Daily Wail continued.

As I was saying the other day. Daily Mail reader is shocked and appalled to wait 50 minutes for a real police officer to turn up to a fairly nasty assault on his son.

I say real police officer. I have got to admit that I am beginning to get a little irate when I see reports which refer to a PCSO as a community police officer. You might say that it is just a minor play on words but there is a significant difference. A PCSO is not supposed to be a police officer, and to refer to them as such is inaccurate.

I've debated PCSO's and their distinction (or not) from police officers before on this blog (with particular regard to uniform and appearance), and its a post which consistently gets referrals from search engines, and I don't propose to debate that again. My view remains the same, namely that there should be more of a visible distinction between regular officers and PCSO's. I was at a motorway services the other week and a PCSO was there handing out leaflets. Now don't get me wrong, she was doing an important job of making people aware that service stations are a criminals dream with all those unattended cars with sat nave, ipods and even caravans available for the taking. But I could only tell she was a PCSO when I got close enough to read her epaulettes. Her hat even had a chequered black and white band round it, black stab vest, black trousers. To a ordinary member of the public, they would've thought she was a police officer. But she was not. A criminal intent on doing no good may decide to have a go yet she has no protective equipment beyond the stab vest and no training for dealing with it.

But anyway. Back to the Mail.

First of all, here's my perspective. I am unashamedly a uniform response officer. For me, it is what the majority of policing is about. With the exception of some ultra-specialist departments like surveillance and counter-terrorism nearly everything else the police deal with, a response team officer (I include specialist response teams like firearms and traffic here) will be the first to encounter it and make the initial moves. You'd think that therefore most other departments should therefore act to help and back up the front line. Unfortunately it is usually percieved the opposite way round, namely uniform response should do more to help the other departments.

In my division, the regular response teams are quite distinct from the neighbourhood teams. PCSO's only work on neighbourhood teams. Therefore I cannot comment on exactly what they do.

What I can comment on is the impact they have had on myself as a response team supervisor. And the answer is minimal. I appreciate this may be unpopular with some readers who are PCSO's (I know there's one or two out there) but here is why. I have only heard one usable relevant piece of intelligence sourced from a PCSO, which was when he recognised a wanted character. I cannot deploy them to any kind of call. I can only use them on a counter-terrorism cordon, and even then it has to be one where I cannot give them a scene log as they've never seen one before. It feels like we have just as much youth disorder as we've ever had. So I take exception to the Home Office stating they are there to support police officers. I have never seen this support.

Now if I was a neighbourhood police team sergeant, I would anticipate I would have a different story to tell, of how his or her PCSOs have got the time to engage with vulnerable community sections (e.g. the elderly) and how their job is not about crime and detections (true enough) but about building bridges. My argument remains the same though. For the 14000 PCSO's you could have 8-9000 PCs who would be able to do exactly the same job- and a whole lot more. My understanding of the the way this was budgeted, certainly to start with, is that the PCSO budget was extra funding made available by central government. Therefore the PCSOs have not taken over a PCs role, i.e. every PCSO has replaced a PC: the PCSO is in addition to the PC. I say 8-9000 extra PCs would make more of a difference, even in the ringfenced safer neighbourhood role.

I note the home offices definintion of a PCSO's purpose is completely unquantifiable, in complete contrast to their attitude towards police officers, which is measure everything, set a target relating to everything and then cut budgets if these targets are not reached, which of course really helps.

So we have: Reassure people (has anyone seen a survey to find out if this is the case? Perhaps I ought to do one of those poll things); build confidence in communities (ditto! In my area, I have never seen a PCSO round where I live, and I live in a fairly large town. According the board up next to the local Co-Op, there's two dedicated to my ward. Where are they?); and support police (er... maybe).

Do tell me if I ever sound like a scratched record going on about this, won't you....

We would like you to focus on......

Was round visiting the folks in Countytown the other day.


Countytown is a fairly decent respectable sort of place. My parents live in a decent area, happily living a much quieter existence since their offspring cleared off and got places of their own. (An aside- I am immensely grateful I was able to buy my place when I could a few years back. I couldn't afford my own place now. How anyone is supposed to buy their own place these days without fabulously wealthy parents or a lottery win is beyond me)


Their particular corner of Countytown has its own residents association. I was leafing through their newsletter when I was over. In amongst the expected articles of middle class indignation "We really don't feel it necessary for people to park with wheels on the pavement" and preparation pleas for "Countytown in bloom" an article caught my eye.


They were appealing- again- for people to attend a local community meeting to meet their new neighbourhood community officer (PCSO) and tell him (or her of course, can't remember) of their concerns.


I say again, as for the last two meetings nobody had bothered to turn up.



This gave me a rueful smile. This part of Countytown is a reasonable place where people by and large work for a living, pay their taxes and probably vote in local elections. But their response to the governments grand hugely expensive scheme of neighbourhood police and "ownership" of local neighbourhood teams has fallen somewhat flat on its face in precisely the kind of area the government would want it to work (i.e. with people who vote and pay tax).


I must admit where I live there is a local residents association too. I'm not too fussed about joining it. To me it has imagines of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet, darling) types filled with self importance and their own little empires. I of course may be quite wrong, but haven't really felt any great desire to prove myself wrong.


My views of my local police are fairly simple (I don't live and work in the same part of the force area, by the way). If I need police, then I call 999 and have a reasonable right to expect a reasonably quick response. When I don't need them, I'd trust the local lot to know for themselves what the real problems would be.


I say real problems. Back in Suburbiaville, I know of one the local SNT/NPT outfits in a nice part of town. Their "neighbourhood policing priority panel" or whatever the hell its called have set their Neighbourhood Team the priority of issuing parking tickets on the school run. When it was pointed out that actually the crime patterns indicated this that and the other, it was ignored in favour of the 15 minutes each day where the school run brigade dare to partially block Mrs Jones's driverway.


Most of the crime that happened was school kid robberies, and theft from builders vans. But because the members of the Neighbourhood Policing Panel (Hyacinth Bucket types and wannabe local politicians) weren't affected by these things which happened to other people, they didn't care. They wanted to be able to get out of their driveway unimpeded.


To me, its another example of how the practical application of a good theoretical idea (Neighbourhood Policing) simply does not work in reality.

Emotion of the day: Frustration

A number of reasons why.

Frustation at the lack of frontline resources. The last few days have been particularly busy and we have completely lacked the manpower to adequately answer calls. Took over an hour and a half to respond to one priority call, you know, the kind where we should be there within 12 minutes? I only know of that one because I booked in the resulting prisoner (and yes, it was a domestic)- there would have been plenty more calls where it took just as long to turn up, if at all. By the time someone becomes available and the control room ring the informant back the suspect is long gone (if there is one), its gone cold and there's nothing left but reports for assault or criminal damage or theft or whatever. And we're forced to put off sending a unit again because by now another urgent call has come out that takes priority, so the bewildered and shocked victim won't get to see a police officer until the following morning. Call that a good service?

I met some people in a local takeaway (No police canteen? Don't be silly. Its the weekend). Really nice folks, we were chatting away while Mrs Leng and her family beavered away in the kitchen getting our tea. They were a touch surprised when I told them just how few police cars covered their neighbourhood (and the surrounding ones). By that time, half the cars had prisoners in and we had the grand sum of 2 police vehicles covering a big area. No neighbourhood police teams on at this time of night I'm afraid. Just us, the slightly mad officers staffing the response teams at all hours (i.e. not just monday to friday) because for some strange reason they're committed to trying to make a difference for when someone has to call 999.

Frustration at humanity. In Urbanville centre, there is a well organised group of persons (having to hold my tongue here) who come to town to prey on the people out getting drunk and careless with their belongings. I lost count of the sheer volume of calls from people saying either they've seen someone pickpocketed or have lost something of their own.
Frustration at the justice system. It is nigh impossible to convict these pickpocket gangs. The person who takes your phone out of your pocket doesn't keep it. Within seconds it has changed hands 5 times. The victims are drunk. The witnesses are invariably drunk. I know it would be a completely futile exercise going to court. The person seen to have taken the item hardly ever (ever!) has the item on them. Poor witnesses, no evidence of item on suspect. CPS won't take long to decide there isn't enough evidence. I've come to the custody desk in the morning before and seen there are seven or eight (thirteen once!) people arrested for the original offence. But by the end of the day, all are out, NFA. Maybe once or twice one will be charged.
The only way to catch these guys is dedicated surveillance and dozens of police officers in plain clothes. But that costs money, needs an awesome amount of paperwork to justify the surveillance, and the crimes are low value, low impact. Got a better chance of voting in my own pay rise.
So week after week its the same story. Who said crime doesn't pay.

Frustration at the courts. A prolific scumbag (harsh words I know, but this one is an exception. I don't know his history, of how he's ended up the way he is. I just deal with the end result- i.e. a victim- again and again. And this bloke deserves the title Scumbag.) was sent to court a couple of months back with a raft of offences. But this bloke is clever, not a brain-addled drug addict. He turns up to court very remorseful, shaved and in smart clothes, calls the magistrate Sir, spins a yarn about his attempts to reform and always makes sure he has a few offences taken into consideration to demonstrate this. He got off with a 2 year suspended sentence last time for a raft of offences that should've got him 5 years.

So he's back out. Our burglary rate has gone in one direction. He likes nice cars this chap, and is breathtakingly arrogant in his driving after he's broken into your house and taken the keys. He knows our rules of pursuit and deliberately makes it as dangerous as he can so we have to call it off. He is good enough to rarely leave any forensic evidence at the scene but we all know its him. Driving around in one stolen motor to turn over someone else: person, house or business. The anger of my team is palpable. We're all hoping its us on for when the dice falls in our favour. Every so often, it does, and we'll have everyone available, and an insomniac who spots him at work screwing somewhere, and we'll have him. But in the meantime, we're as frustrated as hell.

I'm off down the gym.

Policy Review? Hurrah!

Reading through Constabulary Magazine the other day, one of the eponymous job publications that somehow turn up every so often in the nick.
Their headline news is the upcoming new strategy and review for the police announced by the government.
The federation are bit annoyed about not being told about this. Enter Jan Berry, chair of the Police Federation:

"If the aim of this review is to work with the Police Service to develop a shared vision, it doesn’t bode well that as the organisation representing 140,000 police officers throughout England and Wales that we heard about it through the media this morning.
We have been calling for an independent review of policing for the last seven years and noone has been listening. We’ve had five years of piecemeal reform of different parts of policing – none of which have brought any clarity. To announce yet another review will just add to the confusion that already exists"

I liked this bit, still Jan Berry.

"Broken promises to reduce bureaucracy, indecent focus on the quantity of detections rather than the quality of service, poor IT structures and the loss of officers’ discretion to act independently, have fundamentally damaged the trust between the public and the police and the police and the Government."

Compare this with the optimistic title of the governmnents review: "Building on Progress: Security, Crime and Justice"........

As I read on, I find myself reading Ken Jones, who for those who might like to know is President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (banner headline on website: THE VOICE OF THE SERVICE). You'd have thought that he might've taken a similar line to the Police Federation: who do after all represent most of us old bill in the country. But what's this?

"We welcome this policing review to which we have submitted ideas and highlighted challenges. Whilst we wait to see the detail, we are determined to continue to do all we can to reduce bureaucracy, build on neighbourhood policing and make the best use of our resources"

There's a bit of buttering up of the government now, in almost laughable senior police management-pep-speech:

"Neighbourhood policing has made massive progress inembedding local teams in communities. We have seen public confidence levels in policing rise, and we want to improve our partnership working to ensure that we have the support and commitment of all agencies"

Ah here's why the big fat compliment to the Government Neighbourhood Policing initiative! There's a tiny tiny hint of dissent against the goverment, but only a smidgen:

"We can do even more if there was less bureaucracy and fewer targets. If the review is able to ease these pressures ‘space’ will be made for us to customise what we deliver according to what people need in their neighbourhoods"

But to round off, a couple of sentences again in suitably appropriate upper-management police speak:

"We police with the consent of the people. We are always looking for ways to be more accessible and accountable but we need to make sure that the chain of accountability from street-level policing through to police chiefs, and authorities, is not broken"

Flippin eck.

Police federation (and most police bloggers say):- Government: You're crap, and have made our life more difficult, and we feel the public are more frustrated and less trusting of us than ever before. The 95% of us not on The Latest Greatest Thing (i.e. PCSOs or safer neighbourhoods) and have to deal with the dross, dirt and despair that goes on outside the community panel meetings and reassuarance patrols- like kids in police protection, domestics, mental health problems in the community, suicides, sudden deaths, missing persons, people hit by trains (check this link- how terrible is her story??? Come on, humanity!), boozed fuelled violence, rape, messy RTA's (shall I go on?)-are fed up, under resourced and demoralised.

ACPO President says: Neighbourhood policing is great, well done Government, brilliant idea. Review? Brilliant. You can tell us again that Neighbourhood policing is great. (Tiny voice:) a little less obsession with target culture for the 95% of officers not on neighbourhood teams would be nice too. PS did I say Neighbourhood policing was brilliant?

Read Ken Jones's response in full, you decide if I've quoted him fairly or not.
Read the "Building on Progress" review, if you can be bothered with its 104 pages. I read the first paragraph by some politician called Tony which said "We have been tough on crime and the causes of crime", at which point I gave it up as a useless exercise remembering this article by a certain Inspector.

I don't know why, but I'm looking forward to the comments on this one.

The First Whinge

Led to this link by Bloggs and SouthWest, and probably some others too, but once I read it I had to say something about it.

Its some chap at "The First Post" saying how we, the police, are lazy, scared and no good at stopping crime and are a whiney, inefficient, self-important bunch of dysfunctionals. All words taken from his text, believe me.

Personally, I think it would be much more accurate if you replaced the word "police" with "journalists"..........

But I feel I ought to add something in reply to Mr Foreman, who has quite clearly never actually gone out with a response team, (or done any kind of research at all for his article, it would seem- he is quite clearly unaware of David Copperfields writing for the same site) and realised that the front line police, who are the visible presence 90% of people see and deal with 90% of the time, are under-resourced, over-stretched and deemed an embarrasment to their senior officers for doing their jobs.

Just a subtle change in the wording to his article and I would pretty much agree with it in its entirety. Change the word "police" for "Senior Officers at the whim of Interfering Government Ministers", and it would ring true.

But by his use of the word police, he implies that myself and my colleagues actually want this absurd situation where we are perpetually deskbound, or dealing with extended enquiries. For example. One of my probationers is dealing with a shoplifting to the value of approx £30. So far, he has been working at a reasonable pace. He has so far spent approximately 14hrs dedicated to this single incident: arrest (including waiting for several hours for his legal aid solicitor), statements, collection of cctv, transferring cctv onto VHS format, interview, re-interview (we didn't have the cctv first time round. Not strictly necessary to reinterview, but it is good practice), crime report, CPS consultation. Upon his return from bail, should he return, he will be charged, necessitating full case papers. Should he not plead, then we will have a day at court. Should he be found guilty, he will probably be fined £50. Which he will steal to pay for. And so, for probably 20hrs work, or at least time during which he can't do anything else, i.e. waiting at court or for solicitors, we will have no result whatsoever.

Replicate that for every incident of assault, criminal damage and everything else that blights society and is it any wonder why there are either no police available to deal with these things, or the ones that turn up can barely disguise their dread at having to take it on.

The government in its infinite wisdom realised there was something up with police spending so much time at their desks. So instead of adopting an American system (here, I agree most wholeheartedly with Foreman) where civilian investigators deal with all the investigative side of matters, leaving police's role to identify the offences and arrest, and then leave it all in the hands of the investigators, (NB see comments here!) and so the cop gets back out on the street where he belongs; the government instead employs several thousand people who are specificially designated not to investigate anything! And the response police officer is now in an even worse situation as several officers are abstracted from response team to supervise and populate the newly created Neighbourhood Policing Teams. You know, the ones who aren't supposed to do any investigating.

So Mr Foreman, don't imply that I'm lazy and inefficient. I'm hacked off and bogged down.

Go take one of few bits of decent advice the government does have, even if it does have a fairly toe curling tagline, "Respect": Stop moaning. Get involved. Become a special (except I think you'd be too scared and lazy...?) or get involved in your local action groups. Blaming everything on us and absolving all responsibility from yourself is guess what.....? Lazy and No Good.

Car vs Foot

This is probably one of the aspects of policing that everyone will have an opinion on, yet I am surprised to look around the blog list to the left (which is ever increasing!) to see no other posts on it.
It is the simple issue of whether it is better for police to be out on foot or in cars.

From a response point of view, having officers in cars is much more advantageous. There is the simple fact you can between two points a lot quicker. We are an emergency service, and if a 999 call goes out in a village 4 miles away from local urban centre, the pair on foot patrol in said urban centre are going to be completely useless. Often, (but not always, and thats a different story) there is a need for the blue lights and sirens. Was monitoring the radio last few days and heard one of the calls that always gets adrenaline through the roof- "Callers ex is outside the location making threats- caller states male attacking door, can police come quickly- caller states male is inside location- line has gone dead". For that reason, we always have to have cars to get places quickly. The issue of policing driving is quite different, something I feel quite strongly about, more on that another time.

But I am aware, as I am as guilty as anyone, that once inside your nice little metal box you are insulated from the rest of the world and you don't get out and talk to people, and people find it harder to approach you. An example from two of my folks who were out in a touristy part of town the other day- at one point, they actually had a queue of people who wanted to speak to them. Wouldn't get that in a car.

But to peruse the media, the clamour is for officers walking the beat. From my point of view as a response team supervisor (or at least, when I was), my priority will be to crew the cars first, as that is what provides a better emergency service. If I have sufficient officers, then I will post people walking. However, as we are so short of numbers, I can't actually recall a time when I had sufficient numbers to fill all the cars (and we only have 7 for our area, and at least one is invariably broken).

It is because of this that the government introduced firstly PCSO's and then neighbourhood policing teams. PCSO's are always out walking (unless the Health & Safety merchants get you) and are supposed to be out and about meeting people, building relationships etc. The principle behind this I am fully behind. However, it should be a police officers job. The government in its wisdom created a situation where response teams are thin on the ground and constantly dealing with things that take hours to deal with, so any time they are out and about they are going to jobs or enquiries relating to other jobs, and not "free" time to build relationships with the locals. Instead of tackling this situation, the government introduces PCSO's, who can't report or investigate crime. However, realising that the public aren't quite fooled by this the government introduces NPT's (aka SNT's, Safer Neighbourhood Teams) where police officers (taken from response team) are ordered that they too are now not to investigate or report crime so they can spend time out and about meeting people.

Meanwhile, response teams have had bugger all investment and a third of the team has been abstracted to populate NPT's.

It is my belief that the police are primarily an emergency service, but the government in its drive for vote winning initiatives have sacrificed this. If all the investment that has gone into PCSO's and NPT's went into response team, the vast increase in numbers and resources would mean 1) I'd have enough people to be able post walkers out and about and 2) the workload can be shared out meaning the officers have more "free" time to get out and meet people, to build back the relationships.

So the original question: car vs foot. The answer is both. I dream of a time when I have enough officers to post them in a car for a month, and then on foot for a month. The "emergency" side of policing should not be incompatible with the "community" side.

But at the moment, we have the situation where a division between the two is actively encouraged. And the blame for that lies squarely with the House of Commons.

What is a community

This is a bit of a philosophical post this, bear with me.

I get a bit frustrated every time I hear a politician or SMT blather on about "we will work in partnership/consultation/togetherness/ with local community groups". Its all the rage with Safer Neighbourhood Teams. To quote right from the Met's website: "Safer Neighbourhoods teams are dedicated to your community and are additional to other policing teams and units in London." Greater Manchester Police are at it too: "Neighbourhood policing pilot schemes in the Hall'i'th'Wood and Oldhams Estates have started to successfully engage these communities in the setting of local policing priorities and support in their fulfilment"

Well what the heck is a community?

Apparently, according to the Wiktionary (who makes these names up?)
1) a group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law
2) acommune or residential/religious collective
3) the condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common

Who decides what community are to be listened to. Shall we go to Bradford? Where locally elected councillors are members of the BNP? The local community there (or at least, the ones who voted) have displayed what they think. Should the local police therefore pander to the whims of the BNP?
Funnily enough, despite West Yorkshire police having "Community policing for the 21st century" there's no mention of the BNP that I can find on their web page!

So what the hell is my point in all this. Don't think for a minute I'm suggesting West Yorkshire should pander to the BNP.

I think its just that I'm fed up of being treated like an idiot by Senior Management who seem to think that they have to say "community partnership" in every press briefing, assuming that therefore everyone listening will have a percieved sense of ownership of "their" police. Where I live, in a different area from where I work, I'm a member of a community. I'm a member of several. My immediate geographical community, I'm a member of the car driving community, bike riding community, public transport using community, rugby club community. Just within my fairly staid home life, the different community groups I am in have differing and not necessarily compatible priorities. So when SMT talk about setting policing objectives in consultation with local communities, which ones do they mean. They can't mean all of them. The local right wing group aren't going to have much in common with the local Jewish residents.

I think they just mean politically acceptable communities. But who decides this? When I hear SMT say "we want to hear the local communities views" I want to say back "no you don't!" They only want to hear the ones that agree with their idea of who should be in their local community.

No real point to this post, I think. I guess I just object to being pigeonholed as a member of a community to which I don't feel I really am a member of. Where I live and work I hear SMT (and local politicians) talk about how they've consulted with local communities to come up with the latest plan. And I think (for where I live) "Well I haven't been consulted". No, they've consulted some association or other where I wouldn't go if you paid me, as everybody is twice my age and they talk mostly about allotments.

So, lets put this out to debate. Do you think "community" is an overused word that doesn't have any real meaning? Or does it work for you where you are. Tell me, I actually am interested in listening to the police blogging community!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.