> If the officer was calm and professional I don't know what more you want from them.

I said calm, not professional. I consider his failure to notice her distress and panic to make him totally unsuited to work with the public in pretty much any capacity. It was blatantly obvious that she was in distress. Had he seen someone acting like that towards someone not a police officer, he'd have run to assist in what would have seemed like a dangerous situation on the basis of her reaction.

He was blinded by a failure to understand that someone could react with that kind of fear to the police, and as a result proceeded to completely counter-productively escalate a situation that need not have been escalated at all.

> It's not the job of the police to hold the hands of every paranoid individual and shush them back to a state of tranquility.

A large part of the job of the police is to deal with people in distress; often with mental health issues. If they are unable to deal with people in distress with empathy they're not suitable to do the job.

> Is Theresa May some sort of authority on policing that her name keeps being mentioned here? As an external observer it seems that she was a complete failure at everything during her tenure, surely there's someone more appropriate that offered an opinion on this topic.

The point is that even she accepted the report that Cameron commissioned that demonstrated extensive systemic racism in the Met, despite the reluctance of her party to deal with racism in general. Someone else posted a bunch of links about systemic racism in the UK. At this point it is willful ignorance to suggest this isn't a real problem.

You already had a huge scandal in the UK with the police being afraid to break pedophile rings in several cities because they thought they'd be accused of racism. Condemning them for being calm, but not impossibly professional while dealing with paranoid people will surely motivate them even more and ensure maximum efficiency. Comparing them in a critical way with the US police which is regularly killing people likewise.

And if anyone arguing against the approach you support is apparently ignorant or provoking your disgust, I think I'd rather let you focus on fighting this good fight and dealing with its Brexit consequence.

> It's not the job of the police to hold the hands of every paranoid individual and shush them back to a state of tranquility.

Umm... It kinda should be. yeah. It certainly shouldn't be their job to shoot those people, or tackle those people, or manhandle those people.

They will need to be trained and paid far higher then!

Are you arguing that it is cheaper to just kill or beat people than to comfort them?

In the UK, if you call the emergency services and tell them you believe someone is likely to commit suicide, there's a good chance the police will turn up at their door. The police have a dual role, ridiculous as it is - they are meant to both be community workers capable of handling a wide variety of people and situations, and investigate crime, sometimes at the same time.