How verbal and physical abuse drove me out of the police

The past decade has not been kind to those we entrust, in the words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000, with too many choosing to leave the force owing to physical and emotional assaults in a stressed and underfunded job.

I can sympathise, because I had to step away from the front line and the job I loved three years ago. At the time, friends and family repeatedly asked me why I felt I had to leave. Set against the latest news of escalating assaults on police, I’m not so sure they’d ask now.

There were approximately 31,000 assaults on officers last year, an increase of almost 5,000 on the year before. Barely any make the news — despite the stab and slash wounds, broken bones and close calls.

The past fortnight has been especially cruel — and has exposed the risks that police officers face. Charges have been brought for the attempted murder of PC Stuart Outten in a machete attack in London; the attempted murder of PC Gareth Phillips in Birmingham; and the murder of PC Andrew Harper in Berkshire.

Growing up, I considered myself to have had a fairly decent dose of life experience: I’m state-educated, have friends from across the social spectrum, was in the first generation of my family to go to university, and have an interest in social policy. How ignorant I was. It was only through policing that I discovered the full spectrum of what modern Britain looks like and how, at worst, it behaves.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

I saw everything, from utter and abject poverty, in which children stand little chance of a decent life, to the abuse and exploitation of the young and the elderly, and the reality that police are often the ones left ‘holding the baby’ — literally and metaphorically — outside of office hours.