Brunstrom is talking balls...

On Wednesday, I suggested (again) that it was time for Richard Brunstrom, the idiot who runs North Wales police force, to resign after his comments that ecstasy was safer than aspirin.

Brunstrom has used his blog to defend his comments. He writes: “As a fact then, and one which deserves to be more widely known, UK government figures from the Office of National Statistics show that between 1993 and 2006, ecstasy was ‘mentioned’ on death certificates in England and Wales 456 times (and mentioned on its own, without other drugs being present, less than half that number of times – 234) , whereas aspirin was mentioned on 504 occasions (on 285 occasions in the absence of other drugs). So in the last 14 years, as a fact, aspirin has been formally associated by the government with the death of more people than has ecstasy. That’s why I said on the radio that ecstasy’s safer than aspirin. The picture is not that simple of course, not least because the word ‘mentioned’ does not mean that ecstasy actually caused the death, merely that a person died who had taken it.”

As Brunstrom admits the picture is not that simple. Put another way: 504 people “died” as a result of aspirin out of perhaps 20 million people who took it (0.00252 per cent); 456 “died” from ecstasy out of perhaps a million that took it (0.0456). Now which is the safer drug?

In addition, his biography (which boasts of his A grade A level in Welsh as if that has anything to do with policing) on the site claims that “under Richard Brunstrom, North Wales Police has become one of the best performing forces in England and Wales”. Hmm, under Brunstrom his officers issued 4,200 speeding tickets but – in stark contrast – solved only 41 out of 693 vehicle crimes in a single month. In the same period it was revealed that his force had solved a mere six per cent of burglaries in their area.