SASless, they weren't my rules, I only had to stick to them.
You often criticise our stricter UK rules and anyone who dares to mention them here, but the proof is in the pudding - we don't suffer the same losses. From experience, the risk of these kind of flights (i.e. are they VFR or are they IFR) is deemed to outweigh the benefit by the regulatory body.
The answer to your first question is about the same as the last but one line of my previous post. The rules here were changed after a fatal night-time accident to a UK police helicopter. Problem was, when it occurred, the majority of police ASUs were relatively very new entities. Many of the aircraft coming into use were not fully compliant with IFR flight. The one I flew had to have it's stabilisation system removed to save sufficient weight to fit the police equipment and had to be flown completely floppy sticked (i.e. twin engined, previously IFR equipped but now NOT so).
You can perhaps understand the problems it would have caused if Chief Constables were suddenly told the helicopters they had just paid for had to be scrapped...... Back then the large majority of police pilots were ex-mil. Giving those pilots some IF training was a half-way compromise.
A police aircraft is an observation platform. If the aircraft goes IMC the job is, by definition, thrown away. The limited IR training mandated was to give pilots some recency; many of them had previously held a military IR.
Last thing I heard was that once the "old" aircraft were replaced by more capable ones (i.e. fully IFR equipped) the further intention was for all UK police pilots to become IR holders. As I've been out of that industry for over a decade I'm not qualified to give a more up to date progress report on that front. Again, it's down to money.