As much as "it was all a false alarm" would make a killer headline (and clearly has, even in speculation), it doesn't seem that anyone actually believes that. Just a poor choice of works.
The Police in the UK often say the most ludicrous things in statements, and the basic public speaking skills of the people they choose to put out is often very limited. They always look like they're caught in the headlights while trying to sweatily stumble through reading some words off a page.
I'm not sure what institutionally causes this, but it must be something causing it as it's always the same.
Remember when recently a senior Police officer in a statement just decided to call some extremely serious allegations they were looking into 'true' as if they had already had the trial and preempting the whole judicial process? I can't understand how you can accidentally 'misspeak' like that.
They don't hire the brightest - recently I heard a former senior ex met natsec policeman who presented as very very stupid individual I would not trust to investigate a missing kitten.
There was also the scandal where a v senior copper on the Cyber side was found cheating.
This was literally a single court case of a single applicant of a single small department.
The ruling is that it is not literally illegal to refuse to hire someone for being smart. On an totally unrelated note, the applicant was an older fellow, and age discrimination is illegal.
The applicant was also hired as an officer in another jurisdiction.
Most departments that have more than 100 officers require a bachelor's or associate's degree. The department I worked for did not explicitly have this requirement, but I was the only person in our class of 96 hires that did not have either a college degree or military background. Most had bachelor's, a few had master's, some had doctorates.
On a completely separate tangent, law enforcement as a field is much like a skilled trade. To do it well you need a specific set of skills and the desire to learn them. Any high school graduate can do the job more than adequately if hes willing to listen and learn the stuff he needs to learn. At the end of the day a cop simply needs to be an honest person who understands the basic principles of the laws related to policing, and is willing to take calculated risks to help others.
You should cite a source for that. Where I live the cops are pretty on the ball. I recall one of them casually correcting my math on work-related problem when he was taking a report from me on another topic.
Where I live (Eastern Europe) the policemen are generally known as not being the brightest, there are countless jokes made about their intellect (or lack thereof) and propensity to generally follow orders without giving it a second thought. I've just checked and it seems that even the related Wikipedia [1] page has a section on this:
> Policemen: Most Romanian people are not fond of the law enforcement institutions and try to avoid contact with constables. Romanian public opinion about policemen says that they are primitive, uneducated and totally corrupt. Some of these police jokes belong to the absurd genre.
Q: How do you choose a stupid policeman from a group of
policemen?
To be fair, and I've come across this so many times, you can be good at your job and still have awful presentation skills. I don't think we get taught things like this in the UK and/or get practise in it, unlike other countries.
> Detectives were understood to have drawn up a shortlist of potential culprits after the pilot gave vital clues away by audaciously flying the drone right up to the air traffic control tower.
> In a move known as "buzzing the tower", it emerged the perpetrator had taunted airport staff by circling the drone around the building and flashing its lights, an industry source told The Daily Telegraph.
Yeah, considering they found a damaged drone near Gatwick airport... it is strangely possible with 67 witnesses that there is no video "proof", but unlikely there were no drones.
On the other hand, I won't be surprised if the couple that were released use the fairly strong libel laws to punish early press shaming.
> During a conference call between ministers, chaired by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, it was agreed the 67 drone sightings were legitimate.
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-46670714)
As much as "it was all a false alarm" would make a killer headline (and clearly has, even in speculation), it doesn't seem that anyone actually believes that. Just a poor choice of works.