When the police have been in the headlines in recent weeks it has too often been for reasons that have done them little credit. The deaths of two women officers in Manchester today, Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes, fatally shot in the course of attending a "routine incident", is a reminder that for every foul-tempered officer whacking a passer-by at a demonstration or taking a backhander off a reporter, there are countless others who accept the risk of a violent assault ? or worse ? as part of an increasingly stressful profession.

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