As long as the morality remains suspect and laziness and corruption remain epidemic, they deserve not one penny more.
Indeed, until those dreadful aspects are cleaned up and both efficiency and morality are improved, they should be locked up, not paid.
I now believe the vast majority of police are incompetent and lazy and wickedly prepared to bend or invent evidence in order to raise conviction rates - often in the clear knowledge of the human consequences.
KARMA for the police? Oh dear, don't even go there.

It's a sad fact that the government will continue to overlook any wrongdoing by the police. Officialdom needs the police as its intrument of enforcement.

When Thatcher came into power the very first thing she did (within a couple of days) was to give the police a massive pay boost - as she knew she would need them "on side" to enforece her battle with the unions etc

I've just returned from a journey that took far longer due to the police campaign to get more funds to arrest and convict innocent people.

Utter tosh!

The officers who demonstrated today were Off Duty.

This seems to have been overlooked in the somewhat shrill coverage in tonight's Standard.

The Police, Nurses, Fire Service and countless other public servants are being fed a lie in that we need to show restraint in terms of public service pay, in order to combat inflation.

That utter bollocks. They're being asked to accept insulting pay rises because the government is so up to their necks in debt, they simply can't afford to pay any more.

My personal view is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. So where's the incentive for our talented young people to go into public service when pay in the private sector is far more generous?

If I'd joined the police force it wouldn't have been for the money. I did volunteer to be a Special Constable, which is unpaid but puts you in the same dangers as the ordinary copper while you're on duty. They turned me down because I was only 18 and they wanted me to return when I was 19 and a half. I joined the Territorial Army instead (where I did get paid).

That said, if the government had promised a certain pay rise, they should deliver on the promise, although this government have such a bad record on promises that I wonder that anayone is surprised.

So the serious discussion seems to be...

should we concentrate on supporting our police before or after we improve them?

Answer - yes we should support them and yes, a condition of that support should be a cleanup in the ranks.

I think the entire Barry George fiasco illustrates policing this century.
Not only was an innocent man sent to prison for years but the guilty person is still out there.

Then there's the media collusion - why aren't they making as much fuss about the killer of Millie Dowler not being caught as about Maddie McCann?

Just two examples of our seriously collapsing society.