Hello Dolly

Our Texan commissioner has complained bitterly about an article in last week’s Police Professional, ‘Mechanisms of prevention’ which warns that robotic dolls are about to hit Britain, and will inevitably make their way into the sex industry. The piece claimed that this new generation will bring with them very limited conversational abilities and up to 50 automated sexual positions. The commissioner has tasked me to find out about consumer rights given his recent purchase can neither speak nor move. We have tried to explain why automation is different to inflation but to no avail, but he, as always, wants an upgrade. Will these new devices take over? It is difficult to tell. A survey has revealed that only nine per cent of people would be willing to sleep with an android, but it failed to ask them what they would do with the android before they fell asleep or after they woke up. There is some understandable confusion as to what will and will not be illegal with this new generation of dolls, but it will clearly be some time before any of them reach the age of 17 and when our colleagues in the future have to investigate using the standards that are in place then, perhaps they could be looking into how some of these artificially intelligent dolls are being abused. It has been suggested that child sex dolls could be used “therapeutically by non-offending paedophiles”. This might prove a good thing, but it does not sound like one. It is an approach that has been promoted as ‘not great but better than nothing’, and has thus been damned by faint praise. There are moves to ensure that robots give their permission before they have sex, but it is reasonable to expect that offenders will claim that it was difficult to know whether or not they really meant it. Meanwhile, a West Midlands Police officer bitten by a flea while on the beat has been paid out £12,000 for injuries sustained on duty, plus £4,185 in legal fees. Former Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron says: “Our cops do an amazing job keeping us safe. Compensation should be paid for injuries at work but some of these claims seem to take the biscuit.” Fourteen police officers and other staff members of West Midlands Police claimed £61,131.30 in the financial year 2016/17, including £5,000 and £6,000 pay outs for tripping over. There were no complaints of any officers having lost biscuits. An officer injured due to ‘manual handling’ was given a £6,000 pay-out, while a staff member received £8,573.30 for injuring themselves in the same way. The exact nature of the ‘manual handling’ has not been revealed, and we must hope that they are not linked to the new generation of sex dolls. A West Midlands Police spokesperson has proved her suitability for a posting to intelligence with the totally accurate and absolutely useless response: “Compensation pay-outs are only made following the assessment of appropriate medical evidence by insurers and solicitors who then make a recommendation to the force as to what the pay-out should be…The force does have liability insurance in place which operates in respect of compensation claims made as a result of injury.” No sooner had our commissioner read about this scandal than he submitted a claim that his new doll has bitten him. We have yet to establish where, when and why, but we have asked West Midlands Police to send us a copy of its insurance policy. Yours, Stitch