Are the rest of our top cops up to the job?

Byline: GEORGE TYNDALE

FOR those who knew him the death of Police Chief Michael Todd was a tragedy.

For the rest of us it poses some troubling questions.

The life of the 50-year-old Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police ended when he climbed to the summit of Snowdon and, after consuming a mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol, fell victim to hypothermia.

The inquest into his death was unable to establish whether he had actually intended to kill himself.

But what did become clear was that in the last hours of his life Mr Todd behaved like a disturbed teenager.

While wandering around in the freezing cold he sent a string of confused text messages, mostly to the women in his life.

He is known to have had relationships with up to 12 of them in the past five years.

And it was the discovery of his latest affair by his wife, Carolyn, that triggered the events leading to his death.

Yet this was a man in charge of one of the largest police outfits in the country, employing 12,000 people.

His responsibilities included a major Counter Terrorism Unit.

He was also tipped as a future commander of the Metropolitan Police.

So his death speaks volumes about the selection and promotion systems inside our police forces.

Had no monitoring system identified the fact that pressure from his private life would be enough to send him spiralling into an emotional maelstrom? Revelations about the fragile state of Mr Todd come after the head of the Met., Sir Ian Blair, was forced to quit, leaving behind him a chaos of disunity among the higher officers in the London force, and a major question mark over whether he was ever the right man for the job.

If two of our top coppers were given their jobs, despite being so obviously flawed, then we are left facing another question.

What about the rest of them?