Knife Crime

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/ )

Memories revisited

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.

Speedy excuses

wwwSo West Midlands Police only paid 14 out of 2600 tickets eh? Naughty.

Hang on. So thats 7 per day, roughly speaking.

More than 7 emergency calls across the West Midlands every day? I'd have thought so. Its actually nearer 2000 per day, according to their website. So a rate of one camera is set off roughly for one call in every 285. You'd have thought that might've warranted a mention..... but no. Much easier to sneer and criticise.

(Note- edited Friday 26th to the correct figures after someone pointed I completely messed up my sums. It is roughly 50 tickets per week, not per day as I originally said. Look, I posted after a long day! But it makes my point even more so, that it is only one call in every 285 that a camera is set off. Why is that not mentioned??)

An aside. We don't want to set them off though, trust me. The paperwork side is a royal pain in the butt.

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....

Daily Wail (again)

Well, I'm glad to see the Daily Mail still gets completely hysterical about anything police related.

Example one: unfortunate tale of a man down south.

Example two: That PCSO headline.

Lets start with number one. Lad goes down to Portsmouth's 24hr european cafe culture one weekend night and encounters random hooligan and gets a pasting. Not taking anything away from the victim, my only surprise with this story is that anyone is surprised it took a response team officer that long to turn up. In all honesty I wouldn't have been surprised if it was nearer the four hour mark, let alone fifty minutes.

I can completely sympathise with the person at the 999 call centre. Its interesting how what would actually be a civilian operator suddenly become "the police" with its deliberate effort to tar everyone with the same brush. That as an aside, I would anticipate that operator had had dozens of calls from people on that late saturday night. Some of them (well, I read some of our official propoganda in a moment of boredom and found 70% of 999 calls are actually not emergencies) and this poor sod at the end of the 999 line, obliged to make a record of every call recieved was probably more than a touch frustrated at the sheer volume of idiots calling with nonsensical claptrap that would still under this that and the other charter require a police officer to go and speak to them in person. So when he or she gets a genuine call through, like the one in the article, lo and behold noone is available. Or of course there have been sufficient serious calls to mean all available response officers are already dealing, as what is reported here. The 999 operator would've been more of aware of that, too.

I must admit I've used that line before- when I've been haring round from call to call and someone says "what took you so long?" I tell them there's only 6 of us on tonight covering so many thousands of population, and if he doesn't think that sufficient to write and complain to his MP. And you know what, I wish they would.

I don't know quite know why this particular tale warrants a trumpeting around the Wail. There would have been hundreds of people calling 999 across the country at the weekend and found that the police response takes more time than they would expect, or demand.

I have sympathy with the Mr Bayliss senior too. Not his sense of moral outrage at being told to phone his MP, how could some possibly be so rude, but for the circumstances of it. Most decent people can remember how many 999 calls they've ever made and it is quite a significant event, amplified a hundredfold when its your own son.

But Mr Bayliss junior, now that things are over, you had opportunity to make a difference to other people, to try and stop such things happening again by joining up. I'm sorry but withdrawing your application isn't going to help anyone.

At the end of the day, the 999 operator is right. I would bet Hampshire's finest would have loved to have come and locked up a drunken violent hooligan. At least, I would hope so. But they were unable to simply because there weren't enough of them. And the blame for that lies with the MPs.

Which would lead me on nicely to the second article. This is where all the money for PC's has gone. Most forces are recruiting more PCSO's than PCs.

But I'll continue with this another time. This is enough for now.

National Crime Reporting Standards (ish)

Morning all

A shocker for you all today. Police don't always exactly comply with the ethos of the National Crime Reporting Standards, aka NCRS!!!

NCRS state "All reports of incidents, whether from victims, witnesses or third parties, and whether crime related or not, will result in the registration of an incident report / log by the police".

Then.... "Following initial registration, an incident will be recorded as a crime (notifiable offence) if on the balance of probability
a) The circumstances indicate a crime defined by law and requires recording in accordance with Home Office Counting Rules
b) There is no credible evidence to the contrary

Once recorded, a crime will remain unless evidence becomes available to disprove it has occurred" (click here for original source)

The first part is generally not a problem. Any time you call 999 a computer generated log is started. Its how the 999 call gets routed out to the officers on the street.

Its the second bit where corners are cut.

An example. Its a Friday night in urbantown. Someone calls in a fight on the high street. We despatch someone. However, these fights are normally over within 30 seconds, or the sight and sound of approaching blue lights dissuades the combatants to continue. One of two things frequently happens.

1) We never find any of the combatants.
2) We find them, and both parties swear nothing happened or refuse to tell us anything.

When this happens, (note- not including times when someone is actually injured and/or talks to us), particularly in the first case, then nothing more happens. No crime report is generated, even though we have a witness (and more often than not, cctv) of affray at the very least. Technically, that means we should generate a crime number. However, we tend not to, as it is "unnecessary" work. We cannot find a victim, and therefore no crime, right?

Well, not according to NCRS. We have a witness to a crime and on the balance of probabilities it has occurred. Therefore, we should generate a crime report until we can prove it didn't occur.

However, we don't. The balance of probabilities is magically weighted somehow to that it did not occur and so no crime report goes on. Everyone knows we are short enough on a weekend night and invariably have enough work to do with the more substantial fights and where people are injured and booze fuelled domestics to worry about the times when it was handbags.

Chiefs are happy to let this deviation from NCRS go, as it means there is less violent crime shown on the figures and less unsolved crime.

Myself and some of the other relief skippers were discussing this over the weekend. Normally we're happy for these things to go as too right we'd rather have people available for the genuine calls. But we're starting to come to the conclusion that perhaps we can be our own worst enemy. We always complain that we're too stretched, especially at the weekend. Minimum strengths are calculated by some formula I'm not told about but the volume of crime must be a factor in this calculation, especially violent crime.

So we're thinking (we haven't yet decided to properly go with it) maybe its time we really stuck to the rules regarding NCRS. Every time CCTV pick up a scrap, or someone on a passing bus says they've seen a scrap, then recorded as affray it shall be. It won't be investigated as we still don't have a victim, but on the books as violent crime it shall go.

The PC's aren't going to be too happy in the short term as yes, sorry, extra typing on the computers for reports that are going nowhere. But this could cause a stir and you never know, higher echelons of management might get a bit of pressure on, and we might even get some people out of their offices and doing some bleeding work when we're most stretched.

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.

Mentally unstable

For those with the time, read through the Observer's recent report on mental health. Summary: in-patient care - i.e. for those most vulnerable and dangerous- has been completely ignored by the government, who have channelled all the money into community based schemes instead. Any police officer anywhere will read that report with a sense of impending doom. I for one have lost count of how many people I've sectioned. At one stage, when I was a PC, it was literally one a month.

The short sightedness and short-termism of this government is frankly embarrassing. The whole debacle about PCSO's sums it up. Central london response teams have more PCSOs then PCs according to one commenter on TUPC. Someone please, please prove me wrong but as far as I can tell the only policies and initiatives this government can come up with are short term, poorly thought through, and are designed with the principle intention of making the government look and sound good to uneducated or unaware voters, and bollocks to what difference it really makes to the people who have to implement them.

Check this out. The government has allocated £315 MILLION pounds to recruit more and more PCSO's. 16,000 of them. The government is desperately trying to con people that Safer Neighbourhoods are "extra frontline resources" (they're not), equal "Public Reassuarance" (except if you dial 999, they won't be the ones turning up). And hows this for a quote, from the above link:

".... in some areas community support officers and employees of local authorities such as wardens will be best placed to deal with local problems.
But in other places - perhaps with more acute crime problems - police officers will be doing most of the work"

So where's theres crime.... oh, it'll still be the police officers dealing with it! Why oh why can we not have some investment in PC's? In response team officers? We shall forever be the poor men (and women) of policing. The first to be blamed when it goes wrong, but the first to be relied on when it goes belly up. The government will spend a third of a billion pounds on their latest greatest policing initiative but demand police and response team budgets are slimmed.

I can't stand politicians. I really can't.

Deep breaths

This is a job from last year.

The first part of the call started off routine enough.... "Can I have unit for a personal injury accident, outside the Central Railway Station...."

There was a bit of a pause. I start making my way, I have a couple of my probationers with me, they are keen to get to grips with the reporting mechanisms of road accidents (trust me, they're not simple.)

"Er we're getting quite a few calls now.... they're all saying its fatal"

Uh oh.

The first unit gets there. Their first request is for a traffic unit. Traffic only turn up to serious accidents.

Control room: "Yeah we've got your car on cctv.... standby.... oh."

The operator makes a nervous laugh and mumbles something about traffic. She's probably wishing she could take her eyes off the screen but they are still drawn to this image that she'll probably not forget in a while.

We get there. We'd run from the opposite end of the ground and the governor and another skipper are already there. Cordons aren't yet up, but traffic is stopped. Its quite an early hour so there's not too many people about yet.

I stop the car and look over to the road where there's a crumpled heap on the floor. I pause, then take a second glance. The brain figures there's something not right in the dull orange streetlight glow.

The body is missing its head.

I'm out of the car now, deploying my crew to cordon points on the pavement. A couple of late revellers are walking along the road. The girls start with the usual drunk flirting that every cop in a yellow jacket gets. "Ello ello whats going on here then?"

I can't be bothered replying. I just point to the heap on the road. Even in the poor light you can see the mess. Imagine driving over a large melon, and you'll have an idea of what it looked like. The girl stumbles. She turns white, and mouths a few nothings as her brain tries to comprehend what its looking at. She clings on to her bloke and drags him off as fast as her precarious shoes let her.

The other skipper comes up to me looking serious and angry. "Its a fail to stop". The driver responsible has left the scene. Do we know what direction. Not yet.

By now, the emotions have disappeared. This is a job to investigate thoroughly and promptly for the sake of the poor sod left on the road. Plenty of units are here now, and the scene is secured. I go and fetch a hand held searchlight and start looking closely at the road surface around the body. I'm looking for any hint of tyre tread imprint, out of I'm sure what you can all guess. Thankfully the road is dry. I think I see something and get an ambulance to move out the way. They've got nothing they can do anyway. Sure enough, there's an imprint, left on the road markings. It is replicated a couple more times up the road before fading out. It looks like a big wheel, maybe a truck or a coach. I make sure they're preserved. The collision investigators will be able to figure out a wealth of information from this- type of tyre, circumfrence etc.

Traffic are controlling the scene now. There's not a lot left for me to do. I speak to the skipper, make sure he's aware of the tread marks and they go in the log. Other people are tasked to trawl back through the CCTV camera tapes.

I move off in the direction that it looks like the driver was going. I have a fruitless search of the side streets in the hope the driver has panicked and abandoned the car nearby. I give up after an hour. I go back to the scene. The body is covered with a forensic tent now, as I hear that a crowd was gathering on the central island gawping. I would love to get a water cannon on them one day. Yes, its pretty damn awful, and I can't begrudge someone stopping to see whats going on. But once you've realised what it is, move the hell on would you.

I check on my crew, who have realised they're pretty much stuck there on the cordon for the time being.

I have to return my car for the day shift, and trundle off. Another job to reflect on the mortality of us all.

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.

Cowboys

Have to put something on here just to let off a bit of steam. So far most of my unit have been fine.

One of my other constables, however, who is supposed to act as a tutor, I am less than happy with. He drives like a boy racer, and assumes as he has police down the side of his car he has the right to drive like one. I picked up one of the reports his newbie put on yesterday and it's a shocker. So I'll be having a go at them both.

He's supposed to be setting a good example.

I'm just hoping I can catch him driving like a twat, as that's what'll really hit home, losing his driving ticket, as oh he loves himself driving round.

In the meantime..... anyone share a bit of concern over the lib dem's proposals? Some of it I agree with, but not the junking of DNA if you are not charged. As far as I am concerned, DNA evidence is almost exclusively used to link you to an existing crime. It's not used for monitoring, surveillance or anything. Why bin it?

Where have all the coppers gone

A post to highlight how long it can take to process a prisoner.

An incident which happened a while ago, prior to promotion. It was one of those days when luck was with us. We were on way to a call that was a complete waste of time (it was that rubbish, I can't remember what it was). Myself and my colleague were moaning about how rubbish this call was when we turned into a quiet, narrow residential street on way to see the informant.

I need to skim over some of the detail here just in case a colleague recognises the story (yes, I am that paranoid) but one short vehicle chase later a burglar driving a car stolen by means of burglary tries to run away but soon realises I am not the donut eating stomach massaging type of cop. He gives up.

I ought to add that the only thing harmed in the making of this vehicle chase was the stolen car, an unfortunate lamp post and the scumbag's ego.

Anyway, excitement over. Start the clock.

I wait with stolen car to await recovery. 1 1/2 hours
(Another unit tied up reporting the accident because it was a police chase- time taken, 1 hr
Return to custody. Colleague has just finished basic booking in procedure with prisoner.
Fingerprint, photograph and take DNA sample from prisoner. 1/2hr.
Seize all his clothing which has to be forensically bagged and exhibited: 45mins
Seize and forensically bag items from burglary that were still in car: 45mins
Research, risk assess and carry out search of home address of prisoner: 1 1/2 hr
Write notes describing circumstances and justification of arrest: 1 1/2hr
Crime report relating to aggravated vehicle-taking: 45 mins
Intelligence reports: 15mins

Approximate time: 7 1/2 hours. For the CID officers taking the prisoner on, there are now hours of paperwork preparing a case file. Which includes a typed statement of exactly what was said in interview; a list detailing every single exhibit and piece of correspondence connected with the investigation, its location and relevance to the case; and a summary of the overall case.

CPS prosecutors at court often only get the files relating to the case the morning of the court hearing. These files can be inches thick. Often, the only thing they read regarding the entire case prior to going into court, is the case summary.

But thats a different story. My point: next time you're pulled over for a bust brake light or something and you accuse the officer of not catching burglars, be grateful. If they had caught one, they wouldn't be out on patrol at all.