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Tact and diplomacy, very important qualities for this very difficult job. And is it a more difficult job for a woman officer? Are woman police constable Hanks duty’s the same as police constable Rowle’s? My duty’s, the job that I do and duties I perform, are the same as a man. I’m employed at exactly the same basis, as a male police officer. I’ve heard on a couple of occasions when I turned up to the places to deal with jobs, you know, I was expecting a man. Or I’m all you are going to get. Then they have to accept that. And accept that women police officers deal with things as adequately as male police officers do. I’m sure they do. Perhaps there are sometimes an advantage in being a woman police officer. I think possibly there is yes. I think it probably takes up a bit of aggression out of men in particular. I don’t think there’s too much quelled or hit in a woman although unfortunately that does happen these days.
Does Officer Hanks worry about this possibility of violence? It’s something you do have at the back of your mind. Something, that’s every time, you stop a car at night or something like that. You do have a certain amount of apprehension and you try to take obviously as many steps as you can to avoid situations. Whether it’s violence and aggression. That’s the best you can do fortunately. Officer Rowle, on the other hand, is quite a big chap, and he can certainly look after himself. So what does he think of the worst parts of the job? I think, your tape would run out before I finish that along. They are some very difficult parts of my job. There are some very unpleasant parts of my job. Difficult parts, passing on death messages. When a loved one has died, and you will have to go to his house to tell somebody. It can be quite harrowing for police officers. When they deal with accidents involving children, in particular, it’s the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do. But the police officer ends up doing because there is nobody else to do it.
So, it’s the police who do the jobs, the dirty jobs that no one else wants to do. And all the time, Officer Hanks and Rowle talked about tact and diplomacy, and being human and getting to know people. But how do the public see things? Do the police have the support of the public? Depends whereabouts in the country you are, I think. In Lewes, it’s not too bad. I must admit, I do feel quite sorry for police officers in big inner-city areas because I don’t think they have an easy job at all. I don’t envy them of their job. I think, I Lewes, you have quite a good support from the community, and that does help policing quite a lot.
In this country we police very much by consent. If we don’t have the consent of the population, we are out of our job because people just won’t take any notice of what we do, and what we say. So yes, I would say, 99 percentage of the population respect us for what we do and the majority of those people respect the individual police officers. Policing by consent, policing with the support of the community. Perhaps it is this principle which explains the importance of the officer on the beat which explains why getting to know people is not a public relations exercise. So is community policing a good use of police resources? I think it’s an excellent use of police resources. I think there ought to be more community police officers. I think that the community officer plays a very important role as I said earlier in building bridges between police and community. It’s got to be a two-way thing. Not only does the community’s need to be able to talk to us. We’ve got to be able to talk to the community.
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