Building relationships. With criminals.

An interesting quote in Dundee's Evening Telegraph recently on the subject of community policing (community often appearing to be little more than a feelgood label applied to policing in an area that is usually anything but a community!). An officer told the newspaper:

Policing is about getting on with people no matter who they are, whether they are a shopkeeper, a teacher or a criminal.

It's surely instructive as regard the softly-softly nature of modern policing that the officer affords some sort of equivalence between criminals and the rest of society as regards how police should interact with them.

Which brings to mind a statement a few years ago by another Tayside officer, who said, in the context of dealing with boy racers, that they preferred to "build relationships" with them rather than enforcing the legislation.

Which was brought into focus at a later date when police were making a virtue of enforcing the law in relation to problems cause by boy racers, presumably because the latter had been exploiting the previous relationship building to deceive the former into believing that a pat on the head was all that was required to turn them into model drivers.

Indeed, in the latest article the officer goes on to say:

You develop an understanding and a good community officer will have a bit more time to to develop these relationships.

Of course, such an approach can pay dividends, but on the other hand it's surely self-evident by now that the increasing propensity of police to ingratiate themselves - to portray the 'building relationships' approach pejoratively - to miscreants will just be exploited.

Indeed, as I said here recently the last time I approached police in the street about something the pair simply blanked me, the message self-evidently being for me to go away and stop being a nuisance.

Thus on occasion it's not only seen by police as constructive to 'get on' with criminals on an equivalent basis to law-abiding citizens, but perhaps also to place more emphasis on gladhanding wrongdoers while viewing the public generally as an impediment to this.

And perhaps police are just as guilty as politicians of placing more emphasis on 'building relationships' with the the culture of spin and soundbite rather than the substantive task they're charged with.