I predict a riot

Funnily enough, I did just do that. I said to a colleague, "If Rangers lose, it'll kick off".

I wasn't quite expecting several hundred of them to kick off because their giant TV broke, though. Still, thats what happens when you let several hundred people drink all day.

Still, at least the cup final was in Manchester, not Europe, where the police take less kindly to being chased down the street and would've used water cannons, CS gas at concentrations double what we're allowed and several dozen more gratuitous baton charges.

I did laugh at one outraged football shirted woman captured on some news reel, thinking how the police were soooo brutal because they pushed her over. Well, lets think about this. You've a rather hacked off police force (15 injured, plus that cctv footage we've all seen) who are ordered to clear streets, usually to allow ambulances access to one of the dozens of injured supporters. You don't move, you get shoved out of the way. If anything, they were restrained. Riots aren't a spectator sport.

In major public disorder, we don't usually have the time to stop and explain what we need to do and why. Awfully sorry.

Noddy has posted his views from north of the border, but you'll need a scottish translator to read it :-)

Lets see if the supporters this weekend take their cue from Manchester... hum...

Sorry.....

I know I haven't been posting much recently. A lot of time at work means not a lot of time thinking about work when I don't have to, combined with most of the stuff that I'd really like to whinge about would unfortunately make myself far too identifiable, and a couple of garden projects underway, all in all means not much time spent on here.

In the meantime, here's an article for Ms Chakrabarti to consider next time she stands on her pedestal to whinge about how corrupt and abusive the police here are- her last whinge I found being about they were preparing to take legal action against the Co-Op for being prepared to use that terrible tortuous device known as the "mosquito" (a high pitched sonic gadget designed to be immensely annoying to young people, so that they clear off).

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the ideals of Liberty et al, but lets have a sense of perspective?

Propoganda

The last post reminded me of something I meant to post about a while back.

Some time in April, I was off visiting the folks, and I had been saved a glossy leaflet dropped through the letterbox trumpeting the success of their local force in the last performance year. 4500(*) crimes reduced! 7000 more crimes detected! Healthy satisfaction levels across the board in all communities! We are safer than 12 months ago!

The problem is, I don't believe a bleeding word of it. I still know that if I have to call 999 when I'm there I'll consider myself highly fortunate to have a response car within 10 miles of me. The statistics trumpeted I consider with utter disdain, knowing the majority of it will be down to dubious crime recording methods. I am having regular run-ins with my own crime management unit where they even go to the extent of recording something as a no-crime until certain tasks are carried out.

Following a time year where my folks had occasion to call their local police, their (and most certainly my) opinion of them has taken a nosedive following the way they dealt with the call. Don't get me wrong, it was highly compliant with the priorities blared out, but as an "end user" left a very sour taste in the mouth. So much for high levels of satisfaction.

So I thought if I consider this performance news with the gravity I would with a steaming cow deposit, what chance has everyone else got.

(*) All numbers made up of course.... but along those sort of lines

Random Thought

Tootling home the other day from what felt like an interminable shift in custody and my mind was wandering.

For most uniform sections of the police, arrest figures are king. I was speaking to some traffic colleagues the other day. Their senior management have set them targets of a certain number of tickets and arrests per month. The (to my mind) absolute core function of a traffic officer- don't ask me to call them roads policing officers- surely has to be to reduce the number of serious and fatal car accidents. Job parlance for that is KSI's- Killed or Seriously Injured. Yet a target to reduce KSI's doesn't actually feature in the performance indicators set for traffic officers.

I simply just don't get that at all.

This led me on. Senior management, led by the government and whatever authorities they answer to, by the way they have determined performance figures obviously feel that the more arrests = more productive = more good.

Surely though, would the most effective police force would be the one that doesn't find it necessary to arrest anyone in a month. I admit I'm slightly in the realms of fantasyland here as while there are people in the world, some of them will always be up to no good. But do you see my general point? The most effective police force will prevent crime, not simply turn up afterwards to claim arrest points.

But we are orientated completely and utterly to the latter. Not the former.

A TV review moment

Had one of those rare things yesterday, an evening free to watch the box, and happened to come across "Traffic Cops" on the beeb.

The wife doesn't understand me at all. I whinge about how much time I'm spending at the job and then when I do have some time off, I spend it watching a tv programme about the job.

To be fair, she has a point.

Anyhoo I still do find it interesting to watch stuff about UK police, if only out of a curiosity to see how other forces deal with various things, and generally have a debate with myself to see if I'd do the same thing.

Following on from my previous posts below, I definitely do share their sense of frustration with the traffic people about the lack of ability to deal with pursuits. The little oik who crashed an old dear's Micra? I can safely say he won't learn any lessons at all from being caught, and being disqualified from driving. Oh no, I'm disqualified from driving, when I don't have a driving licence in the first place.

Putting my sense of annoyance at the personal characteristics of pint sized scumbag aside, I can understand why the pursuit was called off. Barely 13 years old, haring round in a stolen motor, around a residential estate, in the daytime after school is out is a recipie for disaster. I think the greatest source of frustration is in our apparent inability to deal with pursuits, and a lack of willingness from senior management and home office to seriously invest money into researching safe alternative means of pursuit termination.

But while our options remain limited to stinger, with the odd brave force continuing with TPAC, then this will continue to be a story repeated. TWOC will continue to be common with bored teenagers with little fear of reprisal even if caught. The alternative is to commit your crimes on a motorbike, and give the finger to every passing useless patrol car.

In other news- I'm a fan of Mrs Justice Rafferty! Finally a proper sentence for two definitive scumbags who kicked a man to death in a half-robbery, half for-the-hell-of-it escapade. 28 and 26 years. Now that's a sentence that might actually do what it's supposed to do and serve as a deterrent to others.

Fulfilling the criteria

I am now happily able to type with both hands again after slicing the fingers jumping over a fence the other day! At work, not at home, I might add.

Anyhoo as promised another sad tale of the mental health system at its finest. Myself and a couple of others turned up to an assistance call from the ambulance service. We met the man in green at the bottom of the stairwell who chuckled as he saw us. He told us we'd been here before.

I understood this as we got to the front door, and saw the distinctive red circular marks across most of the door and barely there door frame, and understood that this place had been visited by someone with the 'big red door key'.

The source of all this was inside the flat. The ambulance bods had withdrawn after getting stuff thrown at them, and called us in with our highly trained negotiating skills (note- sarcasm) to try and talk to the clearly imbalanced chap inside.

Lionel, aformentioned imbalanced chap, was up and down like the proverbial yoyo. One moment he was tearful, knowing something was really wrong, wanting the voices to stop- next extremely paranoid, yelling abuse, face contorting. Some of the insults thrown at us were in all honesty quite spectacular in their originality and vulgarity. Packets of medication are all over the place. He manages to tell us he hasn't taken any of them. Which is the root cause of his now unbalanced state.

To cut a long story short, Lionel actually did want to go to the hospital, and as a courtesy to the ambulance peolpe a couple of PC's went with them in the ambulance.

Once we got the hospital, once again, things got political.

Lionel has had a drink. So, despite him being clearly not the full ticket, the mental health wing refused point blank to have anything to do with him until he was fully sober. Which meant we had to take him to A&E. Who are totally inequipped to deal with a volatile, paranoid, abusive man.

And so start the rounds of "it's not my problem". Mental health / 136 department won't have anything to do with him because "they can't assess him". We were only there as the ambulance had called us, and have not invoked any powers and so don't need to be there. The A&E have nothing to do with him as he doesn't need any "normal" medical treatment.

Meanwhile, A&E tell us we can't go as the bloke has the potential for violence. I say to them they've a quarter of my response team babysitting them whilst he has committed no offences and is not 136'd.

I hate this. I know that Lionel has the potential to kick off, and I always try to help out A&E and ambulance staff, underpaid and overburdened as they are. But now I've gone up a rank I have to say that if there's no real reason for someone to be sat somewhere, then I need them back out on patrol. If I had dozens of officers on patrol, not so much of an issue. But I have 8.

So nobody wins. I tell the hospital they have until the hour to sort out their security as I have to have my officers back out by then. If Lionel kicks off, they'll have to call us back. I'm not happy telling them this, but patient security, and their lack of security staff, is something they have to take up with their management, it isn't something we can guarantee to help them with. Of course, Lionel is free to go when he pleases as he isn't sectioned or under arrest.

I don't know what the answer is with people like Lionel. I don't advocate locking them up and going by the "out of sight, out of mind" principle, but this "not my problem" problem is just as bad. The only thing that surprises me about this story is that it hasn't happened before.

Ideally, we need a comfortable, secure suite that someone can wait safely in until sober or not under any influence. But that would cost money to build and staff. So, it doesn't happen, and every time someone who is clearly mentally ill but has been taking substances to try and cope with it, they are ignored by the system.

It is only a matter of time before Lionel, or someone just like him, becomes another statistic like the Leicestershire link above.

I don't know what the final outcome was with Lionel, whether he walked out or managed to stay long enough for the psych teams to say yay or nay. We weren't called back in any event.

Even if he was admitted, it'll only be a matter of time before he's out again by himself, forgetting or ignoring his medication.

Time waits for no man

Ridiculously busy at work at the moment. Unfortunately, it's not the "good" busy. Its the busy that keeps me tied to a computer most of the time. I've actually reached the point where I'm emailing stuff to and from home to keep on top of things.

Unfortunately for a response team sergeant, I don't really have the option of turning off the radio and cracking on with all the reports. Well, I rephrase, I could, but I don't, as I'd much rather be out there dealing with stuff than remotely directing people via the radio. So I guess the backlog of tedious stuff is kind of my fault.

As for hoping to have a quiet hour or so in custody to do this, forget it. I gave myself indigestion the other day eating my lunch so fast in the one 5 minute gap where I didn't have to do anything immediately.

When things do calm down a bit, expect a post that is yet another frustrating indictment of the mental health "system".