Joy of joys! A friend of mine has secured tickets for the Neil Gaiman reading and Q&A in London tomorrow. So after work I shall be in excellent company listening to him talk. Mr Gaiman is one of those writers I really respect and it will be the first time I'll have seen him in the flesh.

I may ask him about the 'Stunt Lime'.

I'm a big fan of police blogging, hardly a day goes past without me working with the police on one call or another. So I know that they are human beings with the same frustrations and concerns as the rest of us. Unfortunately they come in for a lot of criticism from the press and are unable to respond. Their PR department seems to prefer 'spin' and 'whitewash', playing the violins while the Titanic sinks rather than providing the truth of police work. The police blogs give us an insight into a secretive world where their hands are tied by the government and this has prevented them from making the real difference that many of them joined the service to do.

The police management have a habit of shutting down the blogs though, perhaps they can't see how well they humanise the police services. No longer is the harassed copper who comes to take your details a uniformed cog in the machine, but is instead someone who is so buried under paperwork and government targets that they can't help you no matter how much they would like to.

It looks like another police blog is in danger of disappearing, Inspector Gadget is to have an 'informal chat' with the Professional Standards Unit. His sources tell him that this will be about the blog, and that he may be in some serious trouble.

At no point has he brought the Police Service into disrepute, he has not interfered with any investigation (ongoing or in the past) and his blog has shown people the world over the struggles and strains of trying to serve the public while facing unreasonable pressures from government. He tells the truth without it being whitewashed with 'spin'. The should be no reason why his bosses should want it removed.

This leads onto the wider question as to why the Police hierarchy don't like the truth being told. Nor why members of the police seem to have their Human Right of freedom of speech and expression removed from them.

Please, go over to his site, read the archives to see what a great blog it is and leave a comment of support. He deserves it, and hopefully with a show of public support it may demonstrate to his seniors why we need police bloggers.

It would be a terrible loss to see him disappear like 'The Law is an Ass', or 'Brian's Brief Encounters'.

Why can't they be as blog friendly as the London Ambulance Service?