Coming up for air

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.....

Motivation: 0

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.

Flippers

Morning. Or is is afternoon? I hate it when its one of those days when you have to look at your watch to remember a) what day it is and b) what time it is. Night shifts. Love 'em.

Apologies for not that many posts of substance. Seem to spend my life at work at the moment. I've taken my leave this year in two big chunks and it's something I've regretted. I won't have any proper time away from work until Christmas now. Excluding sleeping, I will see the wife for a total of approx 8 hours this whole coming week. Its the football season now so weekends off are something of a rarity. One good thing about television-isation of football is that matches are no longer always on Saturday, or not a kickoff in the middle of the afternoon, so at least I sometimes have a weekend or a bit of one every so often.

And the government still want to reduce our pay. Any pay rise we have is worked out in relation to the average across the private sector, i.e. what people in "normal" jobs get. Government want to bin that, so they can pay us less.

So yeah time I'm off I tend not to spend on here.

Do you know what I'm talking about when I mention that part in Hot Fuzz, where (important, must be said in a West Country Accent) Sergeant Angel has been told so many times that things are done in a certain way round here that he kind of glazes over and mulls along until he has that flash of inspiration?

Its kind of like that with me at the moment. It seems every suggestion I have made to try and improve things on my response team has come back with the reply "we don't do it like that here". When asked why I never seem to have a clear answer, maybe an occasional rumbling containing word snippets like "budget" or "its your officers fault it got like this, therefore its their problem". Thats when I get an answer. The desk drivers at the people responsible for pursuit policy won't even offer an acknowledgement of me trying to get hold of them, as though I am completely unimportant and inconsequential, despite the fact I implement their decisions on a near daily basis with inadequate equipment. I can't be bothered with the flog across the division to Ivory Tower at a time when they're actually in the office and I'm not dealing with a hundred other things. I'd only end up getting angry at them and saying something anyway.

Trying to effect change from the bottom up in the police is like trying to change the direction of an oil tanker from in the water with nowt but a pair of flippers.

Yellow Jackets Are the Solution

Been a mad day. Been flying around like a youth chasing the last hoodie on sale in the world. Frankly, I'm absolutely shattered and I am indeed asking myself the question just why am I on the internet when I should be in bed.
Job is bonkers all round. Our vehicle fleet is at a third strength at the moment, and we are begging other stations to lend us something to fill the gaps. Then I hear someone up in the ivory towers has noticed that crime goes up at weekends and has released a load of cash for officers to "volunteer" to do overtime patrols at the Urbantown booze hole drunken crime hotspots.

An utterly short-term solution. A substantial number of constables (and their grumbling- oh yes we're grumbling- sergeants) in yellow jackets wandering round in a bad mood will probably have an effect on the number of incidents, granted. The reported crime rate will fall and someone will have a big congratulatory slap on the back for coming to the shocking conclusion that more police officers on the streets mean less crime.

But why can't someone look beyond the immediate quick solution of yellow jackets and invest this money- which someone has found from somewhere- in the response teams, in their vehicle fleets and equipment, and even the CID and case handover teams, so they can do their jobs properly with a proper amount of officers with proper equipment. Give it time, and see if the crime will fall. I would argue that it would.

But all that will happen now is that when the crime rate has fallen and the chiefs and money gurus say well done and withdraw funding for the extra patrols, the muppets left to urbantown's drunken halfwits will be the response teams (probably when its our turn for weekend nights again). And so the crime rate will go up because we're understaffed with inadequate vehicles and have to spend most of our time dealing with our own enquiries as the handover teams are completely overwhelmed and can rarely take anything on.

And so the chiefs go back to the money gurus and plead for money to combat this "new" crime pattern blah blah etc etc and so ad infinitum.

I think I'm even too tired to be exasparated. I'm just like- whatEVER. I'm off to bed.

Full of the joys

Spent more time last evening with the other half than the total hours of the previous 6 days combined. Great company I'm sure I wasn't, unless you regard zombiefied stupor as a roaring time. Will update on here when I'm feeling vaguely human, and not in a persistent battle to stay awake............

bah humbug

Good one. I'm shattered.
You know those medieval torture methods where you had a horse attached to each limb who each try and pull you in different directions? Thats a bit how I feel at the moment. Inspectors from every which department (licencing, tasking, Intelligence, Motor Vehicle Crime, Robbery and the rest blah blah blah) all wanting my unit to help with their problems in the run up to christmas. Plus some problems with some of my Pc's in the unit, problems which have to be dealt with like now and not left till after christmas. Sooooooo I'm full of the joys at the moment!

There's something about this job which makes people think that a number of officers in yellow jackets will solve any problem you care to mention, whereas the only problem it really solves is that they can now finally tell senior management that some resources are being targeted to combat their particular problem.

When I finally get some days off (not for a while yet!) my phone will be turned off throughout christmas (the couple of days that I have for it, anyway.....)

Morale & Morality

As I said below, the last few shifts, things have been completely hectic. And I mean hectic. A few highlights of some of the things my lot have had to deal with:
- Burst water mains (like need to close a 3 lane trunk road burst water main)
- Child kidnap
- Sexual assault
- Missing children
- Deceased people
- GBH
- several ABH's
- several robberies and thefts
- drink drivers
- burglaries
- firearms incidents
- several domestics, some of which involving one or more of the above
About the only thing we haven't had is a serious RTA. It was particularly busy on night shift. Usually, calls start tailing off in the early hours, 3-4am or so. Not the last few shifts. Calls kept on coming right through till 6am.

Things are made worse because of the lack of numbers on response team. Across the whole division we had perhaps fifteen cars on. The problem is, as nearly every police blogger says, we can't just turn up at a call and deal with it in 15 minutes and move onto the next one. Oh no. If someone has been assaulted, then people need to be arrested, crime reports created, witness statements taken. As per posts below this takes hours, especially if someone has been arrested.

I can't really comment on why my team is persistently running at minimum strength. Here's the paradox. Neighbourhood Policing Teams have been introduced in my area. Now whilst they can focus on things that 999 teams usually don't, that is offset by the fact they are invariably staffed by officers abstracted from 999 teams- or officers who were supposed to go to 999 teams. Which means the 999 teams are left short. Has my service's ability to respond to 999 calls been diminished by safer neighbourhood teams?

One thing for certain is the boys and girls on my team at the end of these shifts, are shattered. This is where the concept of police morale comes in.

Police officers by and large want to do their job. Even when they're griefy and time consuming, as usually jobs like this don't come along too often, and most days you can finish on time or thereabouts. But recently this has become the exception, not the norm. Numbers are few enough so that most days its likely you'll be late off.

Now for the non-police readers you may say so what. But remember that we have families too, and we have lives outside this job that are invariably affected enough with the shift patterns we have.

The end result is these calls that come out towards the end of the shift- the ones which you know will take ages to sort out and are likely to result in arrest (you can always bank on a minimum of 4hrs work when someone is arrested) then you can see the faces fall. They don't want to go. This is a bad sign. That is what low police morale is.

So when morale goes, the officers morality tends to go too. What I mean by this is their sense of pride and wanting to do the job goes. They start not caring about what calls come in. On one of the last shifts, one of my lads came in to the nick with about an hour to go, dumped his bag and logbook to the floor and said in no uncertain terms whether he was going back out again. He still had a load of paperwork to do from the missing child (who had gone missing from a location way out of our sector, at the opposite end of the ground- but there was no one left down there) and had been late off twice in the last 4 days, with one of them being a really unpleasant sudden death.

Now if a call came out, I should tell him that he will be dealing with it. But would I? Not bleeding likely.