And these guys don't want their pay frozen?

I was at school with the recently retired head of the National Policing Improvement Agency.  He was bright enough to get into Oxford and then progress to being a Chief Constable before retiring at a bit over 50 after 30 years no doubt on a solid pension, so not that dumb, but it has to be said not outstandingly clever, but probably the one of the very smartest in the police force.

Why do I point this out?  Because the average competence of today's police force is as low as it ever has been as evidenced by an instruction given by the Met to police officers at the student protests last year.  Under the heading "negative photo opportunities", police were advised not to draw attention to themselves when waiting around in police vans: "If drinking coffee or reading the paper when embussed, please be discrete."

Forget about "embussed" (it's in the Collins Dictionary even if it doesn't get through the spill chucker on this post and the military use it), but did the person responsible for that instruction really intend police officers to be

adjective

1. apart or detached from others; separate; distinct.
2. consisting of or characterized by distinct or individual parts;discontinuous.
3. Mathematics:.

• (of a topology or topological space) having the property that every subset is an open set.
• defined only for an isolated set of points.
• using only arithmetic and not involving calculus.