True to life, true to image or both?

The Channel 4 programme Babylon portrays rank & file coppers as idle, foul-mouthed gits, the senior officers as obsessed with spin and PR, and the ones allowed to have guns and tasers as ill-disciplined, kill-crazy nutters. Which is pretty much how a lot of people see the sorry shambles which is the present New Labour-created police “service”. Which illustrates the magnitude of the task of turning it back into a police “force” which serves the public rather than itself.