One day

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

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

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....

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

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...

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

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!