Eyesight standards for police recruits have always varied significantly between forces. This made it difficult for optometrists to advise patients interested in a career as a police constable. Rather bizarrely, it also allowed potential candidates to shop around and apply to a force with more lenient standards. For example, Northamptonshire police used to require unaided vision of 6/6 in the better eye with no less than 6/18 in the worse eye, excluding all but the smallest degrees of ametropia. Other forces with less stringent standards asked for an unaided vision of 6/60, which would permit refractive errors of up to about –2.00D, depending on pupil size and the higher-order aberrations of the eye. At the other end of the spectrum, Thames Valley police made no mention of an unaidedvision requirement and specified ‘6/6 binocularly when fully corrected’, suggesting the acceptance of any degree of refractive error. None of the police forces in the UK specified any near-vision requirement. For serving police constables, this inconsistency complicated the transfer of officers between forces since an officer would meet the standards for one force but be ineligible for another.