It has been a hellish week for our boys and girls in blue.
The tragic Westminster events of last Wednesday served once again to highlight the dangerous role our police take on as part of Britain’s oft-criticised thin blue line, a career choice that has left the family of devoted dad PC Keith Palmer facing a lifetime of unimaginable grief and irreplaceable loss.
The aftermath of Britain’s worst terrorist incident since the 7/7 bombings of 2005 brought with it an outpouring of respect, condolence and compassion for our bobbies, much of it on social media where cheap political bile served only to sully the memory of PC Palmer and the other victims of the tragedy.
I much prefer to dwell on the Facebook photos posted by Australian and US families on whom PC Palmer left an indelible impression after they met him at the Palace of Westminster gates, and the messages of sympathy and solidarity from the brothers and sisters in arms of our local police community.
But they had little time to dwell on the loss of one of their own as the deluge of day-to-day business of local policing continued unabated.
Worryingly, that has brought a succession of potentially lethal incidents in recent days.
The magnetic, but deadly lure of abandoned buildings has seen reports of teenagers breaking into the cordoned-off site of the old Forfar Academy and even scaling the roof of the town’s empty Lochside leisure centre.
Then, in Kirrie, youngsters put drivers’ lives at risk by throwing large branches into the path of cars on a busy street.
Only last year we saw the catastrophic consequences of kids mucking around in old buildings with the blaze which engulfed Forfar’s old Wellbrae primary school.
In our Angus tranquility, the capital’s dreadful bloodshed and ever-present state of alert may seem far off, but our officers have their own very important job to do and they deserve every support from us as citizens, a community and a county in helping them carry it out.