Treading Water

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!"

My remit is everything

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.

Two pennies

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.

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.

Too much

I know I haven't posted much recently on "real" police jobs, i.e. stuff I've been going to.

A couple of reasons- a course, one which I feel Inspector Gadget would have particularly loved, a course which can be summed up that if someone is underperforming, its actually my fault. It took a week of seminars, role plays and discussions, to tell me that, and that's about all I can remember. Well, that and the fact I was now called a delegate, the trainers were now to be called facilitators, and we didn't have to wear ties.

That aside, I came to the conclusion last night I'm trying to do too much. I'm involved in projects with various senior management teams trying to improve practical stuff at my (i.e. response) level, I'm in consultation with a specialist branch developing a training package because I found out my troops are completely unsure about how to deal with these particular incidents and are running on a combination of rumour and common sense. Which most of the time is fine, but its when it goes wrong it will come back to bite them. If a standard operating procedure regarding a particular call is published deep in the job intranet files somewhere, it doesn't matter how little publicity it has or how hard it is to find, if its published it is assumed everyone knows of its existence and will be called to account for why it hasn't been followed.

But now I've found this out, the responsibility has shifted on to me to bring everyone up to speed. No pressure there then.

Combine this with a new PC needing a lot development (see above about it all being my fault) who is taking up completely disproportionate amounts of my time, plus the new governor being a big fan of figures, plus a load of other stuff which is too identifiable to blog about, but all requiring computer time. The other day I spent about 5 hours in the poxy windowless box with dodgy heating that serves as the sergeants office staring at a screen trying to make headway with all the above, in addition to the usual supervision stuff I have to do with regard to crime reports and everything else, before I said "Bollocks to this", threw on my civvy jacket and took a walk round the park round the back of the nick in what was a glorious autumn day (I didn't know, see bit about poxy windowless box), where I got hassled by an over friendly squirrel for one of my Revels.

I didn't give him one.

But even then I still took my radio with me, knowing I would feel the vibrate if someone pressed the panic button and having that bit of ear specially tuned to the high pitched beep which accompanies it, so I could sprint back to the nick and be in the car within two minutes.

So I've come to the conclusion I've got to scale back. Accept the fact that changing policies at high level is a process which happens at a pace akin to evolution, and just concentrate at the moment on the stuff that needs to be done here and now. Its frustrating because I know just a few changes, and someone taking responsibility for something rather than saying "thats not my problem" would make a world of difference. But at the moment I don't have the hours in the day to be the person to take that responsbility, which is I know what'll happen. Maybe in a few months when things have settled, just not now.

As for right now, the sun is out and this is enough time in front of a computer for today. Except for one last thing. In true gadget style, here's a song that came on whilst I was writing this which fitted my mood... one of those "sing as if nobody's listening" kind of moments for me.....

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.