A Glasgow "street party" to celebrate the royal wedding has been broken up by the polis. But what is so delicious about this jolly little riot is that it was triggered after the organisers took David Cameron at his word and organised a street party without permission of the local gauleiters.

Two teenagers had organised the rave in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park, using facebook to advertise the event. Over four thousand turned up, many proceeding to get rat-arsed. Rather predictably chaos then ensued as the drunken revellers turned violent.

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Oh to be in Glasgow, now that spring is here...

Good to see that the Facebook generation can muster numbers very quickly without plod, H&S, the council, the government noticing. The future is looking a bit brighter this morning.

I was there at about 4.20 yesterday. Me and my girlfriend went to the park to feed the ducks in the pond & possibly squirrels, knowing nothing about this. We immediately left because it was very noisy & crowded and not worth the effort. However I saw no violence or anything approaching it, nor were there any police visible, at least near the park entrance. I did, shortly after see a police car, lights and siren on racing that way, which, at the time, I said looked like overkill because the crowd had been there all day. Then a police helicopter turned up circling the park for several hours. Had I been there listening to the music I would have taken umbrage at the helicopter's noise, indeed living nearby I wasn't too pleased either.

This was not an aggressive crowd (It is in the posh area of Glasgow). My opinion is that had a few police been there from the beginning, just patrolling on foot, like bobbies used to, and ignoring the bylaws against having a drink in public, like sensible polis do, they could have avoided the stramash at a cost considerably lower than several hours of helicopter time.

The narrative has it that some bobbies on bikes tried to intervene in a dispute ... and got set upon. Some of the comments in the Record are quite interested ... some people who were there were not very complimentary about the way some of the revellers behaved ... I can quite accept that it was overkill though, and it seems that giving the police helicopters was a major mistake. Like all the toys they are given, the eventually end up misusing them.

I agree......

One late evening, after a particularly late finish to a 14:00hrs to 22:00hrs shift at a local industrial plant, my mate and I enjoyed a few beers 'after time' in the local pub. No trouble and no fuss in the bar and we then left around midnight....

.....however, we'd also taken the opportunity to call in at the off licence just after leaving work and bought ourselves a couple of six packs of lager. We sat down on some benches not too far from a take away pizza emporium after leaving the pub....

...by this time is was about 00:30 and so we each purchased a fine pizza (especially good spicy meatfeast and a gem of a spicy pepper & cheese) and started to munch away on them and drink our beers. Clearly drinking in a public place can be seen as being a bit naughty but we had our feet up, out of the way and thus proceeded to watch the usual stereotypical selection of drunk idiots fight and cause mayhem.

Cue the arrival of the police, who to their credit did make a huge effort to not arrest anyone until the behaviour of some went from silly but high spirited into the regions of drunken f**-wittery.

Anyway, an older police officer walked by and noticed what we were doing...to wit, eating pizza and drinking beers in a public place whilst watching the Police deal with aforementioned f**wits. The officer calmly looked at us and in essence said, "Right fellas...I can tell you've just finished work. Do me a favour and keep the profile low will you. And make sure the beer cans go into the bin when you've finished". Our combined answer was pretty much, "No worries Sergeant."

Thus mollified, the Sergeant left us to it do deal with the more troublesome drunks. We continued watching the show provided by the drunk morons and the Police...it was better than watching it on SKY.

Left to our devices, we finished the beers and threw all the rubbish in the bin and wandered off to our respective homes.

Just proves that there are decent coppers out there who will make decisions and exercise the sort of judgement that HM Constabulary was once famous for.

In officer training, where we have to do orderly dog and act as the disciplinary officer, we were taught the essence of police duties .. the first rule of which was do not make a bad situation worse. The idea of good policing is to calm things down, not make them worse. Modern policing seems to involve stoking up a sitation so that you can indulge in mass arrests and then claim a result. Even on a routine stop, with traffice police, I have been close to planting my fist in the face of some of these so-called policemen. They invite trouble and seem to enjoy seeing how far they can push people.

Oh yeah.
When I was arrested on the flimsiest of evidence, I was severely tempted to plant the plods who seemed intent on provoking me!
My best, (& only,) defence was "No comment".

Were you in the Police force ?

You know the answer to that ... if you have a point to make, make it.

I dont know the answer . From your post it seems you were in the force . And I dont have a point to make about it .
Not at present anyway .

Hey ... come on ... me a plod? Can you imagine it? Nah ... I woz a Brylcream Boy ... hence officer training. As orderly dog, you are in charge of the whole station out of hours, guard room and all that ... power of arrest under QRs, so we had to learn something of the elements of policing.

Yes , sorry , I see that .
I erroneusly thought you might have left and be in despair about the force you served in like an aged relative I know .
Look at NARPO newsletters . There is a gulf in attitude between the generations of police .