Here it is, hovering around.
No sirens, no SWAT, no car chases, no paddywagons, no raids, no plainclothes, no nothing- just the helicopter hovering above central Chatham on a Sunday night when all was quiet. I have it on (fairly) good authority that when it’s doing this it is using the heat-sensitive camera to look for cannabis farms in the local buildings. Whoo-hoo. Now THERE’S a positive and efficient use of taxpayer’s pounds. Perhaps, if they hadn’t been wasting said pounds on helicopters that fly around all day looking for trouble, then the need to send out mailshots like this would never have arisen:
Really?!
Aa anyone round here will tell you, if you’ve been burgled, mugged or raped then god help you, because you could be waiting anything up to or excluding 48 hours for the police to deign to arrive and take a few fingerprints while you dutifully don’t repair your door (for fear of contaminating the crime scene- LOL!!! Like they give a damn about you and your crime scene) or whatever and leave your property open to the elements (and further burglaries) in the meantime, and yet they can afford to keep a hideously expensive helicopter in the air 24/7. Perhaps, if they didn’t spend all their budget on show-piece helicopters then they could afford just a few extra bobbies to attend when there had actually been a crime commited, and even perhaps they could have saved the cash it cost to deliver a promise to do just that to every door in the town. Just maybe. Just maybe they could actually catch a criminal too. Or am I just being hopelessly optimistic?
After all, that’s part of the so-called Social Contract, isn’t it? We allow the existence of a paramilitary force of citizens, with more lawful powers than regular citizens, so that when we’ve been attacked or defrauded we can rely on our ‘boys in blue’ to protect us, or at least see that justice is done after the fact. It’s a bargain between us, the people, and them, the state. Once the police stopped bothering holding up their end of the bargain, swapped their friendly-but-professional-blue for intimidating black and decided that instead of solving (proper) crimes (with victims!) they would instead concentrate their powers on rooking cash out of the law-abiding and spending it on Big Boy’s Toys they lost all legitimacy to exist. Full stop.
By the bye, a large part of the reason the Police helicopter winds me up is that we are forced to pay -at gunpoint- for its upkeep and yet the Kent Air Ambulance, a service which actually saves lives is reliant almost entirely on the donations and goodwill of the people of Kent who dutifully put their coppers (no pun intended) into jars on bars county-wide. It makes me SICK.
Here they declare the foreshore area a no alcohol zone at New Year and have the jellychoppers up and shining the fucking NightSuns at people who are suspected of drinking. The locals who know better seem to be going along to drink on the beach the night before the ban comes into force, and then spend New Year’s Eve bitching about the noise the helicopters are making while they help nick tourists who didn’t know they’re not allowed a beer on the beach to see in the new year. I expect the rest of the time you see them hovering they’re looking for pot farmers just like your lot.
I run on beans, man…laser beans.
Thank you. You have finally explained to me why at least once a week a police chopper will hang around in the airspace around here for up to 3 hours. Two cannabis house-farms were discovered near here over three years ago. They’re obviously assuming such things come in threes.