WHY DO NON HOME DEPARTMENT POLICE FORCES GET MISSED WHEN LEGISLATION IS BEING DRAFTED? Note: The Home Department is the traditional name for the Home Office and the Home Secretary is technically the Secretary of State for the Home Department. In this and other pieces I tend to use the titles interchangeably. I hope that by confusing my readers I can distract them from the boring nature of the blog itself. One part of my work lies in the field of research. This is not well paid and is a somewhat lonely pastime, but I do enjoy the thrill of tracking down information in archives, dusty corners of the internet and guiding people around bits of London. I find that there is often an overlap between the past and present, indeed life is a continuum. The present is a product of the past. The influence of what has come before is often apparent in what is done today. Frequently to understand the modern operating context we have to get past the ‘that’s before my time’ mindset.
I had a chat today about the challenges of managing potential football disorder away from grounds. As always everybody was keen to remember that more than 99% of people attending football matches are there to enjoy themselves in a way that poses no threats to the King’s peace. A sense of perspective is important in all public order and crowd management scenarios. The subject of the history of the issue came up. The problems of the 1980s and 1970s are still fresh in the mind and the lessons that were learned then are pretty well incorporated into modern practice. Modern public order (not a phrase I especially like) policing and the co-operation between forces has a lot to recommend it. Looking to the past the books by Mike Layton on the subject are worth a look. The particular challenge of policing fans as they travel on the railway network has been a speciality of BTP for the whole of the history of the force. Time consuming, expensive and sometimes dangerous this is