A POLICE officer who has stepped down after nearly 50 years says the job is harder than it has ever been.
Geoff Harwood became a PC in 1966 and, after a spell on the beat in King’s Cross, has spent the past 39 years in Hounslow.
The 66-year-old, who ended his career working behind the desk as a supervisor in the crime management unit, is due to retire today (Monday).
Looking back on his years as part of the thin blue line, he claimed the role of a police officer was ‘unrecognisable’ from when he started.
“The job’s much harder. I feel as though you automatically had the respect of the public when I began but now it has to be earned,” he said. "I think that’s partly down to the modern methods of policing where you don’t get the same contact with the public as you once did."
When Mr Harwood became a constable as a 19-year-old fresh out of school, police did not even have walkie talkies, with officers relying on the Tardis-like boxes which were then a common sight on London’s streets to communicate.
But the biggest change he has noticed has been the growing drug culture, which drives a huge proportion of crimes, from petty theft to murder.
"The crime rate when I started probably wasn’t as high as today and that was the case right up to the mid to late 90s, when the problem with drugs really took off," he said. “I’m not saying there weren’t drugs because there were, just not in the proliferation there is today."
It was while working in Heston as a home beat officer – the precursor to today’s Safer Neighbourhood Teams – that Mr Harwood, who grew up in Twickenham and now lives in Sunbury, met his future wife Mary.
The couple got chatting during a visit to her hair salon in Convent Way in 1981 and they tied the knot two years later. Their son, father-of-two Paul Harwood, eventually followed his father into the force and after working as a PC in Hounslow, he is now a sergeant on the Safer Transport Team in Hammersmith.
