[Tealeaf]

Originally Posted by DaveinGermany

No, not the best solution by a long ways to my reckoning.

Garbage, mate.

You talk about apprenticeships. In Germany, you still maintain an excellent apprenticeship system, whereas we abolished ours years ago. An 18 year old German kid wills, if he is good enough, be part of a 4, 5 or even 7 year scheme after which he will emerge has a fully qualified engineer and will be involved in manufacturing quality products for export. The equivalent British kid will be doing a joint honours degree in Wimmins, Ethnic & Leisure studies after which, rather than be a Captain of Industry will be knocking out quarter pounders down the local happy Macs.

The same goes for the current standard police training course. It’s 25/6 weeks of how to fill in forms, how to deal with gays & ethnics, domestic violence ,human rights legislation and a few weeks on basic policing. That is the equivalent of the crackpot degree.

Real policing is learnt over the next two years as a probationary police officer – and that is the apprenticeship. It makes far more sense to get rid of half a year’s college jinks and train these guys on the job from the start.

If you want to talk about the real problems facing British cops today, then you need to look elsewhere. This is the plethora of impeding legislation preventing them from doing the job they signed up for, the closure of local stations, the mass of paperwork, 24hour drinking and cheap availability of alcohol, immigrant crime...I could go on, but my tea’s ready.