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Telegraph - Boy’s drowning sparks demand to scrap PCSOs

Police Community Support Officers are a “failed experiment” and should be scrapped, according to a senior member of the Police Federation.

He was speaking after it emerged that two PCSOs did not intervene to stop a 10-year-old boy from drowning because they were “not trained” to deal with the incident.

The officers - who have not been named - stood at the edge of a pond at a Wigan beauty spot as Jordon Lyon got into trouble while trying to rescue his eight-year-old step-sister Bethany Ganderton.

Two fishermen in their 60s jumped in and managed to save the girl, but the officers, who arrived at the scene shortly afterwards, did not attempt a rescue, deciding to wait until trained officers arrived.

Paul Kelly, chairman of the Manchester Police Federation, which represents police officers, said today that officers without life-saving skills were no use to the public.

“We’ve got to able to deal with all types of situations. We should do away with PCSOs because they are a failed experiment,” he said.

“The public are being fooled. We are sending people out there who are dressed as police officers,” he added.

At the inquest into his death the boy’s distraught parents demanded to know why more effort was not made to save their son, and why the two PCSOs were not called to give evidence.

Anthony Ganderton, Jordon’s stepfather, said: “I don’t know why they didn’t go in. I can’t understand it.

“If I had been walking along a canal and seen a child drowning I would have jumped in. You don’t have to be trained to jump in after a drowning child.”

Wow.

Update (9.22):

Looks like Rueful Red in the comments wasn’t the only one thinking along this line:

Telegraph - How can ‘police’ watch a boy drown? By Vicki Woods

The Hampshire Constabulary’s website, though, says it’s hoping to recruit 333 PCSOs to pad out its force of just under 4,000 police officers. Probably in reaction to a recent study that found, on a typical day, that just five officers were covering Basingstoke’s 150,000 inhabitants.

Since Basingstoke must have more than five officers on shift at any time, where were the others? Well, according to the blogger “PC David Copperfield”, they would have been sitting in the police station filling in uncountable numbers of forms in octuplicate by the hour together. Forces have to form squads of officers to deal with stuff that is Home Office target-related.

Just as hospital doctors have to work to target-driven NHS managers with clipboards and stopwatches, police officers have to work to the “audit team”, whose job is not policing but ensuring that the centrally directed targets are hit. To the audit team, a tick in the box is as good as another tick in the box, so a shoplifting detection is as good as a murder detection and two boys fighting in the playground is a violent crime (or two violent crimes, if you’re clever). David Copperfield recently wrote that he arrested two girls in Burton-on-Trent for stealing £19.90 worth of cosmetics just before Christmas. Fair enough: thou shalt not steal. But it took him nine hours to process the piddling crime.

PC Copperfield has now outed himself as Stuart Davidson, and anyone who watched last week’s Panorama, which was largely informed by his book Wasting Police Time, will have understood why he has left the police force in Britain in order to do “real policing” in Canada. Also why hundreds of his fully trained fellow officers are being recruited by our former colonies.

I wonder if the combination of the book, the Panorama, and this drowning, something actually will get changed? (You know, what with the Panorama and book out, this is the sort of publicity I’d only just put past PR firms.) And along the same lines of “humanity”, also discussed in the comments:

A “police presence” is not the same as policing. And PCSOs are not the same as police officers, as reports about the inquest into the death of a 10-year-old boy in Wigan showed. Jordon Lyon was playing near a pond with his sister and both got into difficulties. A 999 call fetched two PCSOs to the scene, where people were shrieking for help as the children floundered. Two fishermen, aged 63 and 66, flung themselves into the pond and managed to rescue the girl, but the two PCSOs stood faffing about on the edge.

When a regular police sergeant arrived minutes later, he dived into the pond and pulled Jordon from the water, but he could not be resuscitated. The inquest was told: “PCSOs are not trained to deal with major incidents such as this.”

Oh, really? Neither are a couple of fishermen aged 63 and 66, but they had a go. I’m not sure we need 333 PCSOs in Ruralshire.

Update II (9.23):

The bottom of Ron Liddle’s Sunday Times notebook:

Two police officers stood and watched as 10-year-old Jordon Lyon drowned trying to save his little sister who had waded out of her depth in a large pond. The community bobbies hadn’t been properly trained in pond stuff.

“What sort of person would just watch a child drown?” Jordon’s mum asked in utter despair.

The assistant chief constable of Greater Manchester police has pronounced himself pleased with his constables’ response: they followed the correct procedure, the idiot said. So, Mrs Lyon, there’s your answer: that sort of person.

There are a lot of them around these days.