A police officer has gone viral for having the greatest name a cop could ever have.
No, it’s not a homage to any characters from The Bill or Hot Fuzz, but it could be a line from a certain Alanis Morissette track.
PC Rob Banks, yes that is his real name, from Avon & Somerset Police appeared on ITV News West Country last night (January 17) to discuss the impact budget cuts have had on the police force.
A caption stating the police officer’s name appeared on the screen for only a few seconds, but that is more than enough time to allow viewers to take photos of it noticing the pun.
Matt Allen shared a photo on Twitter writing:
Best policeman name ever goes to…
Seth Darby posted a similar a picture tweeting:
And the award for policeman name of the year 2019 goes to….
Unsurprisingly both tweets went viral making PC Rob Banks a viral star.
During the special report, officers including PC Rob Banks described the force as being ‘at breaking point’ thanks to years of budget cuts.
While the public is being asked to pay more for their police, officers are considering quitting as there are insufficient numbers to cope with rising crime levels.
Speaking to the cameras after attending to a stabbing in a Bristol park, PC Ainsley Husain commented:
There’s just not enough of us and criminality around the city goes almost undetected at the moment.
There’ll be other emergencies unresourced at the moment, whether that be on our patch or other areas around the city that are going unresourced.
People have been waiting hours to see a police officer.
Inspector Steve Darvey agreed, stating:
The amount of offenders we bring to justice has reduced, which is disappointing because it doesn’t give victims closure.
We’re stretched to breaking point because it might take 24 hours or 48 hours to get to see a victim of crime which is never [how] it should be.
PC Rob Banks meanwhile revealed the difficult situation made him consider leaving the force. ‘I’ve questioned whether I want to carry on doing this, at the moment I do, but there’s been a lot of times when I haven’t’, he said.
Avon & Somerset police is given a total budget of £284 million a year which is £32,500 an hour. The majority of that budget is spent on staffing, with 2,651 officers currently employed in the region.
The Home Office has announced the most substantial funding increase for the police since 2010.
For Avon & Somerset police, if council tax increased by £2 a month their budget would potentially rise to just over £300 million a year.
This is all in the face of crime figures rising over the last three years.
For example, violent crime and the number of people arrested in possession of knives or other weapons have both doubled.
Justice for victims has meanwhile fallen with only one in every eight people seeing a conclusion to their investigation.
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