Posts

Showing posts from February, 2023

That first meeting was the precursor for another one about 14 months

  That first meeting was the precursor for another one about 14 months  later, a couple of weeks into the 2018 season, with the personnel department’s heavyweights—Veach, Tilis, assistant GM Mike Borgonzi and VP of football operations Chris Shea among them—getting together to, again, talk about the future. Mahomes had torn up the Chargers and Steelers to open his second season, making it increasingly obvious where this was going. “We were on this path here, this guy’s likely to be MVP and it was, We gotta get ahead of this thing,” Veach says. “Hey, let’s give ourselves a really long runway because we firmly believe he’s gonna be an MVP and we’re gonna win a Super Bowl. Let’s plan as if all these things happen, so that when they do, we’re not trying to come up with an outside-the-box plan while we’re in the offseason. “We’ve had time to think about this.” The first piece, of course, was always going toward Mahomes’s contract, and at that point, the quarterback was still 16 mont...

Happy Valley shows how policing should be done – how come the BBC gets this, and not the Met?

  Happy Valley shows how policing should be done – how come the BBC gets this, and not the Met? I’m not usually a fan of police dramas. After 30 years working for the Metropolitan police, in a career that spanned working in firearms, hostage situations, murders, riots and domestic violence, I’m usually frustrated with how inaccurate TV portrayals are of policing (I know, this is sad). But then Happy Valley has come along again, and instead of resisting, I decided to watch it. What have I learned? Aside from the fact that unrealistic police procedures still abound on television (mobile phone data analysis missed; a survivor of a kidnapping and sexual assault joining the force and being allowed to work in the area in which the offences recently occurred), what struck me most  was that the writer, Sally Wainwright, and the BBC commissioners have grasped something the police still haven’t: that diversity matters. I was the only person of colour out of 300 new officers when I joine...