[Xaccers]

Basically the government made moves to force an increase in the size of the police force without actually looking into how best to do it, so consiquently there are loads of coppers doing paperwork etc that should be done by admin staff simply so the government can claim the number of PCs is at an all time high.
What's happening now is the media has woken up to a lack of correlation between numbers of PCs and crime reduction, and moved onto the waste of money simply getting PCs to do every police job causes.