Are the police acting with too much force?

POLICe have to deal with violent incidents every day and they are duty-bound to ensure the safety of the public, victims, fellow officers and the arrested person. Some of those arrested are suffering from some form of illness and many may be violent because of drugs or drink, or just because they want to hurt police officers. In the middle of the violent behaviour, officers must act quickly to restrain the offender. Although trained in emergency life support, police officers are not doctors or psychiatrists. If every time a fatality unfortunately occurred the figures for successful restraints were also shown, people would see that things go wrong in a very small percentage of cases. Police officers do a difficult job — leave them alone to get on with it. PAUL MORLEY, Skipton, North Yorks. IN RECENT years, many have questioned the accountability of police firearms use. And the same concern applies to the treatment in police stations of the mentally ill, such as Thomas Orchard (Mail). If the three officers in his case did ‘do it by the book’, then the author of that book should have been in the dock. That way, Thomas’s parents, Ken and Alison Orchard, wouldn’t be added to the list of people who have no sense of justice from the legal processes that followed their bereavement. NIK WOOD, London E9.