User talk:Anon 003

July 2007
Please do not delete content from pages on Wikipedia, as you did to Law enforcement in the United Kingdom. Your edits do not appear to be constructive and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use Sandbox for test edits. Thank you. Gscshoyru 18:14, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

See response on my talk page Gscshoyru 18:28, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

This is the only warning you will receive for your disruptive edits. If you vandalize Wikipedia again, you will be blocked from editing. Nick Cooper 18:33, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Police and guns
Good question. I don't recall reading that Canadian police have ever been unarmed. If I get a chance later, I'll look it up to make sure. Some considerations to keep in mind though: many police forces in Canada were modeled after the Royal Irish Constabulary (armed), not the London Metropolitan police. Also, despite Canadian pretensions to follow the British system, American influences in policing were greater than often admitted. A third factor is that police forces developed in quite different contexts; in the west, for example, the frontier presented different policing problems than say an urban area in the east, and policing is a provincial responsibility, so it might have been different in different places. bobanny 01:49, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Law enforcement in the United Kingdom
I peeked in at the dispute in this article and thought I'd offer my perspective. First, try not to take it personally that your edits were pegged as vandalism by several users who didn't engage with you on the talk page. Deleting information or blanking an entire page is one of the most common forms of vandalism, and the main way the effects of vandalism are minimized is by editors having articles on their watchlist so they can revert it right away (and police articles are especially popular targets for vandals). There's also a commonly held belief that if someone bothered to write something for an article, there needs to be a very convincing reason to remove it, which should be determined by building a consensus on the talk page. These two things would make your edits more likely to be interpreted as vandalism or maybe edit-warring disproportionate to the actual issues and whatever the legitimacy of your reasoning. That said, there's also a Assume Good Faith guideline that's easily forgotten when editors are reverting what they think is probably malicious.

As for the substantive issues, the whole article needs work. If it was fully developed, that section wouldn't seem to over-emphasize the issue of controversial shootings. But I also think that it's just poorly done because it doesn't present the issues upfront to frame that section, but instead mostly just lists raw information, which of course can look like POV cherry-picking, regardless of the intentions of the writers. From a quick google search, it's clear that there are bigger issues that at least some of these incidents speak to, such as post-9/11 policing, racial profiling, fear of an American-style gun culture developing in the UK, etc. The little bit of context provided towards the end seems out of the blue and is entirely unsourced. I've come to believe that most articles with point of view issues or on controversial topics are best fixed by addressing quality issues to result in something that neither camp would object to; ideally, both cop-haters and cop-lovers should find this article informative and useful. One possibility that would be relatively quick and easy might be to just create a List of controversial police shootings in Britain article that could be linked from this one, and people could add as many as they can find without cluttering this already listy article. Anyway, there's some thoughts. cheers, bobanny 07:36, 11 July 2007 (UTC) p.s. I'm not sure if your question about Canada was related to this debate or not, but the iconic RCMP are currently under scrutiny for some fatalities.