The World has Gone Mad

Police Community Support Officers should be scrapped after a young boy drowned as two PCSOs stood by, a Police Federation boss has said.

Jordon Lyon, ten, was trying to rescue his eight-year-old step-sister Bethany who got into difficulty while swimming at John Taylor’s Pit in Wigan, Greater Manchester, in May this year.

Two fishermen saw Bethany with her arms wrapped Jordon’s neck as he was holding her up with his head under the water. They jumped in and saved her but Jordon became submerged.

An inquest has heard two PCSOs arrived at the scene but did not attempt to rescue Jordon because they were not trained to deal with the incident and called for further assistance from uniformed officers.

Jordon’s mother, Tracy Lyon, and his step-father Anthony Ganderton, of Bluebell Avenue, Wigan, want to know why the PCSOs did not try to rescue their son.

Mrs Lyon has called for the PCSOs to be named after they were not asked to give evidence at her son’s inquest and said they should lose their jobs.

She said: “If you’re walking down the street and you see a child drowning you automatically go in that water. You don’t care if you’re going to lose your job or not.

“I want them to be named. I want to know why they weren’t at the inquest when I had to turn up there and go through the pain of it all.”

Her husband told the inquest: “I don’t know why they didn’t go in. I can’t understand it. If I had been walking along a canal and seen a child drowning I would have jumped in.

“You don’t have to be trained to jump in after a drowning child.”

Mr Ganderton and a friend had waded into the pond in a desperate search for Jordon and were helped by a uniformed officer who stripped off his body armour and dived in.

Jordon was pulled from the water up to five minutes later. They tried to resuscitate him but he was later pronounced dead at hospital.

The inquest heard there had been initial confusion over the location of the pond with trained officers sent to the wrong place.

Greater Manchester Police defended the PCSOs actions and said they were right not to jump in the water because they were not trained in such incidents.

But, Paul Kelly, chairman of the Police Federation in Manchester said PCSOs are not capable of dealing with emergency situations.

He said: “The public are being fooled. We are sending people out there who are dressed as police officers.

“Every single police officer that went to training school with me 30 years ago left with a life-saving certificate of some sort.

“I don’t know in this case if the two PCSOs could not swim but not swimming was not an option in our training.

“We’ve got to able to deal with all types of situations. We should do away with PCSOs because they are a failed experiment.

“In Greater Manchester we have taken on up to 400 PCSOs in the last 18 months but in the same period have reduced the number of police officers by more than 200.

“We should be investing in more police officers.”

A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

What is the world coming to when you stand by and watch someone die, then say you couldnt do anything as you dont have the training, is it so difficult to tie some rope round yourself, get some people to hold it while you dive in after the kid.