Indeed, I agree with you entirely, this is a sad loss of someone who clearly was a very brave man, and a pillar of his community, however it is unfortunate that the calibre and extent of community spiritedness in the entire police population does vary so much, that people cannot help but be cynical. The Met always had the worst reputation nationally ( ie Home Office employed, take what you can get etc), and I'm not sure whether that has changed, The best examples of worst cases are probably the pushing over of Ian Tomlinson, a bystander at the G20 demos, who subsequently died, and the fabrication that followed, and the initial cooking up of various stories immediately following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell, ie he jumped over barriers and created suspicion etc, when it was clear that he behaved normally.

I don't think you wanted to spark off a debate here, but unfortunately its probably unavoidable however I do agree that some individuals in the force do a great deal for their community, risking their lives in the process and they should be praised for this.

Another experience that I won't forget is a few years ago driving to the south west we encountered or rather narrowly avoided by having to swerve dangerously a bike on the M4 middle lane which had dropped off the back of a car. This was on the Berks/Wilts border at dusk . We called the police from the car and they seemed a little vague. When we stopped at a service station a few minutes later ( in Wilts) we approached a police car and asked them to check that something had been done about it. They refused point blank to do anything as it was in their own words, ' not their problem'. They wouldn't budge on this. Thankfully there appeared to be no casualties but if cars doing 70 had run into the bike there would have been many fatalities.

Unfortunately my own experience over the years of UK/London police in many situations has not been that wonderful- I wish I could say otherwise.