Often the section police mop up the after-effects of problems, such as attending calls to fires, suicides, natural deaths, domestic disputes, and road traffic accidents. The police on the British mainland do not attend many of these incidents unless a crime has been committed, but the RUC do so in order, as one said in relation to domestic disputes, to prevent crime. With experience of service in the Metropolitan Police, the policeman remarked, I think the public get a really good deal over here. Like, in England we'd never have gone to a domestic dispute unless a crime had been committed. The idea here is that you go to a domestic dispute to prevent a crime from being committed... Also in England the police wouldn't go to a fire, but we go in the hope that perhaps we could save life. (FN 3/3/87, pp. 8-9) Southgate has shown how British police have diffiulties in dealing with