Following the recent robbery on Saturday morning of the ATM at the Bank of Ireland in Crossmaglen, I’ve heard a number of people complaining about the police response…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8463600.stm
I gotta say, you can’t man every police station in NI, full time, that just wouldn’t work, it would cost too much, and I doubt we’d have enough officers to do it anyway… And even if the station was manned, it would probably only be a small night guard of 2 or 3 men. It’s hardly fair to expect them to run up to a group of robbers, with a digger, tractor, and various other vehicles, without knowing what kind of weapons they might be carrying, and confront them. That’s just NOT a good idea? If anything it’ll aggravate the situation, and probably result in the officers getting hurt. At the end of the day it’s only a job, I wouldn’t expect them to ‘act the hero’ or anything like that… And well, an injured police officer is going to cause more hassle when it comes to stopping the robbers, as the other officers will have to tend to his/her injuries, before continuing to pursue the criminals…
It’s sort of a similar situation to those dissidents carrying out the illegal checkpoint in South Armagh early last year. What was the point of the squad car, with two guys, probably only armed with 9mm pistols, going into the checkpoint to arrest the guys, who were all carrying things like Klashnikov rifles and H&K MP5s… It’s pretty obvious (to me anyway) that it would just end up in a blood bath…
The banks, and LINK are trying their best to avoid more of these robberies being carried out, example through putting less cash in the machines, trying to vary the time of replenishing them more… But it still doesn’t exactly take a genius to sit near the ATM, waiting for Securicor/Brinks to come along and fill it…
Anyway that’s my wee rant over…