Coppers throwing their weight around
I had the misfortune of watching 10 minutes of some city centre drunken idiots TV show last night. I can understand that it's frustrating dealing with pissed plonkers, but where some police seemed to be doing a decent job at stopping violence that had broken out, they were astonishingly poor at dealing with people who appeared to have a genuine grievance, and were merely asking for an explanation.
A couple of lads, who were pretty wobbly, seemed to be trying to find out why their mate had been arrested. The answer to this was "JUST GO HOME SONNY OR WE'LL TAKE YOU IN AS WELL". They (that is the drunks), finally gave up and started to walk off. A policewoman then followed them to make sure they were still walking away. They reasonably asked why she was following them, and whether she could see that they were going away. "YEAH. I'M FOLLOWING YOU TO MAKE SURE YOU DO". They carried on walking, and maybe 200 yards and three streets from the clubs, the policewoman was still following them and basically harassing them. When one of them swore, not even at her, but in exasperation, she said "RIGHT, I"VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU TWO!" and called for a van to cart them off as well.
They were drunk, they weren't really disorderly though. At worst they'd lost a certain amount of inhibition, which is why they had the bollocks to question what was going on. That's what really annoyed the police. They were no threat to anyone. Arresting them seemed to me to be a complete waste of time and indeed a waste of resources.
A programme that was meant to show the evils of a typical city centre on a Saturday night showed a couple of pissed idiots not getting into a club and some ludicrously undiplomatic police throwing their weight around unnecessarily. If it was meant to show what a good job the police do, it failed miserably. If I was their boss, I'd want to know where the fuck they were trained.
I'm guessing they harass photographers when they're on the day shift.