Its from a post a while back, but the quote about police being 'originally' trained by civilians is a bit lame. Yes, the first crews were trained by civilians many years ago, but if you apply that logic, who trained the first ever pilots? The wright brothers didn't have a school to go to.
Things have advanced since the early days, we train our own people now. The 'civilian' CAA do check us, but only to make sure that we are operating THE AIRCRAFT safely and within limits. They certainly do not tell us how to handle command and control and the operational kit.
Remember that the civilian/police interpretation is very small. The aircraft carries passengers to incidents, it is operated to Cat A standards to safeguard the passengers. Once it gets there the passengers do their job. Bleating on about engineers and pilots being civilian is a red herring. Who deploys us is a red herring as well. The only important thing is how the observers do the job at scene. A huge amount of jobs we do involve the question coming from ground units: "What offences have you seen committed?". The experienced officers can then relay important information to ground units. To me as a mere 5 year veteran, this suggests that there MUST be at least one qualified cop on the crew. The other alternative would be to train the civilian observer to a suitable standard to recognise offences and be able to understand ground unit requirements.........
Hang on, that means train them as a policeman..... we do that already
