- and probably still are, but in all the current pudder of corruption starting at the top and of systemic racism we do not hear of them.
It's not clear what suddenly brought this recollection to mind, but there was an off-beat story from the 1960s which exemplified neighbourhood policing. One of the duties of the junior clerical officer in the MoT's divisional road engineer's office in London was to visit Scotland Yard and obtain various statistics relating to road use. Our liaison man there was a genial man by the name of (if I recall correctly) Fred Vanderhoek. When I was on data collection duty, he told me of a police station where a call went out for a certain PC: there's a parrot at the front counter for you. What had happened was that an old lady in his area had confided in him that she felt lonely and he had put out feelers for someone to provide a caged bird to provide her with a bit of company. The parrot was the result.
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On reflection, the Fred who told me the story may have been the captain of the Met. Police chess team when I was a regular member of the MoT team which competed in an inter-Departmental league.
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