Captain Calamity:

IT'S TIME TO QUIT, POLICE CHIEF CONSTABLE RICHARD BRUNSTROM TOLD

No one could ever have accused Richard Brunstrom of fearing controversy.

But his suggestion yesterday that ecstasy is safer than aspirin must
make even his most ardent supporters question his judgment - if not his sanity.

Even by the peculiar standards of North Wales's chief constable it
was an outlandish suggestion, prompting one observer to ask: "Exactly
what colour is the sky on the planet where Brunstrom lives?"

Yet nothing deters the ambitious officer, who took over in January
2001 and once proposed putting a vending machine for needles for
heroin addicts outside Colwyn Bay police station, to be kept stocked
with disposable syringes by ambulance crews.

For Brunstrom clearly blossoms on the oxygen of publicity, no matter
how much trouble it might get him into.

This, remember, is the man for ever known as "the Mad Mullah of the
Traffic Taliban" for his relentless advocacy of using more and more
speed cameras against speeding drivers.

In 2003 he suggested, with typical restraint, that this country
needed three times as many cameras and argued that the defence that
some drivers can "drift" over the speed limit cannot be accepted.

Later Brunstrom even called a press conference to condemn a retired
71-year-old bank manager who was caught doing 39mph in a 30mph zone
and criticised his "zero-tolerance" policy on speeding.

His passion for cracking down on motorists saw his officers issue
4,200 speeding tickets but - in stark contrast - clear up 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.

Indeed the former Home Office minister David Mellor once accused him
of making "blood-curdling threats to speeding motorists, while
wanting heroin legalised on logic that would not persuade a six year old".

A former head of road policing for the Association of Chief Police
Officers, Brunstrom stood down in 2005 after persistent criticism
from other chief constables.

But his passion for road safety saw him take the decision to display
photographs of a headless motorcyclist at a traffic accident to a
public conference without asking the family's permission.

The photograph showed father-of-three Mark Gibney's head still in a
red and white helmet with his eyes open while his torso was embedded
in the car which had been involved.

The publication meant that Mr Gibney's widow and children knew the
full details of his injuries, which had, until that time, been kept from them.

Brunstrom was not censured for his decision to use the photographs
although the family called for his resignation, as did Martyn Jones,
Labour MP for Clwyd South.

It was one more example of his apparent disregard for common sense or
reasonable behaviour.

Time after time, he takes an ever increasing delight in drawing
attention to himself - no matter how extraordinary his views or his
actions may be.

Only last month, for example, he broke into his own police
headquarters at Old Colwyn to point out a lapse of security.

The steely-haired Londoner, who gained a PhD in zoology from the
University of Wales in Bangor, spent 11 years with the Sussex
Constabulary before transferring to Greater Manchester and then
Cleveland on his way to North Wales.

He has never minded making a fool of himself.

In August 2006, for example, he took some pleasure in his appointment
as an honorary druid with the name Prifgopyn (which means spider).

There is a headstrong, even devil-may-care attitude about the
Welsh-speaking Brunstrom, who as a young officer in Brighton agreed,
as a dare, to direct traffic in the town wearing his uniform and a
gorilla mask.

Unluckily the first car he stopped belonged to the Chief Constable.

Soon after arriving in his North Wales post, Brunstrom took it upon
himself to label all homosexuals in public lavatories as "queers", a
remark which he later admitted was "inappropriate".

But he quickly learned from his mistake. Brunstrom, who is married
with two children in their early twenties, subsequently asked his
force to launch not one but two investigations into political
correctness against the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service.

One was against the then Prime Minister Tony Blair for, reportedly,
addressing the remark "f Welsh" to a television set during the 1999
Welsh Assembly elections, and the other against the Weakest Link
presenter Anne Robinson for anti-Welsh comments.

Neither case came to court, although they cost the North Wales
taxpayer almost UKP6,000.

But that didn't apparently matter to Brunstrom - not so long as his
name was in the spotlight.

This, then, is the very model of a modern chief constable - a man
whose appetite for publicity is matched only by his apparent lack of
judgment. What a depressing spectacle for the ratepayers of North Wales.