From The Daily Echo-o-o:
The "enormous" toll of excessive drinking on Britain's emergency services is laid bare in a new parliamentary report. Police, ambulance and A&E personnel face a risk of violence and verbal abuse as they attend drink-fuelled incidents, the inquiry found.
Those are clearly punishable offences, the good news is that in most cases, the perpetrators won't be hard to identify and/or arrest. The other news is that alcohol consumption in the UK has been falling for years, so unless they want to claim that this overall decline results from a large number of people drinking less masking a smaller people drinking a lot more, their whole thesis fails.
The report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Harm painted a stark picture of the scale of resources devoted to dealing with alcohol misuse. It called for a number of steps including lowering the drink drive alcohol limit and introducing a minimum unit price for alcohol.
Drink driving is already - rightly - a criminal offence, but don't they do the damage by crashing, not by stepping out of the vehicle and assaulting emergency services? And what on earth does minimum pricing have to do with this anecdotal..?
One statement [from a police officer] said: "I can take my team through a licensed premise, and by the time I take them out the other end, they will have been felt up several times."
a) Well bloody arrest them on the spot.
b) Pubs seem to operate maximum pricing anyway, so any minimum price will not affect the behaviour of people in pubs and clubs.
c) It's probably being in a crowd rather than being drunk which makes people think they can get away with feeling up female coppers.
MPs and peers took evidence from police officers, fire crew and paramedics. In one area, 86% of police officers surveyed had been assaulted by people who had been drinking.
Sorry to say, but being assaulted verbally or physically is one of the risks of being a copper, and we can assume that most coppers have been assaulted a few times, the fact that most of them have been assaulted at least once by somebody who was drunk is hardly surprising. The article does not say how often fire crews and paramedics are assaulted, so again, we can safely assume it is a much lower figure (although not something we can brush aside as a risk of the job).
Labour news: Christmas bumper edition
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11 comments:
Isn't this all down to Brexit?
@Lola: "Isn't this all down to Brexit?
Noooo.. It's #DespiteBrexit.
@Mark:
"but don't they do the damage by crashing, not by stepping out of the vehicle and assaulting emergency services?"
Indeed, but what's to stop them getting another of their pet causes into an article about alcohol consumption?
"And what on earth does minimum pricing have to do with this anecdotal..?"
Er, ditto.
Guilt by repeated association seems to be the game here, much like the quote usually attributed to Goebbels about a lie repeated often enough becoming truth.
c.f. George Orwell.
just for giggles, there's a piece in the Guardian forecasting a house price slowdown due to....Brexit and stamp duty. Iy's a pity that they couldn't get excess sugar and minimum alcohol pricing in there as well.
@Graeme - did third-hand tobacco smoke (covering the surfaces of everything in houses being sold) make an appearance?
"The report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Harm painted a stark picture of the scale of resources devoted to dealing with alcohol misuse."
So how many doctors, nurses and policemen are they going to sack when we all become good people and stop drinking?
Lola, either that or global warming. I've tried, but I really can't see a way to blame Jeremy Corbyn.
@Bayard, none of them. They have those naughty people eating sugar, salt, fat, tobacco and sports to deal with first...
Or smoking or playing with them. Something like that anyway.
L and PJH, bad news is BECAUSE of Brexit, good news is DESPITE.
G, to be fair, the savage SDLT rates on really expensive houses have made a difference, pushing down prices and turnover. Or maybe that was BECAUSE of Brexit fears?
B, the doctors have a strong lobby and are immune. For some reason, the Tories are reducing police numbers quite significantly.
Being an ex Police officer (24 years before retiring on medical grounds from injuries sustained after being assaulted, again) and being married to an ex paramedic, who has also received injuries from assaults, I may be able to have an input. There was a time when even drunks respected the emergency services but due to a continual feeding of their 'rights' from the liberal left wing numpties, today's drunks have probably never heard the word "no" or "you can't do that". Ambulance crews used to refuse to turn out for drunks as their condition was considered to be self-inflicted. This meant that Police had to arrest them for being drunk and disorderly/incapable. This took 2 Police officers off the street to convey them to the Police station with one of them monitoring the drunk in the cell while the other cleaned out the vomit from the back of the Police car. Labour's Human Rights laws put a stop to that and now all drunks have to be assessed by paramedics, even while the 'patients' are threatening, groping, or assaulting those trying to help them with their just as drunken mates watching and laughing.
Despite a comment made earlier, no one, whether Police, Fire service, or ambulance paramedics, can "expect to be assaulted". While dislike, or hatred, or verbal abuse is often experienced, physical assault is not to be expected. It is not in the job description. That is why "Assault on Police" is additional to offences against the person's acts. Unfortunately courts do accept that assaults on Police are to be expected which is why punishments of only a basic Sky package is authorised for these custodial sentences instead of the full film and sports package given to rapists and burglars.
Cynical and embittered at the current societal view? Too f*cking true I am.
PS, I hope you don't think I was making light of assaults on police*, fire fighters, medical staff etc.
So let's agree that such assaults are on the increase and that as you say it is down to "Labour's Human Rights laws", you're the expert not me.
But is still has nothing to do with 'cheap booze',and your comments would appear to support that. They are grasping at straws to justify minimum pricing and, for some reason, stricter drink drive laws despite the UK scores very well on the "not drinking and driving" front.
* Although I stand by my observation that for coppers, it is a risk of the job, which is why I agree that it should be punished most severely. This does not apply to fire fighters and medical staff, that is not a risk of the job and should be punished just as severely.
Given that the Police "Force" decided to change their name merely because they were delivering too much of it, to Police "Service" when it's nothing of the kind, I think anecdotal evidence from that body is, um, shall I use the technical term, crap?
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