Recent Journal reports suggest to me that Lincolnshire Police has been transformed into a farce, rather than a force to be reckoned with, since the controversial new Commissioner elections.
Firstly, Chief Constable Neil Rhodes is suspended. Then he is not!Secondly, County Councillor Ray Wootten resigns as chairman of the Lincolnshire Police and Crime Panel, after what is described as a disastrous appearance before MPs at the Home Affairs Committee.
Hardly has the dust had time to settle when Coun Wootten is named as chairman of Lincolnshire County Council.
Through all the mayhem, newly-elected Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Hardwick appears to carry on regardless.
Yet was it not his decision to suspend the Chief Constable in the first place, an act that was overturned by judicial review?
Also, I understand that the Police and Crime Panel is the body charged with holding the commissioner to account.
I wonder if they will ever get around to investigating whether it was his policies which were responsible for the craziest farce of all?
I refer, of course, to the removal of ‘bobbies’ off the beat, in Grantham if not the rest of the county, leaving the general public, taxpayers and all, without adequate police protection?
Now every day I see drivers parking illegally all over the town, drug dealers carrying on their illicit business whenever and wherever they like, pedestrians, lives threatened by cyclists on footpaths (including my own five times now at least), yobs intimidating or abusing pensioners in public and private and all kinds of other offences being blatantly committed.
None of this under the coppers’ noses, of course, as you hardly see a fully-fledged officer out of his car it seems.
Please can the frontline police-cutting perpetrator be brought to justice themselves, whoever they are, or at least forced into another embarrassing U-turn.
Unfortunately there is one final question which must be asked.
We’ve heard that a number of the new Police and Crime Commissioners across the country are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds employing a whole host of highly paid assistants, which we were not warned about prior to the election.
Could our own worthy commissioner please reassure us that he, at least, is not doing the same?
Peter Clawson
Welham Street, Grantham