and the ‘hunch’ mentality of officers who are watching people causes wrongful arrest, the distress of interrogation, and police officers not admitting they’re wrong after they’ve committed a crime, and further abuses of power end up being right around the corner.
For the record, the police state in the UK has nothing to do with terrorism. The UK has suffered terrorist attacks for decades and while during that time an Irishman on the tube could have been arrested without reason, and abuses of power including the same inability to admit wrongdoing, like that of the Guildford four and the Maguire seven could happen, this didn’t happen to peaceful protesters. It generally happened to people (mostly Irishmen) in the wrong place in the hours surrounding an explosion. The current preemptive stop and search laws and other points of the terrorism act allow the police to do this to anyone at anytime, which is basically the same as walking up to someone, punching them in the face then saying “Oh it looked like you may have hit me”… So this boils down to the state becoming the aggressor, the victim isn’t a victim because the state defines them as guilty until they can prove their innocence over the vast evidence the state can accumulate to find you guilty of something, and everyone is guilty of something if they look deep enough. Right?
So, if the police state has nothing to do with terrorism, what is it concerned with? Mr Brown, care to answer that one?
The difference in salary might be due to a (potentially) more dangerous work environment. I don’t know, but I do feel that nurses (all over the world, probably) are underpaid.
However, to say that the difference in salary defines a police state seems a bit far fetched. How do you deduce that a higher salary leads to more arrests or harrasment?
To me those are symptoms of prejudice or corruption, not of difference in salary.
@pel: It is actually more subtle than you’ve spotted. I never said anything about the difference in salary affecting the attitudes of the officers, its about the government view of health care vs. policing, if the government values policing more then there will be a reward for the police, given it takes about 18 months to train an officer, during which time they arn’t in the line of fire, and they also get paid more than firemen I believe, which shatters the danger money argument, and it takes 3 years to train a nurse it starts to fit as a fairly obvious marker for a police state. During training they are given the lowest pay grade, after training they get a pay boost.
So it seems firstly you have missed the definition point, in that this is a DIFFERENT definition of what a police state is, opposing your (draconian?) understanding that a police state is that of harassment and prejudice.
A police state is not defined by the individual officers predilection to oppression, it is defined by the states predilection to oppression, and of course as eloquently described by my colleague giving greater incentives to police than nurses (for example, the same rule applies to teachers, firemen etc…) shows us that the powers that be want more police, this coupled with draconian anti civil liberty measures like the terrorism act give a recipe for a police state.
As far as I’m concerned we don’t need more police, we need better police. Once there was a time where every neighborhood had a neighborhood bobby, they all knew him and would respect him, always helpful and polite and he wasn’t afraid to clip kids around the head if they acted up. Now there are hoards of police congregating in areas such as tube stations. The community aspect of policing is lost to a confine and control mentality across the police force, with police too afraid to plod the beat in areas that need that helpful, respectful, polite and familiar bobby.
There was no trouble with peaceful protestors back in the old days? What happened to, oh I dunno, Bloody Sunday?
Hmm, bloody sunday, when northern ireland was actually a police state.
You have confused the issue, as ireland was in effect a police state I can’t exactly compare england & the rest of the UK with an actual police state which was part of the UK.
If anything you simply prove my point that when it is a police state, things like this happen.
Are you suggesting that it’s someone’s job in the government to sit down and make a list of how much *everybody* gets paid, prioritized from lowest to highest? I suspect that those salaries you quoted came about because someone discovered that’s the minimum salary they needed to offer in order to get people hired, so it could just as easily be interpreted as a sign that people would rather be nurses than police officers.
I can’t say for certain that this is how it works in the U.K. of course – but can you really imagine that the people responsible for formulating annual budgets in the NHS and [insert police agencies here] sit down and compare notes on how much they’re paying their new hires?
“Are you suggesting that it’s someone’s job in the government to sit down and make a list of how much *everybody* gets paid, prioritized from lowest to highest?”
He’s called the treasurer! And yes, he decides how much every civil servant is able to earn.
“but can you really imagine that the people responsible for formulating annual budgets in the NHS and [insert police agencies here] sit down and compare notes on how much they’re paying their new hires?”
Its called the department of the treasury and they aren’t separate agencies.
–
Now before anyone points it out, I know that local PCTs define their wage levels based on local conditions generally speaking, however the rate of pay increases is defined by the treasury and they do separate out between each different civil service.
It’s quite simple. Policemen (and women) need to be pay well or they become bribeable. With nurses there is no such problem.
Hylton Redhouse Estate Sunderland
One housing estate was once covered by two separate wards. The electoral
register shows that BOTH wards for this one housing estate have the same
identical and similar errors in voters personal registry numbers.electoral
register error number patterns continue into the 1960′s and 1970′s and
probably into the 1980′s and 1990′s.
http://www.4shared.com/u/zvzvpsq/7665beb5/foursgiant.html