Sergeant Simon

One day

2011-11-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

One day, I'll be back on here. I now have much more important things to be doing in my spare time (two of them, to be precise) and until they reach the age when they're out at school all day and I can reclaim back the concept of spare time (i.e. once that long list of jobs to do the house is done.... if it ever is...!) then I'll come back on here.

I haven't deleted any posts. There's still some good stories buried in here so feel free to have a look. Having said that, I probably will delete some of the more useless chaff I've gone on about and just leave the better stuff.

There's still plenty of Police Bloggers on out there as I'm sure you've already found, and new ones come and go. So have a look through here, and some day I'll be back with several years of whinges to bore you all with :-)

Immigration debate

2011-03-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

Immigration. Always in the news.

Two scenarios. Guess for yourself who the immigrant is

One: a man who's a pensioner himself juggles looking after the family business and being a permanent carer to his disabled mother. Owns his own business, has done for years, doesn't make him a fortune and the flat above the shop is a bit tatty but well cared for.

Two: a grandmother who just turned 40, got steaming drunk and smashed up her own council house, terrorising her daughter (who isn't old enough to have done GCSE's yet) and her baby.

Update

2011-03-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

Ok. I've read the report, and I unashamedly admit to completely change my mind. Completely biased to the wants and desires of senior management (the only ones to maintain their pay! no freeze or loss for them!) and if adopted will have major negative impact on family life. I can take a pay cut but make my family time more disrupted than it already is??? Not happy.

Onwards and....

2011-03-08T23:40:00.000-08:00

Okay so it's pretty clear that I am not going to have the time to be able to do anything with this for some time. Losing time to blogging when the little ones are little is time wasted for me.

I will try and edit all the posts to just have the 'interesting' stuff left of the more entertaining policing stories, and sort out the messy labels.

In the meantime, all the furore about pay and conditions.

My view:

- We are well paid
- A pay freeze is reasonable and expected
- I don't get paid any overtime anyway, I'd love to know where all these astronomical figures quoted in the media come from, they don't remotely relate to response team budgets (which is as "front line" as you get)
- Noone has actually defined what front line policing actually is. It isn't neighbourhood policing, but my local outfit are trumpeting how they've managed to save neighbourhood police all their budget.
- Media reports are fuzzy in the details. I can't quite figure out what is supposed to be happening compared to what already is.... I need to read the report fully I guess!

There's a lot more in the Winsor report I know and the fed are getting all stroppy but in all honesty the only difference I am going to see is a pay freeze. Which as I said, is reasonable and expected....

Update

Okay, so I've had a bit more of a look. Special Priority Payments are going. Well I'll always be sad to have a bit less money in the bank but I never budgeted on having these anyway. I also never quite figured the logic in who got how much and when, and they were generally a bit flawed. A material loss for myself but I always saw these as an unguaranteed 'bonus' anyway.

Competency related threshold payments are going. This will upset older service people (I haven't been in the rank long enough - i.e. over 10 years- to qualify) but I disagreed with them anyway- I saw lazy, ineffective officers being given these when they weren't deserved (and before anyone thinks it, I will happily admit I would have claimed it, disagreeing with it or not. Why wouldn't you? An extra grand a year for no extra work apart from form filling). I can see this one causing the most runcus as it will probably affect quite a few people.

Superintendents bonuses are going. GOOD. Need I say more.

Office staff are likely to get a pay cut? Well it has always rankled with me that whilst I work stupid hours and have my duties changed at the last moment, a geezer sat behind a desk doing nice office hours gets paid the same.

I like the antisocial hours pay bump, because I'll get that. I would have carried on doing response work whether or not this perk came in as it's what I joined to do, and it's nice to see a bit of reward for doing the same thing.

I can see this expertise allowance job causing issues. There's already lot of whinges around on the police forums as to why a neighbourhood officer should get this. I can kind of see their point because there are a considerable number of cases whereby those on neighbourhood teams ended up on there because of their ineptitude on response teams, and I don't see how that should be rewarded. However, neighbourhood teams do have a problem with retention. Unlike firearms teams. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say they don't need an extra payment. They already have the best and latest kit and there is no problem with recruitment on existing terms as it is already seen as a prestigous role, whereby you can avoid the tedious humdrum of minor stuff that swamps the response teams the rest of the time.

Custody Sergeant's Response

2010-09-05T15:03:00.001-07:00

Sergeant Mark Andrews is in the news for the wrong reasons. I don't really need to provide a link judging by some of the newspaper headlines but just in case look here.

Firstly I don't condone what he did. No matter how drunk or annoying someone is we still have those three words which take precedence over everything: duty of care. He'll lose his job, and arguably deservedly so.

However, as a police sergeant who has spent a lot of time as a custody sergeant, I think I'm perhaps a bit more entitled to have something to say about all this.

I work in a relatively small police station. We only have the 10 cells. However, despite that we have generated nearly 4000 custody records this year alone. This is not even the only custody suite in our force area. 4000 custody records is just a drop in the ocean of what must be hundreds of thousands of custody records across the uk, each referring to an individual arrested and booked in at a police station. The vast, overwhelming majority of these cases pass off without incident, even with the really drunk, aggressive and dangerous people that we literally drag off the streets to keep you lot safe. The borderline psychopaths who will literally rip their arms open with their teeth to get attention (yes, I have really seen this happen). The drug addicts who start attacking the doctors when they won't give them the drugs they want. They all get treated properly and fairly. Certainly in my experience they do. Custody suites are dripping with these cameras for precisely this reason and to my knowledge they have fended off far more malicious allegations than they have found genuine ones.

So when you see the blaring headline of "BRUTALITY" and bruised faces splashed over pages in full close up just remember it refers to one, single, individual officer and his misjudgement. Not all of us.

Temporary pause...

2010-06-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

I know this site has been somewhat neglected for some time. I just have different priorities these days (family) and I felt I was being somewhat aimless. I didn't have that anger at the ridiculousness of so much of the police service.

Well, I did, but to to a lesser extent, I guess. I was frustrated that I couldn't post what I really wanted to post about because it would lead me to being too easily identified. I've never posted anything really controversial but at the same time it's something I could really do without.

I'm trying to change what I do to go into a certain specialism. I reckon that give me some time and I'll have enough enthusiasm to tell the world about I'm up to (with the odd name changed here and there)...

I hope that I'll be able to return to blogging. I did enjoy it and the odd banter that the comments threw up. I reckon that me trying to be a political commentator opinion type blogger just doesn't suit me. So, I think I'll just return to what I'm most comfortable with, i.e. tales of what actually happens, and leave the political opinion to you.

No time frame on this specialism but I'm hoping by the end of the year. Keep an eye out....

Be the miracle

2010-03-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

I am getting seriously fed up with a certain group of people. Any time there's a problem, they whinge and gripe about how nobody is doing anything about it. Then they come and whinge and gripe at me about how nobody is doing anything about it.

Unfortunately, that particular group of people I'm talking about happens to be police officers. I am so sick and tired of half my relief coming whinging about how stuff doesn't work or there aren't enough latex gloves or bits of first aid kit are missing.

They usually come to me for the simple reason that I tend to sort it out. However, I am royally fed up with it. I now just ask the question "What have you done to sort it out" by which I am invariably met by dumbstruck silence and a shrug of the shoulders.

At this point, I usually point out the very simple solution to whatever their current whinge is. No first aid supplies? Well here's an extraordinary solution. Email the resources people and ask for what's missing!!! Is there a fault with a bit of kit? Here's the fault reporting number!!!

I'm currently sidelined off response team after an old rugby injury came back with a vengeance and the amount of long sighs and slow shakes of the head I have off my old team about the states of various things now the only person bothered to do something about it and not leave it to the next person has gone!

That unfortunately is the case. The problem with shared kit- e.g. a police car- is that everyone seems to think it is someone else's problem to remedy, and not theirs. The end result is nobody does anything about it.

The title by the way is from Bruce Almighty, which I stumbled across last night (great film!!!). The end of the film summed it up. Don't look to others to solve your problems. You can do it yourself!

Season of Goodwill

2009-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

Like many other suburban or rural forces we have a permanent travellers caravan site. The local water some time ago provided a permanent water supply to the site and provided meters to each plot akin to what you or I would have.

Nearly a third of a million pounds in unpaid bills later they got warrants to have the meters changed to pay as you go ones. The Utility company asked if we would come along to 'prevent a breach of the peace'.

After some umming and aahing by the people in charge of such things on a higher pay grade than I, they agreed to go along on a "neighbourhood style" of policing, i.e. not many officers, and the ones who are there to go round and "engage" with the residents.

Well, about half the meters had been changed and a number of plots were without any water at all when there was a perceptible mood shift and a few characters were noted walking round with various gardening and building tools, but not doing any gardening or building jobs, if you know what I mean. Combine that with a few insults and an increasing array of missiles from the youth element and the water boys decided this was not worth it and left.

Now the Utility Co won't go back in unless we can guarantee their safety. The only way to (probabky) guarantee this would mean a lot of officers to safely contain the residents away from the workers. Probably in riot kit. Effectively barricading women and children in their own homes or corralling them outside. And don't forget another lot manning a roadblock to prevent friends from coming to assist.

The Community Superintendent won't authorise that. It's not proportional. And to be fair, I understand why. Legal aid human rights lawyers would have a field day and in the current circumstances he'd find himself in rather hot water.

So. The Water Company have a court issued warrant to change the meters. The police won't help to implement this warrant despite the Water company following all the correct legal and court procedures.

In the meantime, half a dozen traveller families are without water.

Season of goodwill indeed.

******

On a cheerier note. Hope you all have a merry and safe christmas, whether working or travelling on these ice rinks masquerading as roads!

Where's Max Clifford when you need him

2009-12-17T04:35:00.001-08:00

Just noting the relative absence of outcry and wailing about what's going in Denmark at the moment. Where's all the victims going to publicists about how they were slapped?

Can you imagine if we arrested 968 but only charged 4 or 5 with any offence? We made them sit down in lines with their hands tied behind their backs???! We'd be compared to Guatanamo bay before you could say "You're nicked!". How about if we use tear gas against a crowd? Or even imagine if we sealed off an area and said nobody is allowed in or out?

I can imagine the Guardian and Liberty offices simply self combusting in an wailing outrage.

Two Staffordshire Stories

2009-12-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

Saw this splashed over the papers today- the girls in low cut tops with police jackets apparently causing merry mayhem in Staffordshire.

Apparently the officers have been disciplined. The Assistant Chief goes on about how these images could be negatively percieved.

What a 21st Century response. Why were these officers disciplined? The four were brought to the station as victims or witnesses. Okay they're young girls with a few Bacardi Breezers down them and put them in a station with lots of uniformed nice young men around and yes things got a bit silly and flirtatious I'm sure.

But what where the alternatives? Arrest them? Seize the cameras? Put them all in seperate rooms? They would have had no legal power to take the cameras or delete the photos. Yes they should have had a bit more control over them but they are not exactly on the al-quida wanted list are they.

Then, while I was searching through the BBC website trying to find another link to the story, I stumbled across this. Why did the media choose to splash the low cut tops and pouts over this one I wonder.

The Bonus is under threat

2009-12-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

No, not the banker kind.

The Superintendent's bonus.

We have experienced a rise in Burglary. A rise significant enough that apparently the absolute top of the police tree is apparently somewhat upset and the rumour machine has it the Superintendent's performance related bonus is on the line.

Well hellfire if things haven't suddenly happened. We have a support squad who generally patrol in unmarked cars, although nothing as decent as the performance motors seen on Road Wars. Well, they have been hoiked out of their normal taskings and are now solely focused on burglary. Somehow from somewhere they have sourced more unmarked cars, somehow blagged from a different force.

They're normally a small unit but not any more. People have been dragged off the core response team to go and assist. I mean dragged. Some of them only a weekend's notice to turn up to a different police station on Monday. The little Support unit now has more officers parading than the entire outfit of core response team officers. Except the support lot only have to deal with burglary.

Now, not only have they taken officers from team but they've taken some of our response cars too!

To be fair to the support boys and girls they're mostly embarrassed. I've worked with them a lot and most of them are thorough and decent cops, with an encylopeadic knowledge of all the bad guys they've arrested or know are up to no good. They dig up some good results with a style of policing occasionally robust enough to make the Community Superintendent choke on his Earl Grey, but when you're talking about youths with loaded firearms there isn't time to introduce yourself and get consent for your search.

They're more than aware that they're being used as little more than a tool by the top brass to tackle one specific thing, and all their previous good work like the above has been swiftly ignored. They're ashamed of how the core teams have been stripped.

In the meantime as far as you're concerned all this is great if you've been burgled. You'll have a flood of officers arriving darn quick.

However. If you've been thumped on the head by some drunken yob; are cowering in fear from a violent partner; or have been crashed into by an uninsured driver; well, you'll have to wait. That'll still be the beleagured response team in our remaining battered Astras, picking up all the slack for every other darn call generated.

We dealt with a particularly sad fatal accident the other day. Load of units tied up for the shift with cordons etc, dealing with traumatised witnesses, furious drivers who don't care about what has happened, etc. It was a job well done by all us lot who turned up.

Next day, we're greeted by an email from the Superintendent who has analyzed the arrest figures for everyone. It is clear as a bell that as far as she is concerned that if you're not arresting people you're not performing and you need to get your act together.

Who said the performance culture is dead?

Garage Sergeant Please

2009-12-01T13:55:00.001-08:00

I'd hate to have been the officer driving this particular motor. The Italian police's Lamborghini has been written off.

He's going to be buying donuts for a hell of a long time.....

Polar Opposites

2009-11-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

Hero

Pc Bill Parker

Zero

Ex Pc Martin Forshaw

I know it's been a while. I was going to go on about the latest round of patheticness and career obsessions of some of the incumbent SMT round my way that are really driving me up the wall, enough to get me back on here.

However. That can wait till another day, as in the grand scheme of things they're insignificant compared to the impact on Bill Parker and Claire Howarth's families.

It's what I do

2009-10-15T14:39:00.001-07:00

Nearly wrote this the other day, glad I didn't now. Couple of good days off does wonders for calming you down.
Now I know there's a whole load of stuff going on in the outside world that is worthy of debate- the TSG trial going on in South London caught my eye- the 'whistleblower' is either the bravest PC ever or slippery and dangerous- but today I just need to let off a bit of steam.

I don't have any regrets about getting promoted. Save one.

I don't know what it is about Custody. I always knew that I'd get custody postings, after all as a response monkey it always came with the job, being the one behind the desk. Just of late, for a number of reasons, I'm in there a lot more than I'd expected, and I might add a lot more than is reasonable. That and a couple of other things mean I am seriously fed up with where I am and what I'm doing at the moment.

Problem is, I really don't know what else I want to do. Psychologists out there would have a field day I'm sure talking about self image and identity but blue light uniform work is all I've ever wanted to do. Being the one who turns up when you call 999 is what I do. Okay granted far too often half the reasons people call 999 are a load of nonsense (that's the advantage of being promoted, I can delegate those calls off!) but ever since I can remember as a small boy getting excited about seeing a police car with it's sirens on, I'm at my happiest at work now when I'm the one behind the wheel of that police car.

Which is why I get so fed up looking at the same set of walls going throught the exact same inane questions to the next character being hauled through the doors from the yard.

I'm always keeping my eye out on the internal website to see if anything else is coming up. Problem is, there really isn't that much. I'm not interested in the Detective side of things. Traffic is an option but it's still on the politically unacceptable list it would seem and they're all downsizing- or at least having to work below their minimum strength (leading to the obvious question, what exactly is the point in a minimum strength) so vacancies are not on the horizon, and I don't know if I've got the patience to wait. Armed response isn't an option unless I can somehow persuade Mrs Simon of the merits (I know, who really wears the trousers etc)

Safer neighbourhoods? I'm yet to be convinced of the political merits and it's effectiveness. However the hours (weekends? Ha!) and lack of custody postings means I may have to give it a go.

Thing is, wherever I go, after a few months I know I'll be wishing I was back on response team, crap shifts, tedious postings, dubious line management and all. It's what I do.

Sunny Times

2009-09-30T23:05:00.001-07:00

Saw the Sun has officially told the world that the incumbent government has lost it's support. Waiting for the return of the "Woz the Sun wot won it" headline....

Anyhoo it's rare I find myself agreeing with much that particular comic has to say for itself but their editorial on the state of law and order since Labour came to power rings actually pretty true:

"But they FAILED on law and order, their mantra "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" becoming a national joke. Knife murders are soaring. Smirking criminals routinely walk free in the name of political correctness, while decent people live in a virtual police state of snooping cameras and petty officials empowered to spy and to punish"

The next line could have come straight from a Gadget post:

"Billions more spent, insanely, making benefits more lucrative than a pay cheque - creating a huge, idle underclass for whom work is a dirty word"

I could go on about centrally enforced performance targets forcing the Police Chiefs to chase the easy targets of sanction detections at the expense of other things that don't always result in a tick in a box. The whole desperate tale from Leicester being a case in point. Harassment and antisocial behaviour- adult bullying, basically- is a long term process to sort out which goes against the ingrained police culture of once a crime report is closed (whether sanctioned detection or not), the matter is sorted. Chiefs are reluctant to spend money on a unit which doesn' t bring in the results they are required to produce.

It is no surprise that many police forces have one or two officers on the antisocial behaviour unit (who deal with the paperwork side of amassing evidence for ASBO's) whilst there are many more resources put towards the Crime Management units, i.e. office dwellers who have targets to reduce certain crime types by reclassifying them where possible, and chasing up those elusive SD's.

I'm technically not allowed to have a political opinion but I won't be sorry to see this government go. The question I'm asking is whether I dare think the Conservatives are really going to be any better.

Oh the irony

2009-09-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

Suburbiaville is pretty much like any other town that happens to have a reasonably agreeable train link to the nearest proper urban centre.

That means parking restrictions. For anywhere within a bordering unreasonable walk to the station has restrictions between what normal society calls working hours. Where there are parking restrictions, there are parking wardens.

Now I admit I don't have anything against these girls and boys most of the time (probably because when I have to park a car with a blue strobe light on I don't worry too much about what little signs on a lamppost say), and if anything I have a degree of sympathy because they can get an inordinate amount of grief.

Quite a few times we get called to help, at which point whilst making sure nobody actually does rip anyones head off we invariably reel off the same standard lines about civil dispute, civil remedies, and generally advise people to pay the fine and then claim it back later.

(Note- this may sound somewhat contrite but this is actually how we do have to deal with these- a parking offence is not a criminal matter, and no matter what the protestations I have no power to order one of the wardens to rescind the ticket. Having been on the recieving end of these things I know how sometimes they can make your blood boil. Which is usually how we end up getting called, to stop it becoming a real criminal matter should the blood perhaps more literally boils over.)

Anyhooooo I happened to be out and about the other day when another of these calls came out to a parking dispute where things were getting out of hand. I wasn't a million miles away so I flicked the little blue switch and pootled along.

I turned around the corner. I am always surprised at how quick these parking warden people manage to get their colleagues round as there were a right old crowd there, at least 6 of them. Anyway I eventually managed to find what was going on.

I managed to supress my laughter when I realised the clamped motor was a council parking enforcement one! It seems one of their chaps had popped in to see a friend or something and had parked on private premises. Just the owner of this particular private premises had paid out for a private firm to clamp naughty unlicenced parkers. The signs were even up. Unlucky for him the private enforcement van turned up while he was still having his tea and digestive and he didn't scramble out of the place in time to stop the clamps going on.

So we had the usual standoff going on whereby removal bloke was attempting to remove vehicle but the driver had sat himself on the seat and was refusing to move. Yes, the driver was a parking warden. Many a time I've dealt with this situation on the flipside.

So I have to admit I was kind of expecting the council blokes to listen to me when I told them once again that I can't make him rescind the ticket. The private contractors were professional ones (I know some are real cowboys) and even had copies of the land registry to show the extent of the private boundary. I told him until I was blue in the face about civil remedies. I pointed out to him just once or twice that the rules are exactly the same for the dozens of times they call us to something like that, just that this time he was the one having to pay out the cash.

Would he listen? Would he heck.

He started going on about allegations of assault and rang 999 when I told him I was not going to deal with this allegation. Spoilt little boy reaction to someone not getting his own way as there was no assault unless you count a tug of war on opposite sides of a motorbike handlebar. Thank you very much. That's two completely and utterly pointless crime reports that are going to go nowhere that I've got to waste my time writing now because it's now officially recorded that there's an allegation of assault.

A colleague turned up and took over (saying exactly the same things), just in time before I lost my temper. I wasn't far off I tell you.

It was eventually resolved when after the best part of 45 minutes he finally listened and stomped off to a cashpoint and got the money. I had to get signatures from them to confirm that the assault allegation wasn't an assault. This was was solely to cover my backside from when the office monkeys picked up the "crime" report the next day and go apoleptic there were two suspects for an assault at the scene I didn't arrest!

So yes. Off the road nearly two hours dealing with what was little more than a grown adult having the tables turned on him and having a right strop about it!

Just thought I'd share.....

Stop, search, write

2009-09-15T23:17:00.000-07:00

Well. Apparently stop and search forms are to be reduced to the bare minimum if the home secretary is to be believed.

Forgive my cynicism, but I'll believe it when I see it for two reasons:

1) In the name of efficiency I suspect we'll have to finish using up all the old forms first
2) It wouldn't surprise me in the least if my own force bottles out of this in the name of local accountability and we get an amended version which has more stuff to write on it.

In the meantime, I'd love to know where this claimed million hours of paperwork saved figure has come from and how it was figured out. It certainly wasn't from the response team jockeys whose paperwork burden remains as daft as it ever was.

Never believe someone official when they say they've taken x number of obsolete forms out of circulation. All they mean is that they've been replaced with a new version.

Old enough to play the lottery....

2009-08-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

Shift in custody the other day, had a few in for immigration offences.

Immigration jobs make permanent custody sergeants moan, going on about taking up cells and creating them what they feel is unneccessary work. I generally ignore them as most custody sergeants fit the grumpy old man profile very well and if they weren't allowed to moan about something then they'd probably implode.

I'm not bothered about dealing with immigration offences. They do tend to take longer to deal with and there's a whole set of detention and questioning powers I don't really know much about but on the whole they're not that hard.

What does annoy me though is the little bit of small print somewhere in the immigration laws that if someone claims to be under 16 then they cannot be deported but have to be taken into care. Now this in itself I don't object to, for if there is a genuine child who has found his way into the country by whatever means then we should look after them.

I do object when fully grown adults, who wouldn't be challenged on a door at a 25 yrs above only nightclub, claim they are 16. Despite it being as plain as day- and I acknowledge there are some 14 year olds who can pass off as over 18 or even 20 - that someone is a close to 16 years old as your average Shadows single, they are treated as though they are until proven otherwise.

Unfortunately, the people at Social Services who are deemed wise enough to officially decide that someone is not under 16 don't work weekends.

The end result I had was that I had no choice to but to release this bloke (aged between 25 and 30, at least) into the "care" of social services who placed him in a foster home.

Don't get me wrong, but placing a fully grown adult about whom absolutely nothing is known, into a home full of the most vulnerable young people and teenagers in society, is a disaster waiting to happen. But unfortunately until that disaster happens I have no choice in whether I can release them or not.

Back to basics

2009-08-13T13:13:00.001-07:00

Was being sociable the other day and was chatting to some people I had just met. Conversations as they often do turned to work and what I do.

I explained where I work, being a response team monkey somewhere in a suburb. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at their surprise when I said just how many police officers there were at any one time. It made me think for the unitiated i.e. those probably not reading this (never mind) there is a spectacular gulf between perceptions of police numbers and the reality of those on the streets who turn up when you call 999.

There's about 250,000 people resident within my particular part of the policing front line. It has a mix of everything from major trunk routes, well to do areas, old and new estates, some spectacularly notorious and in their "heyday" weren't strangers to featuring in media, and was where police trod carefully and didn't go alone. Some of them have been knocked down now, tower blocks being gradually replaced by compact brick housing on narrow roads. New buildings don't disguise the fact the same people live there.

So with this number of people, major arterial roads, a number of less socially well to do housing estates how many police officers are on duty at any one time? There used to be at least 4 parade stations in my area but it's now down to 2. Between us, we're lucky to have 30 officers.

There is an oft-quoted saying in Suburbiaville that Poo rolls downhill (you can guess what the unsanitised version is). Well, response team is in the coal pit at the bottom of the valley beneath the cliffs the top of which where the poo starts rolling from.

If there is an increase in a particular type of offence- e.g. street robbery- then response teams have new targets to tackle it and get given new fresh tarted up reporting standards by the "specialist" CID units who investigate it, as we were clearly not up to standard. When these specialist CID units fail to meet their targets then officers are taken away from response team duties to man up these teams. I have to supply officers to act as jailers in the custody suite. I have to provide officers to man the front offices. God help us if there's a crime scene anywhere needing a uniform to stand outside. Suddenly the number of officers who are actually there, in a response car with the ability and training to respond to you when you call 999, is pushing 20.

Funnily enough a couple of hours into a shift and with the volume of calls we get, e.g. a couple of shoplifters or someone presenting false documents at a bank (happens a heck of a lot), then we're down to just one or two cars covering the lot.

Now there are of course a couple of other people floating around- catch the right time in the day and you'll have the SNT (also known as NPT) out and about. But it's not their job to answer 999 calls. Someone told me the other day that we're allowed to deflect a single call a day to the Safer Neighbourhood Team. One a day. That's handy.

The effectiveness of the SNT teams is something I remain to be convinced by. Took a call the other day and was met by pretty much the entire street, up in arms about a perpetual problem they have, and the complete failure of the relevant SNT to do anything about it. I'll talk a little bit more about the other issues I have with a police force entirely geared towards the SNT model another day.

Policing is so ridiculously political these days and absolutely everything must be geared towards meeting the needs of the community. Problem is, there are so many different communities within a wider community which can often have polar opposite desires and intentions, and it would be frankly impossible to meet the desires of all of them.

As far as I'm concerned, from my own point of view, policing is really simple.

1) People don't want crime to happen to them in the first place
2) If it does, I'd want someone to turn up in a reasonable time to do something reasonable about it.

Now quite often there's nothing we can do about any particular crime. Your car window gets smashed between 10pm and 8am short of the culprit leaving a business card we've got little hope. But I wouldn't mind it properly reported and you know perhaps seeing someone on patrol between 10pm and 8am once in a while.

Problem is, whilst we are busy chasing our tails trying to meet the myriad different needs of so many different communities, there's nobody left on the response team to try and do anything like directed or reassurance patrol. Unless we're taken off response team duties to go and do that (yes, that happens).

And lets not forget all the officers doing office jobs in units with titles like "Detection Team", "Crime Reporting Integrity Team" doing their best to massage figures to meet whatever the governments latest targets may be.

Blimey. I've been ranting for ages. Apologies. Regular readers of police blogs will be more than aware that the policing situation is riduculous and that the blue line is gossamer thin when it comes to the capacity and ability to answer 999 calls. But on the offchance someone just stumbles across this post as one of their first police blogs, this is the reality.

Here & There

2009-08-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

I have come to the conclusion that blogging is for those without children, or at least grown up enough so they can take care of themselves (most of the time). I know I have been spectacularly slack for a while now, but things are likely to remain that way for a while! On a day off, I have roughly 2 hours at the end of an evening to do the things I haven't been able to do the rest of the day, like cleaning or getting tomorrows lunch ready, you know, real exciting stuff. If I've done that then it invariably means a collapse on the sofa with the Mrs to watch something suitably untaxing.

I do try and keep check on the blogosphere every so often (there's a lot of good blogs out there!), and there's plenty of activity going on so I'm sure you're all still well up to date with the all the internal workings of the sad state of affairs that is the politicians whim of a police service today.

I noticed from the odd glance at the news websites the Met are getting it in the neck as per the normal run of thingswl. They're still as racist as usual (coming from an MP who naturally has a outstanding second home claim history.... cough) and another individual has come out about her most frankly awful treatment at G20.

If I headed up the Met's public order unit, I'd run the next protest along the lines of a barely there presence, letting everyone go and protest as much as they like, because according to the media everyone is a lawful protester just wishing to make their point unimpeded. However, I'd have around the corner a sackload of grumpy riot police in proper kit, none of this poncy yellow jackets and nice beat duty helmets to not appear offensive nonsense- and the moment when it all goes wrong- because it will- send them in. The post event media hand wringing can be dealt with by explaining the protesters had their opportunity for peaceful, lawful protest, and gave it a big up yours.

Although, now I've thought about it, with the exception of the yellow jacket and helmet bit, that is pretty much what happened. Haven't heard it explained like that though.

On a different matter, if I wanted to commit career suicide I'd publish a number I came across the other day as to how much my force is spending on hire cars to ferry various units around. Oh. My. Goodness! I'm not sure if I was supposed to see that number as I was meant to be dealing with something else but it cropped up. I have no idea what the process for acquiring a hire car is (it is almost exclusively CID units who hire cars, I noted) but no wonder they're always moaning their overtime budget isn't enough. Use public transport and you'd suddenly find yourself a lot better off!!!

Back to my first point- posting will be sporadic and not at all regular for some time yet! But every so often I'll pop up and have a little moan here and there, just to keep my toe in :-)

I feel the need

2009-07-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

Have managed to get myself in a couple of footchases recently, joys of being let out of custody. Had a right funny one the other night.

Unfortunately can't go into too much detail but it ended up with one chap thoroughly detained, me needing new trousers, and some kind soul catching up with me to give me my sunglasses back.

I did feel like throwing up for at least half an hour afterwards though. Full on sprints half an hour after finishing tea/lunch/snack (whatever you'd call a meal break at 2am) aren't really ideal. Still, it made me happy that I caught and flattened someone younger and if I'm honest leaner than me and who also wasn't carrying all the kit I lug around!

Was a crazy shift. Started off quite dull with a routine traffic stop that developed into an arrest and some decent intel about an up and coming scrote type. It's rare that I'd bring someone in from a traffic stop but I'm glad I did on this one. Fortunately I had spotted him using his phone whilst going along so had a substantive offence to actually bring him in with.

Later on things got really busy with quite a few proper urgent assistance shouts. I was so exhuasted by the end of the night what with the footchase, but mostly because of the level of concentration needed to drive miles at full tilt.

On blue light runs I rarely give it everything I've got. I'm past the "just passed my driving course and can legally exceed speed limit" enthusiasm (if enthusiasm is the right word) and now generally am a lot more sanguine when it comes to blue light runs. Don't ge me wrong, I don't pootle and get fed up to the back teeth of having to deal with the incessant paperwork to bin various speed camera 'offences', but I don't give it 100% and don't take the car to it's limit. I don't bully people out of the way and always try to keep enough in reserve so there's time to deal with something completely unexpected. The way some people react to blue lights in the mirror is completely unpredictable. All you need to do is move over to one side, preferably the left! However, there is often also a reaction of hitting the anchors and being rooted to whichever spot you've ended up in, even if that is the outside lane.

Proper urgent assistances are the exception to the rule where shaving off half a second here and there make the difference between another punch or kick to a colleague. I'll remember one particular run down one of the main trunk roads for a while, thundering down the carriageway, strobes bouncing off the street signs, flashing my lights at cars miles in the distance hoping they'll get the hint and get out of the way before I'm up their backside palm on the horn.

I was back in Custody the following shift after the one above and for once was grateful. Well, at least I was until I sat down in the chair upon which point Police and Criminal Evidence Act Hell broke free.....

Public Service Announcement

2009-07-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

I don't normally think of this blog as much more than an avenue for.... well, whinging about the state of the job, incompetence of politicians and inaccuracy of the media.

But for once I think I just have to use it to ask people for goodness sake wear your seatbelt.

Turned up to an RTA. 6 people injured. Four of them are walking wounded. Sure, they're not exactly bouncing with joy and they'll have a glorious time with compensation lawyers I'm sure. But they didn't need to spend more than a little while in the back of the ambulance.

Two others not quite the same story. One was kept alive simply by virtue of having a PC holding his laceration together to prevent the torn artery emptying its contents all over the tarmac. The other had another ruptured artery. Buried somewhere inside his body.

His last words on earth were to a PC kneeling beside him, who was trying to tell him everything'd be okay.

Utterly, totally preventable. If they'd been wearing their belts, they'd be alive. The accident wasn't even their fault, blame completely lying with the other driver whose little showoff session to his mates went a bit wrong. I wonder if he came down a route where CCTV cameras may have picked him up so we have a realistic chance of getting a death by dangerous driving charge authorised.

This wasn't a high speed accident I might add.

I must admit I had gotten a bit slack with traffic enforcement recently, as I think the team had. But trust me, for the next while, there'll be no discretion going on around Suburbiaville if you or god forbid any child of yours is in the car with no seatbelt on.

Sour Grapes

2009-07-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

Had an interview the other day for an in-house transfer to a particular role I'm interested in.

The old adage of failure to prepare is preparing to fail loomed large so of course had lots of stuff prepared. I figured it would be logical to be asked questions about my paper application so did a considerable amount to be sure I was ready to expand give a whole load more detail about any particular part they cared for. I researched pages worth of stats and quotes relevant to the role, and had answers prepared for the expected questions about what qualities I felt I had for the role, where would I be in 1,2 or 5 years if successful.

Silly me.

What I should have done is memorise the competency phrases and buzzwords from the Competency Framework. The competency framework is familiar I guess to most police around and probably some corporate types. The competency framework is a list of qualities somebody in an office has decided a particular officer must have to be competent in his role.

My interviewers simply had a tick sheet of these phrases, and if I said one, I got a mark. I quickly twigged this but unfortunately these phrases are often somewhat..... well, random and so I didn't get many.

Anything come up I had prepared for? Did it heck.

Now I can understand there is a need to be objective in your interview assessments. But I don't think solely basing the success of the interview on the number of phrases hit necessarily means the best candidate gets through. It just means the ones who remembered the most score highest. I didn't even get the most simple question of all - "Why do you want to join this unit"??

Still, lesson learnt. Next time I'll simply print off the list they're marking from, and read it and read it until I can quote it back to myself. And then turn up at the interview safe in the knowledge I won't actually need to demonstrate any interest or aptitude in the role I'm going for.

Dc Horton hears a who?

2009-06-26T00:48:00.000-07:00

It has been the hot topic among the bloggers recently- a Times journalist took it upon himself to out the Nightjack blogger.

Motivations for this remain unclear. The most simple being envy- Dc Horton winning prizes for political writing, having half a million views on some of his posts; the journalistic challenge of finding out who it was; a sense of injustice of how posts about actual cases and therefore the suffering of others was bringing unjust reward. Who knows. I've had enough of searching through the website to try and find out why it was felt of sufficient merit to warrant the expense of going to the High Court. (Having said that, it appears it was an effort to establish that he really was a police officer and not someone faking it, according to their chief leader writer, although that doesn't answer the question of once they found out he was genuine, why they felt it necessary to go through to the High Court to fight for the right to name him)

What is clear is the spectacular backlash at their efforts- link here. This shouldn't come as any surprise to Mr Foster, as his own colleagues would have been able to tell him. I ought to make it clear I don't advocate any kind of harassment campaign though, as meeting one apparent injustice with another doesn't help anyone.

This ruling by the court has prompted the pre-emptive shutting of other blogger sites- Plastic Fuzz feels it necessary to shut up shop, and it would appear to be permanently this time. I sadly think it is a matter of time before Inspector Gadget finds himself unwillingly named.

It inevitably leads me to think, once again, why am I doing this. I think by blogging standards I'm (deliberately) quite tame, and as a result I don't attract the readership levels of Gadget, Nightjack et al, but by the same standard I don't think I particularly want to. I generally use this as an outlet to vent frustrations about what I read in the papers.

I usually stop myself posting about jobs I've been to, as I regard blogging is a bit like what someone once told me about batting in cricket- you will eventually, one day, be out(ed). (although in actual cricket, I would be measuring this in minutes, not hours!) I am therefore just a touch paranoid about what I write. I've a way to go to retirement and something like this showing up on my discipline record is not a good career move.

I usually take care not to mention other officers, even senior ones, by name. Politicians are excepted. I have no issue in lambasting politicians. I'm not allowed to join political parties and probably just as well- I make no attempt to hide the fact I distrust most of them.

I might actually post in full the guidelines I set myself another day. But for now, the rain has stopped and despite my back garden being barely big enough to pitch a tent in there's always a hundred things to do in it....

Taking liberties

2009-06-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many people saw this article the other week. I know this old news now but I've been a busy boy!

Families of two persons incarcerated by the fellows over at GMP are suing them over this:

You see, despite all the media coverage of the trial and verdicts, apparently it is one step too far for the families to allow GMP to show mock ups of what these two would look like when they are finally released from prison. Never mind the rights of all their victims, it is a breach of their human rights now that GMP have put up a poster to remind those on the edge of violence there can be long term consequences.

Liberty are supporting this. I think I personally would have a lot more time for listening to Liberty if I was hearing reports from Tehran or Saudi Arabia, somewhere there is a real need for someone to be outspoken and brave on human rights issues, not living a comfortable barely threatened existance with quasi-celebrity appearances on Have I got News For You.

I agree there is a need to keep an eye out on these kind of issues here. But I think there needs to be some kind of acknowledgement too about how actually we do do some things better over here. Perhaps there is, but I've never heard it. Even go to mainland Europe and find yourself in the slammer, you'll be hoping you can afford to pay for your own interpreters and legal fees. And there's no 24 hour limit in police custody over in Italy, I can tell you.

As for the efforts to sue GMP over this poster, I do hope it falls flat on its face. There was wide coverage on local and national media, with the faces of those two plastered all over, but no protestations from Liberty then.

However, GMP are seen as an easy target. At least that what it seems like.

Prisoners, Property and Water

2009-06-10T10:42:00.001-07:00

Just when you thought the dust was settling, the Met have managed another media headline spectacular. Waterboarding suspects? Handily, the Times point out, in case you were confused with the other Metropolitan Police in the UK, this is London's Metropolitan Police.

There are two branches of this story, one of which I sadly don't find surprising, the other I find incredulous.

Apparently, this all started with an Enfield drugs bust, and it sounded like a good one, with three in the bin for drug importation. Probably even got a mention in the local rag or the Mets inhouse propoganda journal, the cannily titled "The job". However, thats as good as the story gets.

Clearly, something has gone wrong from then on. The DPS, an alternative acronym for PSD, whichever combination of Standards, Professional and Directorate you care for- the Police police, have got whiff of something rotten.

I think I have a degree of understanding for the officers who felt it not fair that an apparent thoroughly illegal lifestyle of drug importation should result in expensive electro gadget refinery and thought of better places for them. After all, the Proceeds of Crime Act does takes a lot of time and hassle through the courts and this was more effective and satisfying.

However, summary justice like that is only ever going to bring you trouble. There's an old mantra that has been ignored- the three Ps that can get you fired- Prisoners, Prostitutes and Property. As unfair as it seems that the criminal element wallow in bling, theft is theft however Robin Hood esque your motives, especially when you're supposed to be the impartial sheriff.

That side of the story I don't find unbelievable, and reading in one article or the other if the DPS were at the covert surveillance stage then this was not the first time this particular band of 7 pound note cops had had a crafty property bonus and frankly had it coming.

But this waterboarding thing is so far out of left field that I honestly don't think I can accept it as true for the sake of my own professional pride of wearing a uniform saying "Police", however remote and distant Enfield is. The cynic in me reads articles about how difficult it is to prove it took place and equates it to being equally difficult to disprove. The state of the Met as it is today post G20 some commentators will never be shook in their opinion that it took place regardless what any investigation, inquiry or jury may say.

For such an event to have taken place the amount of collaboration going on between so many officers is disturbingly huge. It can only have taken place at the place of arrest as there is simply no way on earth anyone would do such a thing at any custody suite, every angle covered as it is in audio and visual cameras, with any random officer coming in or out to ask the exasperated custody sergeant some banal question.

I just hope this allegation turns out to be somehow irrevocably disproved. If the opposite, then frankly I hang my head in associated shame.

Note - 11th July- I read today in the Metro that the suspects are now claiming compensation- why am I not surprised in the least. Furthermore, apparently the torture allegations involve the schoolyard bullying tactic of flushing head down toilet bowls. Bullying, unpleasant, and utterly unprofessional yes, but waterboarding? No. Yet the media still went with the waterboarding headlines. Why?

Nothing much doing....

2009-06-06T11:59:00.001-07:00

Ok so a bit of a lack of inspiration to pen anything of particular controversy of late. I've been let out of custody a bit the last couple of weeks and it has been such a refreshing change I haven't even minded standing on a crime scene- I kid you not.

It was bonkers busy when I did get out the other day- a near fatal road accident which we didn't know about until he turned up barely alive in a taxi at the local hospital; a student who said a smart comment to a group of people who were less inclined to settle disagreements by use of constructive debate; a chap who thought his argumentative co-passenger should be silenced by use of a bottle through the trachea.

My one was the middle one. What a pasting he got. How he was still able to stand I'll never know. He looked like he was growing golf balls in his head such were the size of the bruises. He was almost something out of a zombie movie, slurry mumbly speech, shuffling along missing a shoe, bleeding misshapen head and torn up shirt. I have got to admit though I did have a little less sympathy for him as he clearly didn't get the hint that smart sarcastic comments or to be more accurate, insults- don't win you friends, not even from the people trying to help you. The ambulance crew were sorely tempted to leave him by the roadside.

Tell you what our job can be fairly tedious on a weekend night duty but I'd still rather do mine than the ambulance boys and girls. The amount of abuse they must get. At least we do carry handcuffs and have a number of powers to deal with abusive drunken (insert your own adjective here) whatnots. Granted the consequences rarely amounts to much, maybe a night in the cells and a £80 fine when you're kicked out, but at least there is a degree of self satisfaction in slamming the cell door to the insults and waving bye bye through the wicket. Ambulance crews don't get that.

On a different note- we have another Home Secretary? 4th one in 4 years? I can't even remember this new blokes name. I wonder what harebrained idea is going to come spouting forth in what has to be the Labour Party's desperate last stand.

Whingeworthiness

2009-05-27T11:59:00.001-07:00

Something that I think will be the case in any police force ("service") across the country is our outstanding ability to moan.

No matter where you are, ask a room full of coppers about what is wrong with their particular employer and/or the role they are currently doing and you will be met with a cacophony of wails, whinges, a wall of swear words and a general environment of grump.

I don't know whether it is I have finally managed to have two undisturbed days off or whether there were was a particularly special mix of additives and chemicals in the chinese we had this evening but I figured there must be some good stuff going on somewhere. Senior types would call this identifying good practice but I think I just felt swimming against the general flow of police blogger malaise for once.

I think what makes the whole police system "work" overall is the people on the front line - and not necessarily old bill- who are dedicated and work around the tape and frustrations. The station I used to work was one of the few left that had a garage hand, whose general job was to look after the fleet.

This bloke was absolutely worth his weight in gold. You'd come in to write a report or have grub or whatever. He'd come and hunt you down, and have your keys off you. When you came back, your car would be sparkling. It'd be vacuumed. Mechanical checks had been done. He was trusted implicitly by all the teams- nobody doubted him when he said something was wrong with a car. He'd sort out all the boot equipment and had fully stocked first aid kits waiting in standby for you to swap if you had to use yours.

All the teams bought him real good stuff for christmas- full meals at decent restaurants for his whole family, flight tickets- not a box of highland shortbreads in sight!

When I moved divisions, I was shocked to find the state of the fleet when there wasn't someone as dedicated as him looking after it. I am still trying to think of ways I can persuade him to move...

There must be some others around who can dredge up a tale where something works right in this otherwise over-politicised, top heavy bonkers system that is 21st Century British policing....

Irrelevant time

2009-05-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

It is often with a sense of concealed ironic amusement I book someone in, and the officer tells me his 'Socpa' reason for arrest is for a prompt and effective investigation.

If only. The only thing prompt about anyone in custody is the hurry of all the various squads to think of reasons why it wouldn't be in their remit. The battles I have had with the burglary squad who will stop at nothing to argue that someone who has been arrested for burglary and booked in for burglary has not actually committed burglary before they've even read the officers notes or interviewed the bloke.

I have had it argued that someone who gained access to a roof to steal lead, via someone letting him in through a communal entrance, is not burglary. He entered the building by consent you see, and therefore could not be a trespasser.

Or, how I once caught someone, still inside a flat, having smashed the door in. I was literally on top of this call when it came out and was inside and grabbed him (I'm not sure who was more surprised to see each other) before he had moved anything outside. That wasn't burglary, according to the burglary squad, because he had only committed criminal damage and we couldn't prove the intention to steal!

That last one was the only time I've ever lost my temper at work- with the DC who was trying to tell me I should deal with this prisoner as criminal damage.

The bunfights that go on about who should deal with a prisoner can go on for hours. Meanwhile of course Chummy is sat twiddling his thumbs in the cell whilst clock ticks slowly down. My job as the custody sergeant is to make sure he is dealt with promptly and the entries on some custody logs are simply a procession of calls by me to the various gatekeepers (i.e. those who decide whose unit should deal with what prisoner) haranguing them for someone to come down and actually get on with it.

Of course, prior to any of the specialist squads actually taking a prisoner on the Response jockeys have to do an ever increasing list of minimum requirements before they'll accept the handover- i.e. statements from witnesses, victims, photos, seizure and evidencing. Basically, they're only happy if the only thing they have to do is interview.

It's odd. Every so often we get a really juicy prisoner which one of the super central based squads come out and deal with- the murderers, shootings type prisoners. The contrast is stark compared to our local suit department- they offer to help the response team boys with exhibiting stuff, even volunteer to take statements from witnesses. Meanwhile, just getting our local CID out of their office I normally consider to be an achievement....

Not a good week for the Chiefs

2009-05-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. It hasn't been a good week for those higher up the food chain.

Commander Dizaei is off to face Westminster Magistrates.

A Chief Inspector Jones is looking like he's in a great deal of bother.

Meanwhile double trouble in Surrey as both the Chief Super and Superintendent are on gardening leave.

The thing which got me about these three reports is that I have no doubt that each individual is stressing their innocence. Each one is hoping that the criminal justice system is come to the right conclusion. Yet there is a distinctly different tone between one of these reports and the other two.

The fact that Commander Dizaei is president of the NBPA is neither here nor there in relation to the allegations he has been charged with. Yet the NBPA are mentioned no less than 5 times. The Metropolitan Police Authority call on the Met to ensure that he has all necessary support in place and reminds them they have a duty of care to him.

Where was this sentiment at G20? Why does Commander Dizaei get such overt support from the MPA? I understand the TSG sergeant involved in the G20 allegations (i.e. not charged) is a black officer. Where was the NBPA there offering its full support then?

Feel free to try and explain this to me.....!

Highway to.....

2009-05-20T11:44:00.001-07:00

Now that the weather has warmed up a bit, I'm getting to really enjoy the rides home on the bike now.

I've been doing some completely daft hours for a while now (not exactly by choice, I might add) which means quite often when I'm either going to or from - or on a really bad day, both- I'm the only soul on the road.

After a long, frustrating, sweaty day I find myself really looking forward to the ride home. There's the familiarity of the bike, and the fact it does exactly what I tell it to do. It it isn't ordered what to do and doesn't ignore criminality for the sake of public opinion. Our senior management are so paranoid in the post G20 climate that in a potential public order situation we have to be facing virtual armageddon before we are actually told to go and deal with something, even when it is blatantly and clearly illegal.

I'd dearly love to divulge more but I can't for the usual reasons.

So yes after a sweaty day I find myself looking forward to the ride, the familiar v-twin thump and buzz through the footpegs, the cool night air rushing through the flip top. I don't scream home, just pootle along, having some wind down time.

I note with irony the recent media hoohah about overtime payments. Already, my neighbours are giving me wry looks when I talk about the most recent debacle of a 16 hour day. Thing is, I'm not interested in the money. Overtime is for young single people, or those who aren't young but want to be single. I have a family and I'd much rather spend time with them. I'm fed up of being told about the latest first thing the little one has done by text message, or watching a video of it when I get home.

I'm earning nowhere £52k! That sergeant clearly didn't have a day off in a year. Crazy fool.

The politician's policeman

2009-05-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

If I was a policeman who policed in the way the government do, not as the government say:

I'd work in County A. I'd live in County B, but of course that'd mean I'd have my proper home as my second home, so I can buy some decent furniture, paint, televisions etc etc...
I'd then suggest paying myself to turn up to work in County A, on top of my salary.
I'd only speak to members of the public on a once weekly basis, and then spend the rest of my time speaking to my colleagues about what I think is best for the public, in a grand building the public can't visit the most part of.
I'd vote myself a pay rise every year.
I'd claim charity giving, gardening, cat food and christmas decorations on expenses.
I'd vote myself a bigger summer holiday.

All the while, I'd orate at great length...

"The issue of accountability. This is vital for public confidence"
"People pay taxes and want to know their money is making a difference"
"As a government, we have always been clear that the rights we exercise as individuals must be balanced against the responsibilities towards others"

All the above direct quotes from Hazel Blears, January 2005.

Va va vroom

2009-05-05T00:51:00.000-07:00

Happened upon this in the Telegraph Motoring section the other day. Despite all the Subara WRX's, Evo 9's etc floating around in various forces, check out the one they used to showcase the British Police.

It's a comparison between in-service police cars across the world.

The German entrant- a 225mph Brabus V12

The Italian- Lamborghini Gallardo.....

The Austrians have a fairly tame (in this company!) 911

The Americans have some custom made beast with integrated shotgun mounts

And holding up the union jack proudly......

Briefly back on G20..........

2009-05-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

A quick youtube special of one of the lesser publicised G20 events

Good things come in fours

2009-04-29T02:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the scenario.

You're outside the Stupid Simian nightclub, a local pit deemed apparently glamourous enough that the local D-list celebs haunt it.

It's just you and one other unit there, as everyone else is miles away dealing with a 20 man brawl the CCTV picked up.

One bloke is sat against the wall, pretty much incoherent, bleeding from his head. Nobody knows what happened to him. Two other drunken pests bleeding from their noses are haranguing you, jabbing at the bouncer the size of a small bungalow. The bouncer has a face of thunder and has a corking black eye coming up.

A girl is wailing and demanding an ambulance.

Someone else now bursts out from the club, pursued by another of the door staff. He is wearing a skintight top and there is no way his muscular state was achieved without a little steroidical help.

You manage to figure out that there is now someone out cold in the club, and steroid boy is responsible. He is now standing in the street with that look in the eye that you know means he is just willing you to dare try handcuffing him.

So here's the question. What would you do? What has priority? And then, do you think the office inquisition the following morning would support or criticise you?

Unnewsworthy

2009-04-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

Another grim weekend in the Met.

Not that you'd know it.

If you search hard enough in the news websites, you might be lucky to find out news that another CO19 officer is critical after injuries in the line of duty, and that a traffic cop was killed after leaving work.

There's coverage of how the chief is off sick with appendicitus. Just how pathetic is celebrity culture now that a 'known' face gets front page BBC london website coverage for being ill, but the life threatening injuries of an officer doesn't get a mention.

Chocolate and Hugs

2009-04-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

More musings on riot policing.

I just want people to imagine for a second what it would be like to be a public order (riot) officer, using the G20 circumstances.

You know that a number of your colleagues have been injured. The persons responsible have simply melted away back into the crowd. You know that somewhere in the crowd in front of you is a person wishing to seriously injure you, but you have no idea what they look like and you know they will give you no warning when they try to.

Exactly how do you feel? How do you interact with the people coming near you?

I see Mr new Commisioner whatsisname has ordered a review into public order tactics. Well part of me is glad of that. The public order training I've had is heavily geared towards full riots, poll tax style. There doesn't seem to be an inbetween option, so if this review can come up with something then maybe it'll be for the good. I've heard various ideas from the troops as to what the end result might be though. The consensus from the ground is that we should offer hot chocolate and hugs in future disorder situations.

On a more realistic note I reckon it's time to introduce (like everyone else in Europe) water cannon. It's more image friendly- no headline pictures of sticks swinging and blooded people- and appears to be quite effective. I have no idea why we don't have it. I think it's because of top level paranoia that we don't want to appear too militaristic. But to me it seems a lesser use of force- one bowser with a fire hose versus a line of 16 ugly mugs wielding batons.

I wonder what will happen with those two TSG guys. Not that there was ever a place for getting away with anything but in modern times any place in public with near every person with a video recording phone do something out of line, you know it is near inevitable someone will have recorded it, and won't be saying no to a nice sum from a newspaper or two.

I've done a couple of things public ordery since G20 and the level of paranoia from top brass is laughable. Actually, from some. On one of them the briefing was by a Chief Inspector with all the charisma of a flannel, and said all the right buzzwords, and took extra time to remind us about the current political situation.

A second Chief Inspector on another day was clearly less career minded and was more forthright in his instuction. He reminded us that was never a problem in the use of force on two conditions, namely that it was justified and recorded (in some kind of notes). There may have been a colourful adjective or two inserted.....

Sides

2009-04-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

The G20 trial by media rumbles on.

Now this may well be an embarrassing fact for a police officer to admit but I don't mind reading the Guardian. I have even been known to actually part with my own money for it.

Well, probably not any more. Someone on their editorial team is so cock-a-hoop that someone sent them the Ian Tomlinson video that they've taken it on themselves to crusade against this tide of police brutality.

I normally read the Guardian because more often than not they seem to have a balanced reporting, and seem to at least acknowledge there are two sides to an issue. I was very interested in their magazine article about two polar opposite approaches on dealing with London's "disaffected" (insert your own adjective here) youth.

However, their G20 coverage, particularly last Saturday's edition which is the last one I looked at- is all about the police brutality. Rent-a-quote people are popping up everywhere saying how the police were sooo nasty and shouted at them and some people even got a baton.

Now don't get me wrong, if there are occasions when we step over the line then yes it needs to be investigated. But where in the Guardian is the acknowledgement of the issues we faced? The dangerous violent minority, who hospitalised officers (where are the pictures of slumped officers being carried away by colleagues? The officer- not in riot gear- who collected a some kind of pole round the head?) and then melted back into anonymity in the crowd?

I wasn't involved directly at the scene, I was effectively on standby off normal duties at my own nick in case we were called in. Very bored I was. On the Wednesday, I was watching the news in the evening with the wife, when the images came on of the crowd surging against the line of officers, helmets being knocked off heads, little digs and pokes going in.

She looked at me, knowing I was on standby for the next day, and although she wouldn't say anything, I knew she was worried.

Still, it isn't as newsworthy or as an interesting anti-police crusade to bother thinking about the personal aspect of this from the other side of the thin blue line. Hundreds of rent-a-quotes from the innocents but not even a token effort to consider things from the other side.

I suppose thats what prompted me into thinking perhaps I ought to get this blogging lark resurrected. I actually started writing this on Sunday but it has taken me till today to actually finish it because I have spent a barking amount of time at work this week, including the most spectacular waste of a day ever yesterday on Operation Completely Unnecssary Total Overkill, more of which another day.

Okay.........

2009-04-04T01:18:00.000-07:00

So yes this has been somewhat neglected, I know.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the worlds most terrible shift pattern I am still stuck on, which generally means time I spend not at work I really don't want to spend thinking about work.
The second is small, has a heck of a set of lungs, is gaining weight at a very healthy rate, and thoroughly does not believe in lie ins!

Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel as far as the first one goes. I am finally in a position where I am able to apply to go somewhere else, so that is what I am doing. I have been doing response team for a number of years now and it is time to test the waters somewhere else.

So maybe, if things work out right, should get the time and inclination to get something back going on here. Still plenty going on in medialand that winds me up, like the major criticism of the overbearing G20 policing yet the 300 arrests, tear gas and charges going on in France barely gets a mention.

So give me a bit of time, a slightly more regular sleeping ability (that'll be a couple of months yet methinks!) and hopefully will get this old dusty blog a bit more sparkly again.

On route to violence

2008-12-04T18:18:00.000-08:00

PC (Ex-PCSO, not WPC) Bloggs has sent me an email questioning the emotions that go through your head en route to a violent shout. I was going to send an email reply but I'd thought I'd share it with the world.

A word of warning though- in doing so I am breaking two of my rules of blogging- i.e. don't post after a shandy or two, and don't blog when you've been awake over 20 hours. Oh well. So forgive me if this goes a little sideways here and there.

And now, right on cue, Scrappycat (one of two small beasties I own that treat the Simon residence as a hotel) has decided to lie down right in front of the screen, so I'm having to crane my head one way then the other to see what I've written.

Anyhoo in response to the question. In the manner of a true politician I'd have to ask what kind of "violent" shout it is. Usually, the response is apathy. More often than not, a call which comes out as depicting violence is nothing of the sort by the time we get there. Blue lights and sirens invariably have an amazing fight stopping (and run provoking) effect by the time we are out of the car. Most of the time the uniform does have an effect and will stop the majority of street type fights.

Domestic violence jobs are by far the most dangerous. More often than not, there is very little information to go by and the fact that it is the first call to the address can mean absolutely nothing in terms of what has and is going on behind the door. Two colleagues had a nightmare experience at one a few years back- one got knocked out and the other only saved herself from asphyxiation by managing to wrestle an arm free and squeezing and twisting his balls with every ounce of strength she had. (I have yet to see this technique in the Home Office Approved Restraints manual)

In short, there are very few situations we know we are going to where we know there is going to be violence. I've learned not to try and second guess whats happened at a call because no two are ever the same. I just worry about a) where the call is and b) getting there without stacking it. Then think about what I've got to do with the job when I get there.

The exception though is the emergency activation button when an officer presses their little red button. This invariably means "I need help now" and anyone who has access to a car with a fleet number will be on their toes.

But what goes through my head? Well, actually pretty much the same thing. Where do I go, and don't crash. The only difference now is I have no mechanical sympathy for the car and rag seven bells of hell out of it to get there. I'm mature enough (!!!!!!!!!) to not feel the need to drive like a tool to every call whether shoplifter or domestic- but I leave the minimum in reserve for the urgent assistance shout. The adrenaline tends to get going on this kind of call too, especially depending on what the officer in trouble manages to transmit across the radio, and there is a definite buildup of tension as you get nearer the scene. I can best equate it to the build up to kickoff in a rugby match- you know its about to get physical and you may well get bashed around but if you're going to be any use you keep your head and chose your moves carefully.

Right... that will do. Tis now well past my bedtime and I shall suffer if I don't get moving. PCSO Bloggs, I hope this has been of use!

Gathering dust

2008-11-16T14:41:00.000-08:00

Evening all.

Apologies for the continual lack of updates here. Unfortunately at the moment blogging is somewhat on the back seat. I'm not under any pressure from anyone to stop, I don't have senior management asking awkward questions, nor am I getting any funny looks from my Pc's.

Well, none more than usual, anyway.

Personal circumstances at the moment mean I just don't simply have the time to put a proper effort into this and I don't like doing a half-arsed job on things. Maybe one day, (if the senior management finally relent and change this frankly terrible shift pattern we're currently burdened with) I'll find myself with more time and will get motivated to starting shouting out again from this corner of blogdom.

In the meantime I'm currently looking to get off response team. I've said that before but this time I actually am. I've been doing it for several years now and I need a break from all the politics and scrutinisation to the nth degree. I'm just coasting at the moment, not really wanting to get stuck into anything.

I'll come back, I know I will. Uniform response work is all I ever joined to do and despite the opinions of practically everyone else in the job, everything else plays second fiddle to the boys and girls taking the 999 calls. If you lost one office based department or other there'd be varying degrees of hassle and whinging but should the 999 team collectively decide to call it a half day and clear off down the pub it'd be total chaos.

I'm looking at a number of things- going into one of the specialised uniform units like traffic (should they still exist, as unpopular as they are) or armed response (if the wife will let me). I may go back to old grounds if a position pops up in the street duties unit. I did enjoy that when I last ran it- still out and about, but with a lot more flexibility. I wrote the shift pattern for the troops when I last ran it and yes I made damn sure there were weekend night shifts in there. I don't get it when street duty units do 10 weeks of early turns. Pointless.

Got to admit tho I am somewhat of a closet rat (job parlance for traffic officers) and there's where I'd go if I had the choice. I've even starting nosing around neighbouring forces to see if they've got any positions going.

So we'll see what happens. I'm not going to be fussy and whatever comes up first I'll apply for.

So, in the meantime, if anyone is still reading, thanks for the patience. I'll be back one day.

Politics Racing

2008-10-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

Well it's all going a bit wrong down in the fine capital of this island. Blair out, Ghaffur on gardening leave, Dizaei suspended and the NBPA taking out adverts in the press saying don't go anywhere near the Met.

I don't know if I work in a bubble or what but the environment the NBPA talk about is one I don't recognise. No-one is forced to sit on a different table. Either I'm blind to it but I can honestly say I've never seen any overt racism in my job. Ever.

My force has a policy, as do most forces across the country, of positive discrimination. What this means in essence is that persons of a certain skin colour are given extra help and training to achieve promotion and selection for specialist roles. Could you imagine the outcry if this skin colour selected was white? I can understand the reasons for it, but to tackle discrimination with discrimination is a dead end road.

Every black (or VEM, as my force brackets those eligible for said extra help- visible ethnic minority) officer I know has refused to accept the help from the "positive discrimination" unit. I can clearly recall a time in training school when this positive whatnot team introduced themselves. One girl clarified she was eligible for this extra help by basis of one of her parents being of a particular foreign origin. I can remember her storming out of the room in disgust that she was eligible for help solely on the basis of her parents origin. One I know refused to join the NBPA and then found himself ostracised by his colleagues who did join. How messed up is that?

An asian colleague tells a story of when he was at a diversity seminar. The trainer asked everyone to give an account when they suffered discrimination as a result of their skin colour. He thought, and he realised he couldn't think of one. The trainer refused to believe him, and when he stuck to his ground she put in a racially aggravated complaint against him. I kid you not.

I'm not saying the police is perfect. Perhaps I'm lucky that I joined recently enough so that the racism of old (or not so old, by the tales of the 80's I hear) has gone. I would be an idiot to think that we're doing fine. My asian colleague above I would assume would be the exception to the rule, and there does remain the issues that we predominantly don't represent the communities we represent. Thats one of the few things I do agree with Boris Johnson about, although I would point out to him that how about he considers the ethnic proportionalities of parliament too.

But I don't think it's as bad as the NBPA would for some reason have us believe.

In the meantime, if all else fails I'll can the job, get busy with the wife and move to Ealing.

Motorway Cops

2008-09-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

You know, I like to think I generally try and keep (for when I get the time to post!! ha) things topical and serious on here. There's a still unpublished musing on the whole Mark Saunders affair loitering in the draft posts section- just what is up with the Independent On Sunday?- and I'm sorry but I think this whole Tarique Ghaffur shambles rumbling on in the big smoke is little more than grown ups acting juvenile and throwing their toys out of the pram, with this whole racism malarkey as a smokescreen. I hope I'm right, but won't gain any pleasure at all to be proved so.

But I've just watched Motorway Cops on the beeb and thought nah balls to high brow blogging lets be populist! Poor wifey has retired early to bed suffering with this cold that everyone has either had or is closely related to someone who has had it (it was my turn last week)- so I've got a bit of time to spare.

So just what were those two Danish girls on? Must have been cocaine if you ask me, to be that plain barking bonkers and aggressive on the carriageway (I've got to admit, I did not see that coming) to relatively normal in custody. Heh I did sympathise with the custody skipper asking the standard issue question of "Have you ever tried to harm yourself" with the mumbled afterthought of "apart from running into moving motorways (twice)!"

What got me though was those two illegal immigrants picked up off the motorway. What kind of ridiculous policy is not arrest them but just send them off to the immigration centre? I acknowledge that should they be arrested, immigration officers would do exactly the same thing of taking no further action, and would simply tell them to attend a walk-in immigration centre. However, entering the country illegally is a criminal offence which means that if they are arrested and sent off toHome Office centres from custody we can get their fingerprints and DNA first. This would help catch out in future the odd one or two who come here with less than honest intentions- and get a concrete date for when they were in the country!

Those two who walked off happy as larry from the two motorway cops, should they ever get stopped again- if they've got any sense at all they'll say they've only just entered the country. That other bloke arrested on the programme had overstayed his visa for 10 years for goodness' sake.

Immigration whinges aside, I would quite like to join traffic and one of these days may get round to making serious enquiries about it. No custody, a decent job car, and the science of accident reconstruction interests me. It's really rather frustrating traffic departments (I still refuse to call it roads policing) are out of favour with politicians and top cops making my chances of joining their ranks somewhat slimmer.

Treading Water

2008-08-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. No updates for weeks on end.

I'd like to put some funny or humorous slant on it, but there isn't one really. I am fed up with the job to the extent that time away from it I don't want to think about it at all. I am actively searching the jobs pages (internal, I might add, it's not that bad) for something else- I feel at the moment I simply have to get off response team.

I can't pinpoint precisely why, but its a combination of a few things. A new performance target obsessed governor certainly doesn't help. If it doesn't tick one of his boxes, he simply doesn't care. Actually, that's not true- he actively discourages the troops to do anything that doesn't contribute. Unlucky for you, Suburbiaville residents, if you have a road accident, have a relative who dies, or have cause to call police for anything other than an incident that will require you or someone to be arrested or searched. I don't agree with it all, my PC's know I don't agree with it. They know as long as they're doing their jobs properly I don't care what the final outcome is. But when it's the governor who signs off their applications for courses or promotion, he only looks at the league tables, so I can't blame them for playing the game.

Shift pattern- at least every other month I don't have any weekends off at all. Football season will probably put paid to the other 1 in 4 weekends I'm not at work soon enough.

I think the thing that saddens me most of all is that I am seriously fed up with the laziness of some of the PC's across the teams. I have put a lot of effort into trying to help out with their kit, sorting out supplies, making sure everything is there available that needs to go with a response crew. Yet I go away for a week and find everything in complete disarray. With a few exceptions, the PC's are selfish and either keep stuff for themselves, or expect everything to be sorted out for them. For them, it seems, everything is always someone elses job- yet actually they all have the collective responsibility for it. I've even had some of them come up to me and say "but this isn't your job sarge!" to which I've replied "I know, it's yours". However, the message still hasn't got through and I've had enough doing it for them. Especially when really in theory I should be disciplining them for not doing it in the first place.

So, I'm actively seeking to get off response work. Perhaps I just need a break from it, a change is as good as a holiday and all that. I'm not that fussy as to where I go, just as long as its not office based!

So apologies for the lack of effort on here. I take my hat off to the other bloggers who get almost daily updates on theirs. Hopefully, in a few months, I'll be doing something different and getting myself a bit more zested up. Not just - to quote Mrs Simon who happened to read this whilst in progress- "all you're doing is moaning!"

Disciplinarian

2008-07-08T02:21:00.001-07:00

Carrying on from post below there is a linked article to do with discipline, where once again skippers get lambasted for not, well, disciplining enough.

McNulty says he is doing lots to ensure police sergeants are getting more training and support. Really?

If he means this "leadership" course I had to go on some time back, then that spectacularly failed to address any of the issues mentioned in the Wail report- i.e. discipline and dealing with incidents. Of the three weeks, one day was spent how to deal with a major incident. Most of the rest of it was spent in group discussions and role plays about resolving staff conflicts.

At least a day was spent debating whether we were "leaders" or "managers". The difference may seem petty at face value but despite being told we were leaders the course was very much geared towards us managing staff, and working around rules, not applying them. I think the job even offered to pay for us all to join the Chartered Institute of Management. That might explain the frequent mailshots I get from them.

The general gist I got was that the job is trying desperately to align itself with business models, with talk of customers, clients, partners et al, improving management. All well and good, but at the end of the day policing simply is not a business. If someone messes up or has a bad day, it doesn't mean a late delivery or a refund, it can mean deep, irrevocable personal consequences.

Talking of discipline. I had cause to discipline someone about them not submitting paperwork- not routine stuff, but something that was actually essential, in fact a legal requirement for them to do. Simple discipline issue, you'd have thought? But no, before I could formally do anything I had write a veritable essay of the circumstances- why this form needed submitting, when I told the Pc it must be submitted (despite their knowing in theory it must be submitted), and what further opportunities, assistance and reminders I gave the Pc to help him submit it!

Its no surprise that minor things like rudeness and not wearing a tie are ignored, when it is simply so much hassle to do something about it. Sort that out Mr McNulty, don't send me on another pink and fluffy management course.

Time well spent?

2008-07-06T03:07:00.000-07:00

Well, of the things to get me posting again, I'm surprised its a Daily Mail article. I'm even more surprised I find myself agreeing with it.

But an article dedicated to police sergeants? I couldn't resist.

(Graphic courtesy Daily Mail website.) According to their report, I spend roughly 10% of my time on patrol. And you know what? I think thats a tad optimistic. Lets look at a recent four shift spell:

Day 1: Entire shift in custody. Ridiculously busy. Leave suite with my head swimming. A hell hole of a shift with extremely violent schizophrenic prisoners (deemed to be quite sane by a mental health assessment team??!?), people unconscious after genuine fits; and spitting, clawing drunk females.

Day 2: Entire shift in custody. After previous day, not in the mood for doing anything other than bare minimum.

Day 3: I'm allowed out! However, I have a considerable amount of paperwork relating to a Pc who has "performance issues", a load of stuff to get signed to justify my own existence, plus a mountain of emails I've ignored the last two days in custody. The time I spend out and about is almost solely to give myself a break from the computer screen.

Day 4: First half of shift first aid training. Second half- a meeting relating to my own performance, targets and evidence.

So from the last four days- 32 hrs at work- about 3 hours out of the station? Yep, about right. But only just.

I don't know what sergeants spend only 8% of their time in custody, (are you one? what force are you in? Tell me!) but it's much nearer 50% for me.

The police unsatisfactory performance process is such a long, drawn out and tedious affair. The PC with "performance issues" is currently midway through this, and demands a completely disproportionate amount of my time. I have had to apologise to the other officers I report on as I really haven't spent a lot of time with them at all in 6 months (although I'm not sure they're complaining that much!!). I have my suspicions that this one is going to go all the way, so I have to make a note of every single conversation and instruction I give out, to prevent accusations down the line of "But I was never told that".

I'll spend roughly half an hour a week going through the outstanding crime reports the rest of the team have. I hate it, but I have to deal with them by a series of memos and emails, as I only rarely get a chance to actually sit down and speak to them about it.

If I want to spend time out doing proper police patrol, as in being out of the nick, being free to take calls and go directly to jobs with the PC's (and not just be on the other end of the phone or radio), I have to plan in advance. I generally try and work it so that I do all my paperwork on early or late shifts, so I can actually get out when we're on nights, when the thin blue line is at its thinnest, and I don't spend half my time patrolling a traffic jam.

Sometimes I actually get a bit jealous of the PC's, who each day (well, a lot of them) are free to actually get out and do stuff, while I wave at them out of the window from my computer.

Forbackward

2008-06-22T23:59:00.001-07:00

Morning all.

A word of explanation. I know for a while now I have only been posting inconsistently. This is mostly do with a new, frankly terrible shift pattern where I seem to never have any time at home, and that time at home is spent not wanting to be anywhere near a computer desk nor thinking about anything job related.

I am also a bit frustrated that I can't blog about what I'd really like to, like the barmy amount of paperwork I have to do to evidence a particular PC isn't up to the job and the sheer length of time it takes to kick someone out of the job for not being up to scratch. Unless you commit criminal offences or are overtly phobic or 'ist' in one way or the other then it is bleeding hard to be fired in this job.

Perhaps I'm being excessively paranoid about being found out, but I know if I talk about some of the embarrassing moments this Pc has put himself in anyone on my team, and some of the more senior management involved, will suddenly have a very accurate idea of who I am.

I don't know, I seem to have lost a bit of motivation or direction for what I'm doing here. I stand in awe of the like of Bloggs and Gadget et al who are always updating with topical stuff with a good degree of wit and / or sarcasm thrown in, but I find myself thinking I'd rather be out in the garden or polishing the bike or something.

I apologise if anyone has sent an email to the one I have to the right- I haven't checked it in ages and now I look at it with a good degree of guilt, particularly with regard to one person whom I promised I'd do something and I never have got round to it- particular apologies to you.

I think this will be the status quo for some time, methinks, or at least until I get on a different pattern. I've reached a point where I am now actively looking for something to get me off response team as I figure if I'm going to put up with rubbish shifts and far too much time in custody, I might as well clear off somewhere else where I still may have rubbish shifts but can bin the time in custody instead. I can't remember the last time I was able to driven a pursuit standard car for anything other than 15 minutes and Traffic (yes, Traffic, not Roads Policing), always in the back of my mind as a career option, is coming more and more to the fore.

I'm not saying I'm going to fold this site. I just wanted to explain why I have been so sporadic in updating, and say that unfortunately that'll be the case for a while yet.

Thanks for reading.

Anyone else see this coming?

2008-06-12T10:08:00.001-07:00

Old news now I know but I've only just found the bit of newspaper I saved, as it made me laugh in a highly ironic way.

Recall a while ago I posted in a mildly disparaging way about the government's "tough on crime" policy with regard to paying £3000 to those of foreign shores convicted of a crime here? The £3k being an incentive to take voluntary deportation?

I think I said something along the lines of what a load of rubbish.

Well, it is a load of rubbish to anyone except the criminal of foreign extraction, who must be laughing all the way to their home country having been released from prison early, and then having the UK taxpayer fund their journey straight back home. Possibly even business class.

Except that this isn't actually a hypothetical situation any more.

I am not in the least bit surprised he came back the following day. After all, what kind of punishment is he going to face? No judge will give him the 10 year sentence the Theft Act allows him to mete out.

I heard a rumour on one TV news programme or the other- I can't remember which one, I had only just fallen out of bed, I really wasn't paying attention and thus I have no idea whether it is true or not- but I heard that there was a proposal for suspected terrorists detained over the 28 day limit, to be paid £3000 per day of continued incarceration? Anyone confirm or (surely) deny this?

Well I never

2008-06-06T00:41:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, I did two things I normally never would do.

I bought something from a motorway service station, and it was a copy of The Times. I did the mental equivalent of a handbrake turn when I saw the headline article though, and I had to buy it just because I didn't believe it.

Top police to boycott official police paperwork? Turns out the headline is a touch misleading as Surrey police and their compatriots are not boycotting the official paperwork, but are giving a suitable finger to the target driven culture that has the bane of every front line PC, and a great deal of dissatisfied "customers".

Well halle-flippin-lujah. What this and countless other blogs have been saying for ages, in fact is the root motivation for many a blogger- has finally been noticed at the top of the policing tree.

I still have some reservations though- I put chief constables in the same bracket as politicians most of the time, and I will be curious to know if any front line officers from Surrey, West Mids, Staffs and Leics police will actually find their day to day jobs any different. Not that I'm suggesting that Chief Constables are all talk and no action, or like their league topping position a little too much to really follow through with this once the media isn't listening.

I hope I'm wrong. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times that target driven policing is a shambles to the detriment of the police and the public. So much front line work either cannot be measured - e.g. how you go about dealing with the family of a road death victim- or is ignored all in favour of the big two: total recorded crime, and total detected crime. Nothing else seems to matter come the end of the financial year.

Come March this year I had to laugh as suddenly bucketloads of cash were released from their hoarding sites as 1) it had to be spent else there'd be less the next year 2) everything was being thrown to try and keep the total recorded crime figures less than the previous year. I kid you not, up to three minibuses a day full of old bill on overtime, dragged out from every which corner, stuffed in a yellow jacket and told to do "high viz anti burglary patrol".

So I hope that Mr Rowley, Sims et al are true to their reported word, and really have decided that focusing and driving towards being top of the sanction detections table at the cost of losing common sense and discretion is to end.

Knife Crime

2008-06-02T03:13:00.000-07:00

Well I'm only away barely a week and all sorts go on.

So the government will solve knife crime by a multi million pound poster campaign? Well, that'll work.

I am fed up of people asking me what we're going to do about it. I normally now just simply turn the question round and ask what they think we should do. This usually provokes a bit of a bluster and one of two responses- "I don't know, just something", or an indignant "I don't know, its your job to figure it out".

Well, no. It's everyone's job. Especially parents. Especially government and local authorities who need to give schools the proper resources- and I don't mean posters- to speak to these kids who look like they're certain to end up through my custody suite doors. I have relatives in the education system and the potential to stop a lot of children and youths going feral is clearly there, but the government and the Daily Mail readership is only obsessed with the three R's to the exclusion of everything else. Difficult kids are invariably seen as a drain and a diversion of resources and it is rare to find a school (through no fault of their own) prepared to put the time and effort into these kids to stop them becoming one of my regular customers.

So what would I personally do? Well, nothing more than I do at the moment. Legislation is sufficient and is actually fairly common sense. To not quote exactly, to have a pointed or bladed article without lawful reason is the offence, but the lawful reason is not specified and is open to interpretation.

It's a cliche but it isn't the knife thats the problem, it's the person carrying it. I have on my kit belt a multi tool with not one but three blades that should I ever decide to use it that way would cause horrible injuries, and is easily strong enough to penetrate far enough to be fatal.

Carrying it on my kit belt at work is fine. I've used it for a number of things including fixing door frames and sawing the tops off plastic bottles.

Take it down the pub with me, different kettle of fish.

This may be controversial, but police don't need to do any more. We could search more people, but that'd need the removal of the reasonable grounds to suspect clause out of the search legislation. At the moment, when we find people with knives, or screwdrivers, or anything else in circumstances we find dubious, we bring them in.

They go to court- and herein lies the problem. What deterrent is a £50 fine. Spin a yarn about they forgot it was in the car door or they left it in their back pocket after fixing a loose screw and off you go. Unless you are daft enough to talk in interview how you planned on using it against anyone whether self defence or not you'll never get a punishment bigger than a big saturday booze up.

Knife crime is one of those things where prevention is far far better than the too-late time when we happen to search them. However, the government is ploughing money only into something visible and something people can see and talk about. Utterly unsurprising. Putting the money where it'd be useful won't have the instant, visible, talk-about-at-the-next-election results the government quite clearly crave.

Next post- what's this I hear about Chief Constables officially going against the government grain and binning sanction detection targets?

(Useful website I came across: http://www.knifecrimes.org/ )

I predict a riot

2008-05-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

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.....

2008-05-13T11:25:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-01T09:27:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-23T08:53:00.001-07:00

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".

Stop or Not

2008-04-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

When I initially read this report, I must admit I laughed and said "doh" on behalf of the Hampshire police officers who managed to take out three of their own cars whilst chasing a stolen car.

Now I've had a chance to think about it, it did make me think (again) about the whole police pursuit business. Three teenagers driving a seriously powerful car- a Bentley Continental- clearly having no intention of ever stopping for a roadside chat.

I think the news report would be quite different if one of the three died in the crash.

At what point does the risk of someone getting seriously injured, including the thieves themselves, override the need for them to be arrested?

This country will never follow the American example of trying to induce a "controlled" crash before they lose control (see the sidebar vids for examples) to terminate a pursuit. We only have stinger (ineffective against runflat tyres) and TPAC, or boxing in, and a number of forces don't even authorise that as its too much of a risk of someone getting injured, or too expensive to train officers, or they don't want the repair bills. A lot of forces will never authorise a pursuit of a motorbike, mainly because noone can think of a way to end it without the motorbike crashing, which obviously means the person riding it will be injured.

Its another of those which shoulder to listen to questions- pursue no matter what the risk to the person failing to stop, or stop as soon as its clear that it'll likely end in tears? I'm only thinking of the night time pursuits like the example here, where the person failing to stop is the one most at risk of injury. If someone is pursued into a town centre or through residential areas half an hour after school closing time, then the pursuit should be called off, period.

Personally, I'd like to see some of the American ideas brought in. If the suspect can be forced off the road in a reasonable safe manner as soon as possible, then I think we should before he or she gets the chance to really get the speed up and put other people at risk. All police cars should be equipped with stinger, but again to cut training and equipment costs, only traffic officers are trained. And seeing how we only usually have one traffic car on nights, for a vast swathe of Suburbiaville and its environs, it usually is never available. No pursuit I've ever been on has a traffic unit managed to get in front for a stinger deployment.

Poles Apart

2008-04-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

Had the joys of dealing with a group of Suburbiaville's economic migrants, or whatever the current favoured term for the swell of East European fellows currently residing here for purposes of plastering and plumbing are.

These people ought to have a photocall with a government minster, as they have clearly have embraced traditional british cultural activities during their time here, but have cannily updated it with a twist appropriate to their cultural origin.

What this actually means is instead of themselves getting completely inebriated with Stella, they use Smirnoff.

However, the traditional British activity of then beating seven bells of hell out of each other remains unerringly familiar.

None of this is lost on me, being a suitably citizen-focused officer, as I survey the scene of blood spread across two streets. At least I don't understand the what I am assured are genuine ethnic swear words being yelled at me.

Chap in back of ambulance with bits of cheap wine bottle sticking out of various limbs, and the owner of most of the blood spread across the pavement is doing his best to cheerily tell us not to worry about what happened. His emotions suggest somewhat otherwise and I am grateful that this is our last night shift, so we won't be on when he's stitched back together and released to sort this matter out on his terms.

His friends are bordering on downright contemptous. They are adamant we are not required to intervene in their minor argument. One in particular doesn't bother to hide his contempt at us trying to tape off pools of blood left right and centre. I can see he thinks we're quite pathetic.

Whats the point, he calls out, it was an argument between friends. Its all over now. He feels we should therefore adopt his attitude, and as such the crime scene is therefore all a pointless exercise he can walk right through it.

Unfortunately for him, the Pc who happened to be the first on scene trying to contain all this mayhem is now just about on top of things and the crime scene is under his command. He also happens to be 6 foot 5 and the size of your average house extension. Our friend is given suitable advice that although he might think our rules our daft you start breaking them then we're not so useless after all.

I kind of wish that he tries to re-enter the scene after being assisted to leave in the manner a disobedient puppy is moved from where he is not supposed to be. However, he decides not to.

Shame.

Who to listen to

2008-04-09T01:07:00.001-07:00

I was having a chat with a colleague from a different force the other day. I can't remember why the conversation started but once the usual pleasantries and regular comparisons were exchanged (crap shifts? yep. At work the whole time? Yep. Hours of work seen wasted by judges afraid or advised not to use decent sentences? Oh yes) the conversation turned to a recent incident he had been dealing with.

Billy the Burglar and one of his equally criminally inclined friends had had a little prang in the nice motor they had recently relieved the lawful owner of. No other cars involved, and no it wasn't a pursuit, or even a sniff of one. Just them, a crash barrier and some road signage.

Unfortunately, Billy was driving fast enough and not wearing enough of a seatbelt to be able to survive.

Herein lies the copper's moral maze.

Devil on one shoulder is almost glad of this. My colleague tells me Billy was a right piece of work, and as a result of him no longer partaking in this world they will now see a significant percentage fall in their residential burglaries. A lot of people will no longer suffer their houses being broken into as a result. The devil whispers to consider this as evolution in action.

Angel on other shoulder counters with it's still a waste of a young life, he was still someone's son, and asks what failings there have been in the system so Billy got to this stage of prolific burglar who steals for fun.

Who to listen to?

Under 18 = incapable of crime?

2008-04-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

I would hazard a guess that Chris Sidoti is a liberal.

Now, I have nothing against liberal politics per se, but something caught my eye that I could barely believe.

Chris Sidoti is the author of the UK's first written bill of rights. Apparently, this will be enacted in Northern Ireland, according to the Observer. Good luck to the PSNI is what I say!

You thought the Human Rights Act was bad enough in letting criminals claim that criminal proceedings were against their human rights? Well get a load of this.

Mr Sidoti proposes that the age of criminal responsibility should rise to 16.

Wait, there's more.

The plan is that it should be 18!!!!

I'm sorry, Mr Sidoti, but GET REAL. Under your plans, the two teenagers who deliberately drove at the two armed cops in London would get away scot free. Crime levels would rocket, its the only way to describe it.

My old patch, nearer the centre of town, had a particular issue with cannabis dealing. Almost without exception, the dealers were 16-17. Most vehicle crime- particularly TWOC or "joyriding", is by kids under 18.

So Mr Sidoti would empty out the YOI's across the country because they're all misunderstood little darlings. Well, yes, at one point there may well have been an intervention available to deter them away from crime. But by the time they get there, it's pretty much too late. Giving them this get out of jail free card is out of touch, fantasist, and frankly dangerous.

Family Connections

2008-03-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

I happened to browse over someone's shoulder today (well, I wouldn't buy it myself) an article in the epitome of unbiased reporting, The Sun. I noticed this article.

Some bloke is given eight points on his licence for driving like a tool at 130mph plus.

Not normally a cause for a story, there must be dozens of people going through the courts on a daily basis on speeding cases that never get a sniff at the Sun's editorial desk.

Yet this is news. Why? Because he's an ex-cop's son. Not even a serving officer. In fact, he's a PCSO. But that isn't the blaring headline.

The whole article has a somewhat unsubtle bias, and it is clear to me the person writing the article either believes, or wants you to believe, he only got this lenient sentence on the basis of him being an ex-cops son.

Sure enough, the first commenter "makes" the connection, saying how we all look after our own.

This whole article annoyed me because of the snidey anti-police connection made when there frankly is none.

For what it's worth, he should have been banned. £200 fine driving a V6 Alfa Romeo? He's got more cash than that. A non-police friend of mine, no previous motoring offences, got that fine (and the rest!), plus a 6 month ban for 105mph on a motorway.

It should be the judge that gets the criticism here. Not making unsubtle hints thats its only because his old man used to be a policeman that he got off lightly.

Investigative journalism at its finest.

Double Standards

2008-03-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

Want proof that setting targets is a helpful method of improving performance? Ask the senior NHS man who's just been sent down for a year for trying to make his results meet government targets.

Okay so he falsified some documents to fiddle the figures, but two questions I have:

1) Is that really a million miles different to the crime classification games the police play to make certain crime types appear not as prevalent as they really are? The over emphasis on sanctioned detections, where a 5 pound shoplift carries the same statistical weight as a murder or rape?

2) How come this bloke, on a first conviction, without any personal gain or injury to any other person, gets sent down for a year, whilst violent drunks, car thieves and burglars get (barely) supervised community orders?

All of this, of course, whilst the government themselves are desperately trying to not make themselves accountable, and have all their generous expenses claims kept secret from the people who fund them.

Show me the.....

2008-03-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

Well, a couple of days a long way from the grey walls of Suburbiaville, where by some terrible mistake of planning I forgot to take the phone, and I'm feeling a bit better about actually going to work.

It's surprising (read: not at all) to find that after a bank holiday weekend the email inbox barely registering anything new at all. As crime doesn't happen on bank holidays, not least in offices within police stations, there has been nobody in to send force wide emails on minute (but god help you if you don't implement it) changes in policy, or the unneccessarily detailed breakdown of the last so many hours crime patterns. I shall wait for the deluge upon my next non-bank holiday login.

Before I get criticised for criticising people not working the bank holiday- I know, I wasn't there for all of it either, but it was only my second weekend off this year that just so happened to be a bank holiday weekend. I did get calls to ask me to work various days within it but I balanced it up and thought the ire of the duties office was a better bet than the wrath of the wife.

Anyhoo one thing has caught my eye. Ever eager to clamp down on expenditure on every public sector (excepting, of course, within their own unaudited, mileage-claiming, second home owning, self-pay-rising, family employing walls) the government has put forward the suggestion that PC's and Sergeants should have overtime payments abolished in favour of a higher basic salary.
The details are in the most recent Police Review, for those who are able to log in.

I can hear Inspector Gadget's hollow laughter already. Inspectors and above forfeited their right to overtime back in 1996 for a higher basic salary.

Now, this higher basic wage would be a fantastic idea for anyone office based. An extra 3 grand a year for doing precisely nothing more. For muppets like me still flogging out rotating shift patterns and the unpredictability that response policing inevitably generates, we'll probably lose out. There's been at least two or three occasions this year already where circumstances have dictated I have had to stay at work long enough to work into a rest day. Things like this aren't planned, and are generally actually an inconvenience, but at least the following month when you've forgotten all about the extra tiredness and rapidly rearranged childcare stuff there's an extra couple hundred quid to play with.

I don't want to see overtime scrapped in favour of a higher basic rate. I'm no overtime bandit unlike some other safeguard-aholics I work with, but I still wouldn't want it on principle. However, it worries me that if it went to a vote, there's a lot of Pc's and skippers working in office based units, with no intention of being in a situation where they could end up being late home, who would vote yes if it came to it.

I think policing would suffer, too. Don't pay the overtime and there's a real risk that an hour before the shift end, every car is going to be parked up in the back yard with the log books shelved. At least now, if you're late off, there's extra money to be had off it. Be late off with no recompense at all, and especially if your finishing on time colleagues will get exactly the same cash, then there will be a real motivational issue. Coppers generally are decent people who want to help the people who call 999, but we're not complete fools and we all have bills to pay- and if we get the same money for whenever you finish what's the point in taking the last minute shoplifter that'll make you 4hrs late home.

But of course, McNumpty et al don't care about this, they only see the pound signs, and if they think they'll go down, then it'll be worth it whatever the price, if you catch the irony.

Coming up for air

2008-03-17T12:28:00.001-07:00

I know I've been rubbish about doing anything on here on a regular basis at the moment, but it's somewhat lower down the list of priorities at the moment. At work the whole time it seems at the moment, a relentless movie on repeat of custody desks, perpetual sanction detection plea emails. The force has found a huge reserve of money from somewhere and is throwing everything they have at scraping a few more figures before the end of the month, so custody is more busy than usual with top brass sniffing around. Combine that with days off cancelled here there and everywhere, a frankly quite horrible job the other day and when I get home I'm much more inclined to sleep or go and do something completely job unrelated with the missus.

Hopefully, normal service to be resumed in April.....

My remit is everything

2008-03-10T02:43:00.000-07:00

I've had it up to here with the job at the moment.

You'd think policing is in essence a simple concept but somehow it has become a convoluted twisted political game. Maybe it's especially worse at this time of year (i.e. three weeks before the end of the financial year) but it's just pathetic at the moment.

Couple of things have highlighted this to me. Having spent an entire day doing a pointless paperwork duplication exercise for someone in HR having a strop (It doesn't matter that you've got all this record of supervision in this format, it has to be done on this one) I went out with a bunch of my lot the other day. I even got to drive for a bit before I had to give up to deal with my phone going incessantly about some other pointless political wrangling:

One of your team is driving our squad's car!
Do you need it? You're going off duty now.
You're not on our squad, you can't use our car.
Tough, I've got permission from your governor.

(repeat several times.)

I was saddened to see one of my Pc's, an Irishman the size of a medium oak tree, become near jubilant over finding some cannabis, which meant his sanction detection targets (also now known as "Saccy D's", I found out) were now met for the month.

I wasn't saddened because he met his target (not that I take any notice of the targets anyway, as I am quite aware the capability of a police officer is not measured by a tickbox list) but because we have reached the situation where a reliable, capable PC, damn useful in a pub fight, is reduced to this.

I ought to add the reason for his jubilation was that now, having achieved his target for the month, he was free to dealing with jobs in the most appropriate way, not the way the statisticians want.

As it is now the end of the financial reporting year, all the various squads are desperately trying (as in even harder than usual) to avoid being given any new jobs that could impact their figures. Whilst I was in custody the other day the domestic violence unit were desperately trying to cling on to the ACPO definition of a domestic incident because the female victim, who lived with her less than charming other half who had given her a thumping, was a few days under the age of 18 (ACPO definition being a domestic incident can only take place between adults over 18, you see). Unfortunately for them, the arresting officer wasn't a PC, slightly more susceptible to being out-talked by squads- but the duty officer for the day.

Half an hour later two grumpy detectives mooch into the custody suite. I did chuckle to myself.

Of course, response teams have the remit of everything. I love the gadget quote- remits are excuses used by lazy officers to avoid doing work. Or to avoid doing unglamorous work.

Another day, a different squad from a neighboring division in the custody suite, as their own custody suite is full. There's four of them dealing with this one prisoner. Force doctor says that the chap needs a constant watch and so they approach the desk with this news, expecting to use one of our PCs. Their faces when my colleague tells them where a chair is so they can do it. With the duty officer behind him, agreeing with it. Sorry chaps, you're already using our facilities, you're not diminishing our team strength with your problem. I did chuckle. Again. I could see their thought process on their faces- "but I'm on a squaaaad!"

I think I'm just especially frustrated with response team work at the moment. We are the easiest to blame for any failure to meet squads targets, we get criticised for failing to reach our corporate team targets, never get any thank you for dealing with crappy jobs well. It is so easily forgotten how I have a quarter of my available response team sat cold, bored and immobile on crime scenes, and much easier to point out how so many percentage of calls weren't answered in the chartered response time.

Response team is the dumping ground for anything that comes into the too difficult box for other departments. I spend at least 2/3 of my time when I'm not in custody doing reams of paperwork relating to an officer that came into the too difficult box for the training unit, and who got farmed off to response team to "develop".

I'm coming increasingly to the conclusion I need a break from response team. It's all I've ever really been interested in the job, but I'm getting to the stage where I've had enough. I'd like to be able to play more than one rugby match in a month without having to take leave to do so. It'd be nice to have a shift pattern that doesn't include night shifts. I'd like to have a team with PC's where I don't have monitor every single thing they do.

I think I need to be on a squad.

As Tough as Usual on Crime

2008-03-05T03:18:00.000-08:00

The latest hare-brained scheme from Central Office? Lets give our foreign prisoners £3000 in the hope that they'll agree to go home??!

Am I alone in thinking that this is an incentive to commit crime?

Yes I know the argument about how it saves the taxpayer money by them not being in prison any more... but how did we find ourselves in the situation where the only way we can deport foreign nationals is to bribe them?

I'm all for migrants who come here, work and pay their taxes. A hell of a lot of them do immeasurably better than some of our own home grown workshy types. But if you commit a crime serious enough to warrant incarceration, then it shouldn't be an option, you will be deported on the completion of your sentence if deemed appropriate.

Not on the condition you accept £3000 to do so!!

Here's an idea (thought of the following day): how about we take the £3000, minus one one-way ticket, and give the rest to the victim of their crime? That sounds a little more like justice to me, rather than pay your offender a barrowload of cash

I feel the need......

2008-03-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

Feel urged to write this post having had a couple of conversations with people over the weekend.

I do not, have not, and most likely will never have anything to do with speed cameras. I don't have anything to do with where they're sited and I certainly never see any sniff of any "revenue" generated from them. If I did, I might have a fleet car capable of setting one of the things off without a 200 metre run up.

In fact, from photo to court summons it is more likely than not that no police officer will ever have the slightest thing to do with it any point. Its all dealt with by civilian officers from "Safety Camera Partnerships".

I'm sorry, it's a speed camera. Calling it a safety camera is merely trying to rebrand it into something its not. It can only ever deal with speed and the myriad other factors (drink, drugs, bald tyres, leaking fuel pipes etc etc) that have a significant impact on road safety are excluded. The following Top Gear video sums it up nicely.

Should I ever make Chief Superintendent, I wouldn't get rid of speed cameras, for they can have a role. However, I would have the following rules.

1) The relevant speed should be posted on the back of the camera.

2) The camera can only be sited where-

i) There is an accident blackspot

ii) Local residents have requested one, backed up by a speed survey

iii) worker safety (I know someone who works for one of the firms who do engineering work etc on the motorway, who has a few fruity things to say about people who speed past him whilst he's standing protected by nothing more than cones)

iv) a high density pedestrian area, by which I mean town centres and schools. I've never seen a camera in a town centre or by a school.

The reason for said speed camera should be posted on a plate below the camera.

I get just as hacked off with cameras as the rest of you. I have heard a rumour that SPECS cameras are going up on a A road near where I live, on a national speed limit 2/3 lane dual carriageway that I often use to go into work. In the last 4 years or so, I've never known an accident on that road. When I head in to work at 5 am on Sunday when I quite often don't see another car at any point, I don't have an issue bimbling down at 85, or possibly faster if I had a car capable of not sounding like the engine is about to come through the bonnet at said speed. If I was in a job car on a shout, I'd have no problem topping the ton.

But now I'm going to have to constantly monitor the speedo, consider getting flowery non-ANPR reading numberplates (there's never a traffic officer around these days to tell you off, after all) and quietly see nothing at all when I see things like this:

Small print: blah blah I'm a police officer and speeding, and most particularly the wanton destruction of taxpayers money manifested in the form of a speed camera, is highly naughty and illegal and expect to get prosecuted.

(Note- for some reason the comments tab isn't appearing, I have no idea why, hopefully it'll show up again)

Lies and Damn Lies

2008-02-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

This news article talks about drug related crime. The following two quotes are direct lifts.

Labour: "[we have] reduced drug use to an 11-year low and drug-related crime by 20% in the past five years."

Conservatives: "Labour's failure to tackle drugs has led to an increase in drug crime by 43%"

So which is it? Down by 20% or up by 43%? No idea.

Whichever is right, it doesn't really matter. All that will happen in that whatever pointless home office sourced initiative is implemented, all that will happen for me is that there will be a new compliance or performance indicator imposed on us to monitor our implementation of said scheme. It won't make any difference to victims, and may inconvenience a suspect or two. With the current drug testing scheme in place those found to be users of class A are required to attend drug treatment programmes already. If they don't, the courts do absolutely nothing about it apart from tell them to start it all over again.

This initiative by Labour is merely a rebranding PR exercise in a sad attempt to keep up their tough on crime posturing.

They'll never get the seizing assets on arrest proposal through the house of lords (bypassing as it does the assumption of innocent until proven guilty) and as the Tories do point out existing legislation covers it adequately under the proceeds of crime act.

But it sounds good to say we'll seize a drug dealers assets. Nobody likes a drug dealer.

"We want communities to be free of drug-related crime and we want see tough enforcement of the law"

Good strong words Miss Smith. This of course in contradiction to Mr Straw, asking the courts last week to not jail as many people.

Politicians. Bunch of self-serving, self-interested, self-expense-paying hot air merchants.

Oh the hilarity

2008-02-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

Following on from the last post- here is the link to Haringey's Autumn 2007 newsletter! The Met are decent enough to publish it online for us all to bask in the hollow words of the senior management team,. Haringey of course is the locality that Superintendent Mawson worked in, and subsequently moved his residence away from as he had some troublesome youths nearby.

It's all on a PDF file and I'm not computer literate enough to be able to copy any pictures of those across, but please follow the link above while it's still there.

Check out the headline articles:

Chief Superintendent: "We've all got a part to play in battle for safer streets". But only from the Ivory Tower offices for Superintendents.

Thie is the best article by a country mile, oh so inappropriate now:

"Making a difference in your neighbourhood".

By leaving!!!!!!!!!

Brilliant.

My thanks to Nightjack for alerting me to the fact this was online.

Led by example....

2008-02-24T09:00:00.001-08:00

Well, if ever anyone wanted proof senior police management have evolved (or should that be devolved) into political beasts it's here.

Superintendent Mawson would have made many a speech in his climb up the greasy pole about how important the community was, how things must be done in partnership with the community to tackle issues that adversely affect the community.

So here is Mr Superintendent, now part of the community, and adversely affected by a problem. So what does he do, someone in a position of power and authority?

He does what any good politician would do. Talk a good fight, and then move somewhere so that he doesn't have take part in it. If only the rest of us earned over £70K a year and could afford to be choosy about where we live!

An aside. Community is a liberally espoused but often completely meaningless word. Senior management are utterly devoted to making sure everything we do is supported by the community. Being part of any group which can have the community tag attached to it seems to mean instantly that any government funded service think you're a good thing.

"Community" conjures up images of village fetes and retired people chatting over garden fences, but in reality means any group with a common purpose or origin, but whose values can be completely opposite (and on occasion violently so) to those from a different community.

No real point to this last bit, other than I wish politicians and senior police officers would actually be more specific about which community they talk about, rather than the undefinable catchall terms they currently speak about....

GMP: "extra officers- right into the heart of communities"
Met: you can call their "Community Reassurance Team"!
West Mercia- their local police teams "engage communities and partners"

Its such a vague term to border on useless.

Motivation: 0

2008-02-22T01:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry to those expecting for some reason a scintillating witty topical post today (as if any of you were) but I am too tired even to comment at the governments latest plea to magistrates not to jail people.

I've just had my only weekend off next month cancelled; I have my "issues" probationer calling me on days off now (thank heavens for caller ID); I have a mountain of paperwork to do (its coming up to PDR time, in addition to issues probationer and if I ever get the chance some self-development stuff!!) which of course I never am able to get on top of as I am hardly ever let out of the custody suite. This has a double impact as on the rare days I am let out of the dungeon I have to spend the day going through said mountainous volume of paperwork.

This really hacks me off as funnily enough I actually would rather like to get out and do some proper police work, which for me involves actually dealing with people, not computer screens.

So I'm off to watch a recently borrowed copy of Long Way Round, and get thoroughly jealous of people with the spare time, money (and a fully kitted TV backup crew) to do such a thing.

Straws and Camels

2008-02-18T05:33:00.000-08:00

Usual weekend custody suite nonsense for me, where everything blurs into one constant flow of the same questions again and again, swearing at NSPIS, drink drives at 7am (the adverts are true about the morning after the night before) and a general sense of not really having as much idea as I should about whats going on.

Its a strange existence in custody, no natural light for however many hours I'm there, emerging blinking like a surprised badger in daylight when I'm finally allowed home.

Anyway nobody died or was illegally dealt with, which is the short summary of my custody life- so have a tale from when I was allowed out the other week.

Domestic incidents are the bread and butter of police work. I honestly could not tell you how many I've been to.

In years gone by, domestic incidents between partners were largely ignored by police- it was generally accepted by us - and the courts, CPS and everyone else- that matters between husband and wife were to be kept private.

Today, things are quite different, and rightly so. If there is a domestic incident, a whole roll call of procedures are implemented. This is but one of a hundred standard operating procedures for different types of calls, most of which are designed either for appeasement for a particular "end user" group, or to give the "specialists" who should end up taking it on the minimum amount possible to do. Some of these SOPs are completely useless and make no concession to the realities of response policing.

However, the domestic violence policy is one I actually agree with wholeheartedly and make sure the PC's do their jobs properly, and aren't tempted to revert to the "good old days" of a suggestion that they keep the noise down next time.

I went to a middle aged lady the other day. It took her 16 years to call us.

As I sat round the coffee table with her 4 children at 3am, she recounted how within a year of their being married, the abuse started. Nothing ever major, the occasional backhand, a constant stream of denigrating abuse. She left him once, twice, but always came back after the extended family got involved, put pressure on her to go back and keep things proper and not bring shame. They'd have words with him too, and he'd promise he'd change.

Of course, he never did. But having given up work to bring up the children, she was now dependent on him for income.

In terms of what happened for them to call us, again it was nothing "major"- no broken jaws or stab wounds, both of which I've seen before- it was a slap, hairpulling, typical bully stuff. But it was the fear factor which finally prompted her to call. A day of silent treatment over husbands's new girlfriend led to him going for her in the evening.

It might have been much worse but for the intervention of their eldest son who burst into the room when it was still at the hairpulling stage. He was still a boy really but finding himself as he grows up his first steps as a man are standing up to his own dad, stopping him attacking his own mum.

What really made me mad was his attitude when I called in later to custody. Arrogant, confident. Couldn't resist a couple of derogatory comments about how ungrateful she was and how much he gave her.

I didn't say anything to him. Custody suites are covered with audio recording cameras, after all.

....and the winner is

2008-02-12T17:18:00.000-08:00

Well, a combination of the previous comments comes in to the right answer.

It is of course, as Pc PurpleHelmet (nice name....) pointed out, the annual drive towards the superintendents bonus... I mean sanctioned detection rates.... I mean 21st century policing.

Every office based unit has got to make efforts to chase up those last niggling possible sanctioned detections and go out knocking on doors. I've already been told I'm in custody that day!

But the part which really made us laugh (us being the 24hr response jockeys) was the part that mentioned even if these arrest enquiries are fruitless or none can be made, then high viz patrol will be undertaken in order to offset the impact the one extra day of unwanted crime a leap year brings!

So this therefore even includes the desk bandits in ivory towers who normally work comfortable office shifts sending out snotty emails and memos about how a certain crime report or case file wasn't quite completed according to requirements. I hope they deal with an abusive violent drunk and get a reality check beyond their warm secure offices and tickbox checklists.

Once I finished chortling at the sense of outrage and desperately grasped excuses of the office brigade I thought there could be a serious lesson here. The Super wants all the extra people out to offset the impact of the leap year's extra day.

So what if it does? All the office dwellers and stat-checkers get their uniform back on and go out on the streets, and crime sharply falls. Do you think anyone will draw the conclusion that it might be a good idea for them to permanently back out on the streets? That all these abstractions from response team to all the various units whose function is to quality control reports, monitor and increase sanction detection rates actually results in an increase in crime?

I can but hope, but somehow I don't think so. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those people would go "sick" with "stress" if they were told they had to do more than a day in uniform interacting with the public every four years.

What could it be?

2008-02-09T02:25:00.000-08:00

Some fairly disturbing rumours floating round the fiefdom of Suburbiaville this week which were proved to be true.

The Superintendent has issued instructions that on a particular day this year, no further leave is to be authorised. Every office based unit is to ensure they are up to date on their first aid and safety training. Every officer who has a shoulder number is to get out their uniform. All of it. Every detective is going to ensure they have body armour.

On this particular day, the offices are to be stripped bare of all but one or two people and they are all going to get out on the streets. Officers in high viz, detectives in plain clothes. Only those signed off as incapable of operational duty by Suburbiavilles HR department are exempt.

So just what can have caused such consternation that all hands are called on deck? I haven't been aware of such a mobilisation of Suburbiaville police in a long time.

I'll tell you next week. Please have a guess in the meantime.....

Unwind

2008-02-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

I tell you what, no matter how manic the day, an oversize mug of tea and an unhealthily sized slab of chocolate don't half make things feel better. Well, particularly so when you're at home and the custody desk which has been the bane of your existence for the best part of the day is now several miles away.

There was at least a couple of times today when if I happened to have a lump hammer close by I would have mildly redecorated the suite with bits of computer and telephone. Had to get people to go to a completely different end of the building to print off bits of paper from the printer 3 feet behind me; people kept ringing up with the most inane, useless questions; people who were supposed to be on "help"lines were utterly useless (4 times I rung up about not being able to print, 3 times I was told it was being resolved.... it never was); solicitors got stroppy; prisoners wailed incessantly when I politely declined their requests to be released forthwith; my lunch sat sadly abandoned in my bag; people coming and asking for quick favours when "I get a minute", governors coming in and getting a bit stroppy when I don't know the precise latest up to the minute details on whichever prisoner he's taken an interest in.

I love custody! Really. And I am now asking myself the question why am I sat down in front of another screen? I'm off outside to wander aimlessly, and simply enjoy the fact I'm able to be outside wandering uselessly.

Targets to nowhere

2008-02-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

There's a whole lot of target related pressure in the job at the moment, because we're coming to the end of the financial year.

This has resulted in a deluge of emails regarding attachments to various squads who have been given a bucket load of public cash by superintendents worried about their private performance bonuses, and who now need extra pairs of hands to grab every single last piece of performance indicator pie before March 31st. It isn't just happening round here either.

I treat these pleas with the disregard they deserve, and carry on each day dealing with each job as it comes. This won't have hit any performance indicators for Dorset. Neither will this for North Wales.

Neither did this job.

Alfie (obviously not his real name, but it suits him) is a teenager, and if you know what I mean looks and sounds like one. He is scrawny, has the short spiked hair with every strand gelled in just the right place, the chunky necklace, that immensely annoying london-mockney-ali G inspired (or inspiring) "accent" and a colourful use of language. He'd be the kind of kid that would be your first suspect if you found a recently tagged wall or bus window.

Except that Alfie is the only one trying to keep his family together. Dad has had enough. When it happens he turns the tv up and has another beer. He sits on the sofa staring blankly, his mind wandering back to good times, better times, any time but the present. Younger brother Carl is dealing with it in a different way. He's angry. He's controlled enough not to show it while we're around, but I can tell straight away.

Every once in a while, mum has a turn. The eldest child, the only daughter, died last year in miserable drug related circumstances and she simply can't deal with it. Most of the time she's ok and copes but every so often another little bit snaps and she loses it. This time, she lost it bad enough the ambulance guys refused to go in until we got there.

She's inside in a scarlet dressing gown. She sees us and is a shrill shrieking woman, ranting that we haven't washed our hands, and refuses to speak to us until we do. I note the broken bits of ornament missed in the quick clean up undertaken before our arrival.

An overweight labrador dog pads around wagging incessantly at all the new people in the house.

Dad is not being helpful. He tells her to shut up, daft woman, and tells me she's gone a bit mad. Really. I suggest dad goes outside for a fag and a chat with a colleague. He seems glad of the opportunity and is off.

Mum needs to go down the hospital. Its no guarantee she'll get the right help and a weekend night is not the best time to go down hoping to see a psychiatric specialist, but she can't stay here. Even an outpatient appointment would be a start.

I try talking to her but get nowhere fast, getting sworn at at full volume. Alfie starts pleading with her. I step outside the room. I'm no use, I'm just antagonising her. I hear the conversation played out at full, shouted volume.

"Please mum, she's dead. You've got me and Carl now, you gotta think about us".

After a while that feels like an eternity Alfie comes out. She'll go down the hospital. Alfie's eyes are wet but he's still holding it together. I radio my colleague to let him know, and advise him to keep himself and dad out of the way. I don't want the sight of our uniform or a comment from Dad to upend all this.

I see Alfie in the bedroom, putting some of Mum's stuff hurriedly in a bag. He's lost it now, tears flowing down cheeks as he puts various pink things in a pink holdall. What do you say to a kid barely in the second half of his teens who's the only one trying to stop his family disintegrating even more?

I kind of grab his shoulder as he goes between dresser and bed. I tell him he's doing a great job, a f###ing great job. It feels completely pathetic.

Alfie pauses, looks up.

"Thanks officer."

He manages a sort of smile before returning to packing mum's things into a pink holdall, shooing the ever curious hound out of the way.

I dart out and hide the police car round the corner. After an age Alfie appears, coaxing mum out with an arm around her shoulder. She gets into the ambulance and has second thoughts, and Alfie again goes through the shouting match. Alfie wins again, kind of by default as I hint unsubtly at the ambulance man to drive off as everyone who needs to be is in the back of the ambulance already.

We trundle down to Suburbiaville hospital behind the ambulance. By the time we get there, Mum has changed. She's calm now, laughing and joking with the crew. I don't know if they gave her anything!

There's nothing left for us to do now, and the usual weekend night nonsense is building up on the radio. Alfie comes over and shakes our hands. I tell him best of luck. He'll need it.

Community unsentenced

2008-01-31T10:27:00.000-08:00

A while ago I posted about how community sentences properly enforced could and should be a viable alternative to jail.

Unfortunately, articles like this are the reason these sentences are treated with understandable contempt. Which until this is sorted out, I have got to admit I find community sentences a washout. I wish I didn't, but I do.

And Jacqui Smith blabbering on this morning on GMTV about how Labour are so much tougher on crime. How she can say that with a straight face is beyond me.

Horses for courses

2008-01-30T01:25:00.001-08:00

I am in a bit of a quandary.

My team has been offered a particular training course. At least 3 of the PC's want to do it.

Although the final decision is the governors, he's asked us skippers to say who we think should be top of the list.

How do we- how do I- do this? The governor's forwarded on all the latest stats for the team- the usual stuff of whatever the statmonkeys can access via their IT systems- so arrests, stop searches etc.

Now this is total anathema to me. I hate statistical comparison. I reckon that the available statistics that can be measured may equate to roughly 20% of our police work. The list of things that aren't statistically compiled is endless- death messages, accidents, sudden deaths, court appearances, spending an extra half an hour having a cup of tea with a victim. All this counts for nothing in the team performance indicators.

But now I'm in a position where I have to give someone a sought after course and be able to justify why. Suddenly, it becomes very easy to jump on the stats bandwagon and justify it like that.

But if I do, I suddenly become part of the system which I hated as a PC and do still now.

Any suggestions for alternatives gratefully recieved. Names out of a hat isn't really an option. One of the PCs who would like to do this course isn't really suited for it, certainly not as much as the other two, and I need to be able to justify somehow him not being the the first name.

Coming Soon

2008-01-29T05:59:00.001-08:00

I've actually been allowed out from the custody suite by some accident of planning and have ignored the paperwork side of things to actually go out for a few days. (I'll suffer for it later!)

Was a bit rusty on my roadcraft.... as I went to one of the assistance calls, I realised that despite knowing the ground and bends very well, every so often some utility company comes along and digs the road up in a place there weren't no digging before.

One sobering new-pants-please moment later I switched my driving head on, remembered what I was actually taught, and decided I would rather like my unsullied police driving history to remain in that condition.

Someone once told me the key to advanced police driving was when you mess it up, give the impression that you planned it the whole time....

Car incidents aside, coming soon are a couple of highlights from actually going out and doing stuff, if highlight is the word. Makes a change from whinging about MPs embezzling money or assaulting kids.

Random things

2008-01-24T14:34:00.000-08:00

I've had 5 minutes to spare, so I've had a look at some of the stats I've got for this site. Weird search engine results that have somehow ended up here include:

- "female blogs handcuff him". I bet they were disappointed when my page turned up.
- "deactivated guns price". I bet they were even more disappointed.
- "how to make round stairwell post". I have no idea. Go to B&Q.
- "how to make a warrant card". Go to Toys R Us, thats where our ones feel like they're sourced from
- "I'm a PCSO". How nice for you!

...and the best one by far- and I kid you not, somehow someone stumbled across this page after googling the following:

- "the average size of duck flippers".

Note from the 5th March- What are you lot like! This has now jumped up to the 6th most common search engine referral!!!

Randomness.

Good Stomp

2008-01-24T00:58:00.000-08:00

I know I know, I was going on about it for ages and then I double booked myself with something I really couldn't get out of, and so my involvement in the march ended with a sheepish apology to my local fed man, who took good advantage to shower me in various muppet themed compliments. Had no respect for the rank that man I tell you.

Anyhoo sounded like a good turn out. Good to see there was no rowdiness and no-one threw any eggs at any MPs (which I have to confess to being a teensy bit disappointed by!). If I'm honest, my main concern would've not been the march itself but the inevitable almighty piss up that usually follows a jolly down town- thank you, totally un-sober.

Whether or not the government listens is another thing. The whole point of this march has been the government has not been fair. This could easily be dismissed as comparing the police to little more than a child not getting his way and having a strop, and in a certain way it is, just multiplied by 144,000. Except I would tell a child that if someone wasn't being fair, then you should stand up to it.

The government has for the first time not accepted independent arbitration's decision on our pay rise. We have to make it clear from now, from the first time, that this is not acceptable. I don't want to go on about how jobs are unique and all that for the 1000th time but we have no means of communicating our displeasure with the government in a way that really makes them listen.

I don't want to strike. I could only strike on a rest day, if you know what I'd mean. I'd love to have a stick-a-finger-up-at-government-targets day, where we could deal with stuff in the most appropriate way and ignore the bleating emails from office jockeys about our sanctioned detection rates and our failures with PND's. (Although I do kind of do that most of the time anyway).

Good luck to prison officers too. Instead of dealing with their concerns, the government instead tries to make it illegal for them to strike.

And has anyone else noticed a quietly introduced report which suggests Police pay should be determined by skills and performance?

Hmmm. Will have a closer look at that when it's fully published next month.

Downhill all the way

2008-01-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

The Sun is following Gadget and others lead in decrying Britain as a descending into anarchy as feral youths roam the streets looking for innocent people to randomly assault and murder, etc etc.

Whilst I would take any appeal by the Sun with more than a pinch of salt I have got to agree with their letter writer who derides politicians as doing little more than giving sad eyes and soundbites. Couldn't have put that better myself. Whilst I would normally avoid the Daily Wail like I'd avoid the back end of a cow with digestive problems, I did enjoy their dig at Jacqui "one doesn't mind popping out for a kebab with my own personal armed policeman" Smith.

So what do I think? I've talked before about prisons. My opinion hasn't changed much- Prisons only work in the sense of whilst someone is inside they can't commit futher offences (except against other inmates and the occasional warden.) However, the populist press can not let go of the Victorian idea of that if someone has done something wrong they must be punished, and that the only way to properly punish someone is go to jail. "Community" sentences are derided as soft.

I'd disagree. Prison costs a fortune and rarely provides any rehabilative capability. For those who were sent to jail with a job and rented accomodation, they will rarely have either when released but services to deal with rehousing offenders are overstretched beyond any capacity to deal with any effective number.

I'd agree community sentences are ineffective but thats mostly because the services to monitor these sentences are again underresourced and overstretched and people frequently get away with avoiding them. I have yet to confirm the story I heard that one person appealed his community sentence of clearing rubbish as degrading, and under the human rights act some judge or other was compelled to agree and changed his sentence.

Properly funded and monitored community sentences, with the threat of a non-playstation equipped jail as a motive for compliance, where persons keep their jobs or studies going but losing their spare time to something beneficial to a local area- something like clearing litter, clearing graffiti, whatever- would be better for the minor offences rather than clamouring to throw everyone in jail.

The nasty unprovoked beatings like what Nicolas Hague showed himself capable of- our prisons are frankly too good for him. We should have a prison sharing agreement with Estonia (apologies to any Estonians, I have no idea what their jails are like, but you get my drift).

One thing which certainly doesn't work is the youth justice system. This whole situation is so spectacularly ineffective I simply have no idea where or how to start even thinking about where it has all gone wrong. But the end result at the moment is young adults have a system where everything is geared towards bending backwards for them- we're not even allowed to wear our belt kit into youth court in case the little darlings find it too "oppressive". Tell that to the victim of their knifepoint robbery. They have absolutely no respect for authority - i.e. us, courts etc- because they don't need to. Some little burgling so-and-so I arrested after he crashed the car (after pursuing him, ha ha) he had stolen from the burglary he did 2 hours managed to persuade the judge big nasty evil bully men were making him steal these things despite not providing one hint of a name or evidence, and so got acquitted on the burglary charge! He only got convicted for driving offences! Nuts.

Despite what the government believes and will probably do, no amount of target setting for getting youths into court within 2 days or new proposed legislation will make any difference. Not while we have parents who instead of giving their offspring a bollocking for shoplifting, give them a bollocking for being stupid enough to get caught by the police. Yes, I witnessed this myself. I was actually speechless, and had to leave swiftly before my mouth caught up with what my brain was thinking. Not while we have a culture that encourages all disputes have to be sorted out by someone else, because no-one wants to take on any responsibility on themselves- it is always someone else's fault.

And in the meantime politicians continue waffling out the soundbites, and people seem to accept them, despite it being proved time and again they are at best half truths and occasional outright lies.

It winds me up when I read about the stories like Gary Newlove. I get fed up with the lack of balls (apologies to Bloggs) from anyone in a position to do anything about it apart from order yet another inquiry.

I just get back up at a stupid time in the morning, and go back to work and do the best I can with the rules I've got.

Career Disambition

2008-01-17T02:16:00.000-08:00

Happened to be up at big chief HQ the other day during normal (for the rest of the world) hours, and happened to stumble upon the big chief himself coming out of a meeting.

To be fair, especially after recent events (which I can't post about) I think our chief is actually a decent person. However, what struck me was his staff officer. Immaculately ironed and creased shirt, shiny scuffless shoes (mine are all beaten up after being over too many walls, being out in the rain far too often etc etc- although I still do polish them every so often!), blemish and hole free trousers, and just a little soft round all the edges- but what really got me was the plate of biscuits being held.

"Hold your biscuits sir? Absolutely sir."

He had this curious look about him too- one which at the same time seemed to survey everyone else as less important than them, but also doe-eyed puppy dog whenever Mr Chief was looking that way.

And I just thought someone shoot me if I ever end up like that.

Off topic

2008-01-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

I know it's not exactly anything to do with anything anyone's been talking about, but it made me laugh at out loud and sometimes thats just what you need, especially with this wind and rain!

Rotten Egg

2008-01-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Sad story from the home counties. Police Inspector by all accounts has killed his wife, then having secured bail, he goes on to kill his mother in law, then himself.

I don't know why the COURT decided to release Gary Weddell on bail. It is important to realise that it was a judge who released him. He was remanded in custody from the police station. Need to be fair on Herts Police here, they didn't release him on bail because he was in the job, as I can almost hear someone shout already.

The MP needs to sort his facts out- we don't have any say in whether a judge grants bail or not, that issue by that stage lies squarely with the CPS. How unlike an MP to spout off accusations without knowing the full details.

Murder is one of those exemption-to-the-rule type cases with regard to bail- i.e. it is only granted in exceptional cases, and not the other way round. It is like this precisely for the kind of reason that has happened here.

So why the judge decided to allow him free (and who's going to pay the £200k now I wonder) is a decision he has to justify. I wonder if his defence team feel satisfied now.

Who to Choose

2008-01-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

For my last post below I've been having a debate with a commenter about how we should prioritise incidents we are called to.

Firstly, my thanks to Michael. I am quite aware that other people have different opinions to things to me and with regard to policing, everyone who pays taxes has, or should have, an opinion on how we go about our work. I do like a bit of good debate- and I don't mean in the Jeremy Clarkson style of "My opinion is worth more than yours, so I'll shout louder until you shut up".

The theme of the debate was deployment of resources to a self harming mental health patient, whom by the nature of his violence required a significant number of police officers, which inevitably meant a number of calls would have gone unanswered. (Note- I don't know if there exactly were any serious or non-serious calls which were unanswered / delayed responding as a result of this job, but the point is if there could have been)

So should we give a lesser priority to those whose needs for the police are self generated as opposed to others who are more genuine victims?

As much as sometimes I might like to think one way or the other yes or no, I don't think we as a police service have the right to prioritise our calls dependent on the social background, mental state or any other factor involved in the personal background of the caller.

This is why I also disagree with the concept of police performance targets. Targets by their very nature mean the paymasters want certain incidents to be dealt with in a certain way in order that this target is achieved.

I myself a firm believer in dealing with incidents on an individual basis on its own merits. You shouldn't have a system where people are criticised for dealing with incidents where the outcome was the most appropriate, but as it was not in accordance with a target the officer is seen to have failed by his superiors.

Back to the original point, if we do start giving higher priority to people who are arguably more deserving of police time then it sets a dangerous precedent. Take this example. Should the boy's family have any less of a service compared to the driver of the car as you could argue it was the boys fault? Of course not.

In summary, police deployment should be prioritised by at its most basic level threat to life, then property, and then all else below that. It shouldn't matter whose life or property is at risk, and if we start changing priorities within that in accordance to who is more likely to satisfy a target, or who is deemed more deserving, then it is a sad day.

On a completely different note- please see the "Police Short Stories" link either here or from the sidebar. The man behind that blog is compiling a book of just that- short police stories- and would love to hear from you.

Abiding memories

2008-01-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

What with it being a new year and all I wondered what the lasting memories of 2007 would be for me. There was a couple of nasty car crashes, one involving a decapitation, another with a man being cut in half by a tree- whilst still in his car.

However, sad as it is to say it there'll be more car crashes this year, probably some as gory. I think the following story though will stick out in the memory, as it was a bit more unusual and out of the ordinary.

I originally posted about this back in May. I've changed some bits around, changed grammar and whatnot. But it's still the same story.

Its about the time I met a man called Robert.

Robert has a personality disorder that is determined untreatable and so he is not allowed to stay in hospital despite our frequent cause to S136 him. (S136 Mental Health Act- sectioning someone)

Robert decided the other day to cut his wrists. Now we quite often get calls like this, and get there to find small cuts, not very deep- more scratches, really. Robert was a tad different.

With a stanley knife he had gouged right through his wrist. 3 times. He was sat in his kitchen when we got there with his despairing friend.

I don't think I'll forget the sight of his kitchen. It was a reasonable size, with a white tiled floor. It was about 2am, and a single flourescent tube illuminated the room, making a gentle buzz.

Robert's blood covered every single tile. It was on the sideboards where he had sat. It was dripping down the cupboards. A blood saturated towel was in the middle of the floor. Blood spots were on the wall from when he'd flung his arm about. You wouldn't have thought blood smells, but I tell you it does.

Robert was sat on the sideboard, talking to us quite normally, oblivious to the fact he was sat in a scene straight out of SAW. Robert did not want to go to hospital, despite the fact he was constantly oozing blood and he had already lost at least a pint.

This left us in a bit of a situation. We can't force him to go to hospital. He's committed no offence. We only have powers to section people if they're in a public place. The old trick of arresting them to prevent a breach of the peace, followed by de-arresting them once outside and sectioning them instead isn't an option these days. Its now in fact a breach of force policy. We also have the issue that he doesn't even want to leave the kitchen. Robert is no small man. We're in a kitchen with all manner of weapons close to hand with a blood covered ice rink for a floor. We do not want a fight, but thats what we'll get if we try and put hands on him.

But there's no way we can leave him there. He's still conscious, blood steadily dripping through his hands, telling us it was an accident and he'll get it sorted in the morning.We all know he'll be dead by the morning. The bandage he did let the ambulance service put on he has decided he doesn't want and has torn off.

So, we talk. We patiently build rapport and trust. His friend tries too, but nothing. He just sits on the sideboard, oblivious to the blood everywhere, telling us he's fine. Half an hour of patient persuasion leads nowhere.

All of a sudden, Robert is impatient with us still being there and smashes a cup down onto the floor. The group of armoured PC's who are hiding outside brace, wondering if I'm going to order them all in.

A lone Pc comes in with a shield, and tells Robert not to be so stupid in a manner you would tell off a child, which with all the circumstances seemed mighty surreal. But to my amazement Robert responds, becoming apologetic and saying sorry.

Taking this hint, we continue with the more forceful approach. Myself and the Pc tell him that he's going to hospital right now. Hallelujah, Robert agrees. I quickly signal for everyone outside to quickly hide, knowing if he sees all the armour and shields waiting it'd freak him out. We walk out and go down the several flights of stairs, everyone quietly following. Blood is still flowing down his hands. We are leaving a trail of red, and as we wind down the stairwells, there are spots and spots of blood all over the floors below us before we even get there.

Finally, three floors down Robert goes down in a heap, succumbing to the blood loss. I quickly grab his arm and get the ambulance service to put one, then two and finally three dressings on it. Robert regains consciousness.

Straight away he's fighting us, swinging arms and legs, swearing at us to leave him alone. I'm in a fire exit stairwell of a grey low rise tower block, its 3am, I've got a seriously mentally ill chap spraying blood everywhere who's using his remaining strength to fight us. I do briefly wonder why I do this job.

I don't wonder for long. I've had enough. I nod at a Pc whilst taking a tight hold of Robert's arm and shoulder. The Pc grabs the other side and we march him down the stairs, holding him as he collapses again. He really is a hefty git and we can't carry him, we just wait for him to come round again, stop him fighting us, and march him on again.

Finally, we reach the bottom. He collapses once more as the ambulance driver runs off to get his rig. Once again, once he revives he flails out at us. We can't handcuff him because of his mangled wrist. We're going to have to keep hold of him until he gets sedated. I throw my car keys at someone and we somehow get into the ambulance and are off to the hospital on blues. I stand, holding his wrist up high to stop him hitting me with it and to try and stop him losing yet more blood. The Pc is pinning his other arm. The paramedic is trying do attach monitors, but not getting very far as we're all struggling with him and our balance as the ambulance dodges in and out of traffic.

We get to the hospital and see the open mouthed reaction of the staff when we struggle in with him. We take him down to a cubicle from where he somehow summons more strength from somewhere and 4 of us end up pinning him to the ground. A nurse runs in and puts safety specs on all of us. The doctor doesn't ask a hundred questions of us or the ambulance crew for once, but gets a sedative and administers it. Finally, Robert calms down. He crawls to a mattress on the floor and allows the nurses start cleaning him up. The floor and corridor around us looks like some something out of an abbatoir.

I take the chance to grab some water, grab some air. I take a look at myself.

I am covered in his blood. Boot, trousers, stab vest, shirt. Thoughts of HIV and Hepatitus cross my mind and I go and clean myself up, hoping that little nick on my arm has healed properly. The other skipper is going through all the details with the ambulance and hospital staff.

I feel justified in volunteering someone not covered in his blood to write this all up. I head back to our nick, feeling quite nauseated now by the constant smell of blood from my own clothes.

They were so contaminated I had to return to the hospital later and bin most of my uniform into their hazardous waste bins.

Time to dust off the walking boots

2008-01-05T04:32:00.000-08:00

Did someone mention the idea of going on a rally?

A certain someone on the 10th December...

The Federation on the 3rd January! (took them long enough!) Please click the link to see the poster, I laughed out loud when I first saw it. Someone at the fed has a sense of humour after all! I tried to figure out a way of copying and pasting it onto here but I was defeated by my un-technologicalness.

I shall be taking the train down to big smoke central on the 23rd, as I enjoy a happy coincidence of rest days. Does the Met's perk of free public transport around London apply to non-met warrant card holders? Hoping so.

Much as part of me would love this march / rally to not have complied with the various regulations of no protesting without prior notification around parliament, I actually do hope it is all legal.

Whilst I would love to see how the government would cope with such an incident (i.e. it would ram home the point that any amount of legislation they pass is useless if the people who are to enforce it completely ignore it), we can't act illegally for just the same reason.

We would utterly undermine ourselves if we in a deliberately in a very high profile way break the law, for then we would leave ourselves open to fair accusation that we pick and choose which laws to uphold, i.e. only the ones we choose to. Much as I think much government legislation is pointless, I can't decide which ones not to enforce.

Although having said that, our ability to use discretion is one of the most important tools we have else we all would have a lot more points on our licences and there wouldn't be a person left who hadn't been fined! Come on, who hasn't dropped some litter. Or sworn in public.

But a big display of a mass of police officers sticking a finger up at the law in order to stick another up at the government is pushing it, I think.

Views welcome as always.

Another year over

2008-01-03T20:20:00.000-08:00

... a new one has begun in depressingly similar circumstances. Get well soon.

Final grim statistic of the year

2007-12-31T10:09:00.000-08:00

No sooner had I finished writing that I noticed this on the news!

Some scumbag has shot a Pc in Lancashire. Not going to be a good new year for Pc Katie Johnson, I hope she gets better soon.

I sincerely hope the office dwellers and armchair supervisors don't start going on about breaches of policy for turning up to a firearms incident whilst not a firearms response officer. Unfortunately, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if someone did.

Bit of a slip by the Acting Assistant Chief Constable too:

"It troubles me greatly that at a close confrontation level, someone is shooting not only a police officer but a female one who was clearly identified"

Its the "not only a police officer, but a female one" that caught my eye. Does that mean that it wouldn't have been as serious if it was a male officer shot? Or does he think that as she's a woman she shouldn't have to face such dangerous and naughty people, and it's doubly as tragic when she does?

What will Pc Bloggs think.

In all seriousness though, I hope Pc Johnson recovers without ill effect and the toilet-dweller responsible shoots himself in the groin.

Note- I feel suitably honoured to have been visited by Cuddles, the eponymous idiot commenter with a somewhat limited vocabulary. Normally I'd leave the comments there to allow everyone to see the irony of him adding to my hit counter (thank you, by the way), but at the moment I can't be bothered with it and so am deleting them.

Final post of the year... almost

2007-12-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

As most are aware Pc Roberts died from a heart attack, but would he have experienced it if Mr Savage hadn't been such a violent person? We will never know. We salute him for willingly going to a situation which was fraught with danger in the first place.

I'm going to leave the expected charming comment there. If anything, I think it helps show the rest of the world the type of people we have to deal with.

I know I haven't exactly been a shining example of blogging effort the last couple of weeks, but a combination of applying 15 months in advance and being lucky in the pool system meant I have for the first time since the millenium got both christmas and new year off. So I've actually had a "normal" christmas, which has generally involved eating far too much and driving half the length of the country every other day seeing various relatives.

Tonight, I'm off to celebrate new year from somewhere other than the inside of a police car. I have been told that already no more leave will be authorised for the 2008 Christmas period! I'm off tonight with friends who don't feel the need to assault each other or their spouses or feel it is a good thing to become drunken heap on the pavement.

I hope all have a good celebration tonight in whatever form it takes, and I hope you don't have need to call 999 as you haven't got a great chance of getting through, and even less chance of someone turning up.

More cheery posts in 2008! Hopefully.

Sadness

2007-12-27T01:38:00.000-08:00

My sympathies, sadness and anger are with the Met officers, but most of all with the family of the officer killed. (link)

Just a quick one

2007-12-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

Just to say very briefly, and politically incorrectly, happy christmas all!

Moving on

2007-12-19T01:44:00.000-08:00

I'll let the pay business slide for the moment. It seems for once the fed are actually being half-organised and might actually give us an opportunity to do something to show our displeasure beyond yet another email proforma telling us to write to an MP. We'll see what happens. The much vaunted power of the internet seems to have failed for me.

For as of course life goes on. I've been anchored to the custody desk, so for once with this freezing weather I'm not so fed up of the same 4 walls as usual. My sergeanting colleague wandered in the other day. He has now adopted a permanent expression of.... I can't quite describe it, but resigned acceptance about sums it up. He told me we're now down to 4 Pc's covering Suburbiaville, whose population and problems have not been reduced by a third to match the loss of the PC's. The governor won't be happy, as his statistics will have reduced by a third too. Never mind eh.

Which brings me on. Things I am likely not to see in a custody suite:

1) A PCSO. They're not allowed to arrest anyone.
2) A safer neighbourhood constable, unless they were really unlucky and were in the wrong place at the right time.
3) A safer neighbourhood sergeant. They're not even custody trained round my way.
4) Anyone under 16 who actually demonstrates some kind of regret or sorrow for being arrested.
5) Anyone in a suit before 0930am.
6) Anyone from SMT, unless someone has died.

Feel free to continue the list.

Clarification

2007-12-14T00:22:00.000-08:00

Well, the last post didn't cause that much controversy.... never mind.

A couple of things had arisen though- I had completely forgotten that our glorious government had made protesting within a mile of Parliament Square illegal. I didn't really think much about it before but now it has become something I was actually seriously contemplating doing it really winds me up! If the government don't like being told by their electing public that they're not popular, they'll just make it illegal for the public to tell them about it. They don't want to run the risk of actually being confronted by one of their constituents. Its much easier to dismiss a protest when it's something your secretary can deal with via the postbox. I would love to see what the Met would do though if a several hundred old bill turned up outside the Houses of Parliament. Probably bus in all their PCSO's to give everyone a PND.

Anyhoo I did note that one of the things the Fed is now advocating is a mass protest rally. I'll take the credit for that ;-)

Now that this situation is getting a fair bit of news coverage the comments pages on some of the rags are getting letters sent in. I can't remember which one (and I can't be bothered searching) but someone was saying how pathetic this all was over 0.6%. (someone commented on the last post in the same theme)

So, to clarify. For myself, and I think the most of us, this is really not about the money. We are relatively well paid, especially compared to the other emergency services. Although there are unique aspects to our job that don't apply to the others- but more on that another time, if there's the interst.

If the government had backdated the 2.5% to make it a proper 2.5%, I personally wouldn't be jumping up and down.

What is galling is the way the government have gone about this pay rise. They canned a long standing police pay rise mechanism linked into inflation, which was accepted by "us" in return for the right to strike. They then enter into "binding" arbitration which recommends a 2.5% rise. They then, having stalled the issue long enough, accept the 2.5% increase, but only implement it 4 months after it should have been so that the overall increase is 1.9%.

Underlying all this of course is the fact most of us are seriously hacked off with the target obsessions of this government which has a direct impact on the way street level officers go about their jobs. Which has been, for the most part, a negative impact. Most people have seen or heard a story about how some minor petty offence- e.g playground scraps-which in all honesty should be dealt with by words of advice was dealt with according to the letter of the law- which whilst not illegal is not exactly proportionate. But its the pressure from the senior management, under pressure from the government, to improve detection rates which causes this.

Its not about the money. Its about the government constantly interfering and imposing their will. Now I will counter this to acknowledge there is a need for a publicly elected body to be concerned with the manner in which the country is policed but the manner and the method through which this government has gone about it has been woeful, and this pay issue has just been the final straw.

Time to Listen

2007-12-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Right.

This pay decrease we're getting. The fed are writing "angry and frustrated" letters and suggest you do the same. They are apparently holding a meeting to discuss it. ACPO meanwhile are officially disappointed.

Is it just me, or is this mostly a lot of hot air and vigorous arm waving and jumping up and down? I'd like to be proved wrong, but I'm not confident.

I don't think the government really give two hoots about letters from the federation or the opinion of ACPO.

Parliament go onto their 3 week christmas break on the 18th December. (3 week break!) They come back on the 7th January according to here.

I'd like to stand outside at Parliament Square and meet them as they go home to whichever one of their homes they're off to. I think that if enough of us are there giving them abuse as they go off to ponder which christmas tipple to have they might just start to listen. Let them leave their decadent halls with the sounds of hundreds of angry police officers ringing in their ears.

I say hundreds. Here's something to test the "power" of the internet. Is this a good idea? How about we start something from the ground up? Lets be honest, this won't affect ACPO. Can you see them recommending any kind of protest?

So how about it? Parliament Square, 2pm, 18th December? I'm not advocating anything other than a show of numbers and perhaps some light-hearted banter with an MP. If too short notice, how about we meet them coming back on the 7th Jan?

Email me, leave a comment, tell your friends, suggest it to a fed rep! - lets see if there's anything in this. I somehow feel I don't want to trust this issue completely to those who represent us- no disrespect to the fed, they just haven't got the clout, and ACPO wouldn't dare risk their rank (come on and prove me wrong!)- I feel I need to do something myself. And this is what I came up with.

I am interested to see if this post will go with a whimper or a bang.

Two pennies

2007-12-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

Every blog has been ranting about our pay award. 1.9%.

Now I don't think we as a rule a particularly badly paid especially when compared to some other emergency services. Can't say I particularly like a pay increase below inflation though, that's really a tad off.

I don't know the ins and outs of the whole history of police pay but as far as I can tell some time ago an agreement was reached with the incumbent government that in return for the right to strike we would be guaranteed a certain pay increase each year. Quite what the mechanisms were regarding that I have no idea but the point is this government has reneged on that agreement.

MPs have such a cushy life which is what really makes this sting. Take a look at Coppers Blog for the best comparison of MPs claiming expenses for everything left right and centre. I have to buy my own torches, batteries and belt kit as the job issue ones are invariably poor quality. MPs can even claim a cycling to work allowance! At their rate, I'll have a pound a day thank you very much. Not much, but it'll buy me and the wife a takeaway at the end of each month. Oh except we don't have a cycling allowance.

I would've accepted 2.5%. What has really wound me up is the way the Jacqui "I live in an awfully nice area" Smith has said she accepts the 2.5% recommendation but won't backdate it to when it should have been implemented, making it a reality of 1.9%. Its underhand, sneaky and frankly I'd like to..... (I've been pondering what to say, and I still can't think of anything postable)

Here's the reality for me. I parade 6 officers to cover an urban / suburban population of approx 70,000. I spent 9 hours of my last shift writing a report regarding one individual person. On night shift there are dozens of spare car park spaces but come the morning every one is filled by someone, but who I never know as they're never with me on response work. Safer Neighbourhood teams have been set up with people taken from response teams to do the work response teams don't have enough time and resources to look at. The ethos of management revolves solely around perfomance indicators (and inextricably linked- whether the Superintendents get their bonus). "Support" Squads are set up with fat overtime budgets to target specific crimes (which are always but ALWAYS linked to performance indicators and bonuses) whilst team inspectors can only authorise overtime when it is completely unavoidable (i.e. arrest). They face discipline if it is overbudget and yet if there is an underspend the money is taken away from them to feed another support squad.

I knew there was a reason I didn't initially want to post about this. It winds me up just how messed up this system is. And the blame completely lies with the Labour Government as far as I'm concerned. I've not been in quite long enough to have worked under the Tories but this lot are obsessed with target culture and imposing a financial reward and sanction scheme on a job that essentially cannot be measured effectively with any statistical means. And those aspects which can be measured cannot give an accurate reflection of what they are meant to. 4 out of 5 crimes aren't investigated? So we are expected to put out witness appeals for every car window smashed as John Random forgot to put his TomTom away? There is often a reason why crimes are not investigated beyond their initial investigation. We don't have the resources to stand there at the following day asking people if they were present yesterday, to pore over hours of CCTV on the offchance a suspect may have been captured. I've known people get furiously angry for us not checking 8 hours of CCTV when they found their car window had been smashed in a car park. No suspect description, not known if he was a he or a she or in a car of their own, utterly unrealistic proposition. But my goodness she went mad at me for not doing it.

This post has gone on long enough, apologies.

PCSO uniform revisited.

2007-12-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

This Guardian comment is free PCSO Steve business has jolted my creaky memory.

A while ago I posted a poll about whether PCSO's uniform should be more distinct from police officers. I never got round to talking about it.

The poll result is now parked right down the bottom of the page, underneath the youtube videos. The results are clear in what I freely admit is completely unscientific research (not that that would stop any media outlet presenting it as fact)- the overwhelming majority - 75%- say that a PCSO's uniform should be changed so it is less like a police officers. 67% say it should be completely different.

It would seem most people aren't fooled by the illusion the government wanted to create. If they see a uniform walking past, they want to know it is a police officer. Not someone whose training stipulates to simply stand by and observe someone getting a hiding or drowning, as their instruction is to call a police officer down to deal with it.

I think people would rather see the police officer in the first place. I know I would.

However, I am most curious to see that the remaining 25% would like to see the line blurred further between PCSO and PC- to make it so you only know the difference when you're standing next to them asking them about it.

I am interested to hear why.

Note (4th Dec)- in an unusual turn around of the usual order of things, the only PCSO blogger I know of has been resurrected! Link removed from graveyard accordingly. Check out the view from that side of the fence here. Good to see him back

Memories revisited

2007-12-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

Went past that accident yesterday. The furrow marks on the grass are filling in, and the grass is already making a comeback. The trunk is still a scorched black with scars cutting deep into the wood near the base. Some sad flowers hang limply where they've been tied to the tree.

It's quite a different scene in daylight. The skidmarks have been worn away now by the traffic and rain.

I never mentioned that on the night in question the governor asked me to take a car away from response work - i.e. don't take calls- to specifically target the Dream Factories latest performance indicator.

We were "underperforming" because a while ago someone invented a new code to go on certain paperwork returns, and then made our returns on this new code a performance indicator. Because we weren't told about said new code, (well, it might have been published on the intranet site or even a forcewide email, but I don't count either of those as real communication) our return was zero. Oh dear. Someone didn't like that (probably the person who thought of the new code), sent word to Ivory Towers and so the governor got a rocket.

I did ponder the governor's request on the way to the accident, travelling in a blue light convoy behind the car who was supposed to be doing it.

Did we meet any performance indicators dealing with a fatal road accident? Nope. A bad day at the office for the governor.