TC
When you are on the ground and off duty I doubt you would feel that a visible police presence in your local area was other than a good thing when it comes to keeping the local bad lads in check.
That is my take on what Shawn is saying and I am with him.
When you are on duty you may be able to argue cost/effectiveness issues (which I am certainly not competent to talk about) but to suggest that a police chopper flying about while not on a specific shout does no good seems wrong to me.
Yonks ago I was involved in testing the airworthiness of some mods to a Police Islander. When flying on these tests we were several times asked to help (and were able to) just because we were airborne in the local area. Talking to the officers on board they doubted they would have been scrambled for the cases we helped on because of the response time that would have been involved.
JF