A Bad Day At the Office

This is indeed an amusing story.

Ms Prentice, 55, who is the MP for Lewisham East and a junior minister in the Justice Ministry, had been on her way to attend a citizenship ceremony.

As she boarded a bus in Lewisham town centre she felt a man pushing up against her. “I was just turning round to ask him to stand back when he got off the bus,” she said. “I knew straightaway that something was wrong and looked into my bag to discover my purse had gone.”

“I shouted, ‘He’s nicked my purse,’ and a man farther back in the queue immediately gave chase.” This man, whom Ms Prentice would describe as her “knight in shining armour”, turned out to be a off-duty detective sergeant.

With the young officer hot on his heels, Cooper, 46, ran across the road and on to a pavement — where a team of police officers had just arrived to offer crime prevention advice to the shoppers.

They immediately joined the chase. Cooper ran into a shopping arcade, but the pursuing police alerted security guards and soon Cooper — who may have been envisaging easier targets at the start of the day — found himself up against the combined forces of Lewisham’s finest crime prevention officers and the guardians of the Riverdale shopping centre.

It was an uneven contest. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: “The man was detained and the purse recovered.

“It was fortunate that the thief ran past a busload of police and he was caught so quickly.”

But might I add a small comment to it? Clearly, having police on the streets enables them to catch criminals. So why not have coppers there? Instead of travelling around on busses to to give chats on crime prevention strategies to shoppers, why not have them, quite possibly in uniform, walking around deterring crime and, when that smaller amount does inevitably happen, they could chase the criminals.

It's a very odd idea I know, almost absurd in the minds of some. I've been trying to think up a name for this scheme though, for I know that nothing works in the modern world without a snappy monicker.

Roberts Against Robbers?

Plods in Public?

Missing a certain something, don't you think?

Aha! Bobbies on the Beat!

A ring to it, don't you think? What worries me is that no one seems to have thought of it before and given the number of incredibly intelligent people who have thought through such problems before me it does make me wonder what I've missed.