It's not a question that has the same significance, if you were to ask it of a librarian, an accountant, a secretary, or a salesperson. It's a question with special significance, with consequences outside of the normal realm of the workplace.
Was it to drive fast cars?
Fire a taser?
Ponce about in a uniform and feel self-important?
I've known officers who seemed to aim for each of those. But ask one in a recorded interview, and "helping people" will always crop up somewhere.
I'm not blowing my own trumpet here - I joined because it looked like an interesting job with better conditions on a higher salary than I had before.
And yet... that "helping people" part of the job description hastened my hand when filling in the application form. I still tell people that's a large part of the attraction of the job, and it is. I feel disappointed if I go home at the end of a shift and I don't have a feeling of having helped someone.
I rather feel that that feeling is the closest I ever come to the satisfaction of being a real copper.
And yet...
I put out the scared little old lady who's barricaded herself inside her house, and no-one offers up.
I put out the rogue trader who's promised to return to his victim at a certain time to collect the rest of his paycheque for doing the square root of fuck all and no-one offers up.
I put out the 12 year old boy, too scared to walk past the bigger boys to get home and hiding in the bushes in the park and no-one offers up.
I put out the stolen Mercedes SLK passing from a neighbouring force into our our area and you all drop your paperwork and leap into your poxy diesel Astras, hoping for an exciting pursuit.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
I hope to join, one day, and I will never ever forget this.
Tuesday 29 June 2010
Sunday 27 June 2010
Central Control Rooms don't work, apparently.
I'm a long-time reader of the Police Inspector's Blog and would normally highly recommend it.
I find myself heartily disagreeing with this post, however, written in response to this Daily Mail article about the failure of Cumbria Police to respond to a call from a young mother who had accidentally locked her baby in her car on a hot day.
The Police Inspector blames a lack of resources and the fact of Central Control Rooms.
Assuming the facts of the Daily Mail story are correct (and I admit that is a pretty big leap of faith) I tend towards the view that this was simply a good, old-fashioned cock-up, with no political point to be made out of it.
Yes, we need more Response police officers - but that point could be made by the many response targets that I miss every single day, it's just that most of them don't make it into the papers.
I have also seen situations where call-takers have blindly quoted the Pledge targets rather than the actual reality and said things like, "help is on its way" when in fact we're not likely to have anyone available for hours. So yes, that call-taker did something dumb. A more experienced (or less dumb) call-taker would have realised that there was a real urgency to this job, and phoned the Control Room to hurry things along, or graded it as a One - we don't ignore those. S/he might then have considered phoning the Fire Brigade or the AA, as Chief Inspector Rutherford suggests. I've expressed concern before about the level of training and experience in our Contact Centre, but I have no way to know if this is a national problem or just our force. I also don't know anything about how Cumbria's call-taking works.
Obviously a decision was made at some point that police wouldn't be attending, as Ms Woodburn was told on her second call. She should have been phoned at that point with an update, so another mistake was made there.
Blaming Central Control Rooms though? Sorry, Gadget, but that seems to have come out of nowhere. Maybe there's been a problem with the way it was implemented in your force, but in a small force like mine it works extremely well. Because we're geographically small, events often cross borders and we often share resources, so all I have to do is shout at the operator on the next desk, "Stolen car heading your way - details on Bravo Sierra Three One's job," "I've got no units left but I've got an assault right on our border - can you spare anyone?" It smooths the way no end, and because we as operators move around the desks there is no rivalry, as there might be if we were in different control rooms, so we just help each other out when necessary. This sharing of resources internally, too - we were very short staffed on our last run of nights, and someone went home sick leaving one desk with only one operator. Because we're all in the same room, I was able to move over onto that desk - it only left two operators per desk, but we can manage with that at 0400 when there's not much going on.
Finally, I can't see this happening in my force. I don't know if we're a particularly sentimental bunch, but any job where a child is in danger we tend to drop everything and run. We absolutely would have attended this.
The press like to give the police a kicking, and I suspect Cumbria is about to come in for more than its fair share, so I'm sorry to have added to it.
I find myself heartily disagreeing with this post, however, written in response to this Daily Mail article about the failure of Cumbria Police to respond to a call from a young mother who had accidentally locked her baby in her car on a hot day.
The Police Inspector blames a lack of resources and the fact of Central Control Rooms.
Assuming the facts of the Daily Mail story are correct (and I admit that is a pretty big leap of faith) I tend towards the view that this was simply a good, old-fashioned cock-up, with no political point to be made out of it.
Yes, we need more Response police officers - but that point could be made by the many response targets that I miss every single day, it's just that most of them don't make it into the papers.
I have also seen situations where call-takers have blindly quoted the Pledge targets rather than the actual reality and said things like, "help is on its way" when in fact we're not likely to have anyone available for hours. So yes, that call-taker did something dumb. A more experienced (or less dumb) call-taker would have realised that there was a real urgency to this job, and phoned the Control Room to hurry things along, or graded it as a One - we don't ignore those. S/he might then have considered phoning the Fire Brigade or the AA, as Chief Inspector Rutherford suggests. I've expressed concern before about the level of training and experience in our Contact Centre, but I have no way to know if this is a national problem or just our force. I also don't know anything about how Cumbria's call-taking works.
Obviously a decision was made at some point that police wouldn't be attending, as Ms Woodburn was told on her second call. She should have been phoned at that point with an update, so another mistake was made there.
Blaming Central Control Rooms though? Sorry, Gadget, but that seems to have come out of nowhere. Maybe there's been a problem with the way it was implemented in your force, but in a small force like mine it works extremely well. Because we're geographically small, events often cross borders and we often share resources, so all I have to do is shout at the operator on the next desk, "Stolen car heading your way - details on Bravo Sierra Three One's job," "I've got no units left but I've got an assault right on our border - can you spare anyone?" It smooths the way no end, and because we as operators move around the desks there is no rivalry, as there might be if we were in different control rooms, so we just help each other out when necessary. This sharing of resources internally, too - we were very short staffed on our last run of nights, and someone went home sick leaving one desk with only one operator. Because we're all in the same room, I was able to move over onto that desk - it only left two operators per desk, but we can manage with that at 0400 when there's not much going on.
Finally, I can't see this happening in my force. I don't know if we're a particularly sentimental bunch, but any job where a child is in danger we tend to drop everything and run. We absolutely would have attended this.
The press like to give the police a kicking, and I suspect Cumbria is about to come in for more than its fair share, so I'm sorry to have added to it.
Thursday 24 June 2010
Targets
In recent years, governments have been keen to give the public sector all sorts of targets to chase - league tables for schools, the Ambulance service's ORCON target and, until recently, detection rates for the police.
While I completely accept the need to measure how well a police force is doing, we don't seem to have ever got it quite right. The problem with measuring detections is that it's too easy to massage the figures - if an officer is told that he doesn't have enough detections this month, he'll suddenly start volunteering to take all the poxy stupid "death-threats by text message/Facebook" jobs that officers normally prefer to avoid. The victim knows who the offender is, so it's a detection in the bag. Does this make our streets safer for the general public? No - it just makes some idiot who's too stupid to de-friend someone on Facebook, or change their mobile number, feel like they've had a bit of attention. We should be helping real victims of crime, not pandering to these people.
So, the latest scheme to hit policing is the Single Measure of Public Confidence. A few forces are piloting this and it looks set to become the national standard: no more targets, no more chasing the figures, we're all about public confidence now. It's measured by someone from the Customer Service team ringing up a victim and asking if they were happy with the calltaker, the initial response, the investigation ad infinitum.
I see three problems with this.
First of all, it's completely and utterly unscientific. The public at large don't have a clue what we do (much as I don't have a clue what makes a really effective teacher) and don't really know if we're being effective or not. It's completely and utterly subjective. Someone might respond to the survey and say they were completely happy with the whole process just because they fancied the response officer who turned up to take initial details - whether we actually caught their burglar or not.
At the other end of the spectrum, I recall talking to a lady who had reported a group of youths kicking a football about and being noisy on the green opposite her house. As it happened, it was a quiet shift and we had a unit less than a mile away, so we got there in less than the 15 minute Grade 1 response time. Unfortunately the youths had chosen that very moment to go home, so it fell to me to phone the lady back and report ASNT. She was furious - "This has been going on and on for months, and the police do nothing, I pay your wages" and on and on and on. She would be totally dissatisfied with us - despite the fact that we'd given better-than-mandated service.
Secondly, public opinion is too easily swayed. The press seem to enjoy giving the police a kicking - a big front-page article in the Daily Hate Mail, and suddenly all the surveys would be negative.
Finally, it ignores all the behind-the-scenes work. An enormous amount of intelligence work goes into preventative policing, and we get some great results from intelligence gathered by our own officers, and the intel people who look at all the call logs from the public. The obvious example to use here is cannabis factories - we might find one and bust it on the basis of something suspicious that a PCSO notices when out on his beat, thereby removing a lot of criminal activity and the comings-and-going of some seriously nasty people from what's usually a fairly innocuous suburban street. You might never know a thing about it, apart from vaguely wondering why you were woken up in the night with a bang as we bashed the door in, but we've just made your street a whole lot safer and more pleasant.
I don't have an answer to this, I don't know what the best way to measure police performance is. But I can see that it must be measured, and relying on unscientific polls of what the public think is not the way to do it.
While I completely accept the need to measure how well a police force is doing, we don't seem to have ever got it quite right. The problem with measuring detections is that it's too easy to massage the figures - if an officer is told that he doesn't have enough detections this month, he'll suddenly start volunteering to take all the poxy stupid "death-threats by text message/Facebook" jobs that officers normally prefer to avoid. The victim knows who the offender is, so it's a detection in the bag. Does this make our streets safer for the general public? No - it just makes some idiot who's too stupid to de-friend someone on Facebook, or change their mobile number, feel like they've had a bit of attention. We should be helping real victims of crime, not pandering to these people.
So, the latest scheme to hit policing is the Single Measure of Public Confidence. A few forces are piloting this and it looks set to become the national standard: no more targets, no more chasing the figures, we're all about public confidence now. It's measured by someone from the Customer Service team ringing up a victim and asking if they were happy with the calltaker, the initial response, the investigation ad infinitum.
I see three problems with this.
First of all, it's completely and utterly unscientific. The public at large don't have a clue what we do (much as I don't have a clue what makes a really effective teacher) and don't really know if we're being effective or not. It's completely and utterly subjective. Someone might respond to the survey and say they were completely happy with the whole process just because they fancied the response officer who turned up to take initial details - whether we actually caught their burglar or not.
At the other end of the spectrum, I recall talking to a lady who had reported a group of youths kicking a football about and being noisy on the green opposite her house. As it happened, it was a quiet shift and we had a unit less than a mile away, so we got there in less than the 15 minute Grade 1 response time. Unfortunately the youths had chosen that very moment to go home, so it fell to me to phone the lady back and report ASNT. She was furious - "This has been going on and on for months, and the police do nothing, I pay your wages" and on and on and on. She would be totally dissatisfied with us - despite the fact that we'd given better-than-mandated service.
Secondly, public opinion is too easily swayed. The press seem to enjoy giving the police a kicking - a big front-page article in the Daily Hate Mail, and suddenly all the surveys would be negative.
Finally, it ignores all the behind-the-scenes work. An enormous amount of intelligence work goes into preventative policing, and we get some great results from intelligence gathered by our own officers, and the intel people who look at all the call logs from the public. The obvious example to use here is cannabis factories - we might find one and bust it on the basis of something suspicious that a PCSO notices when out on his beat, thereby removing a lot of criminal activity and the comings-and-going of some seriously nasty people from what's usually a fairly innocuous suburban street. You might never know a thing about it, apart from vaguely wondering why you were woken up in the night with a bang as we bashed the door in, but we've just made your street a whole lot safer and more pleasant.
I don't have an answer to this, I don't know what the best way to measure police performance is. But I can see that it must be measured, and relying on unscientific polls of what the public think is not the way to do it.
Monday 21 June 2010
Being Busy
A busy shift, or a busy hour (we take it in turns to be on the radio, swapping on the hour) can be described in many ways:
it's gone a bit banzai
the shit's hit the fan
it's all gone tits-up
and my personal favourite:
the wheels have all fallen off
These can all be used in different tenses and contexts, of course, like:
"Sorry but there will only be two of you on the desk tonight."
"No problem, we'll be fine unless all the wheels fall off."
I've also settled on a few definitions of busy-ness in a Control Room.
There's the kind where the public are busy calling us, new jobs are piling in all the time, and we have to read the new incoming call logs, understand them and prioritise them in our heads. This is like an English exam set by a teacher with a cruel sense of humour and a real ability to deal out punishment. Suddenly seeing four new jobs appear at the same time, with the little counter next to them telling us how fast we need to work in order to meet targets, delivers a big rush of adrenaline - not the most useful thing, when you need to calmly read four logs, risk-assess them, figure out what units you have available and prioritise accordingly, with the radio babbling in your ear all the while. The punishment? That nasty tickling at the back of your neck, all the time there are unread jobs on the queue, that horrible feeling that there's a nasty surprise in there - that the calltaker has accidentally mis-clicked (it doesn't happen often, but it's easily done, especially when you're in a hurry) and sent us a suicide-in-progress as a low-priority "grade three."
There's the kind when you're on the air and it just will not shut up. Radio discipline should be: call, respond, acknowledge, out. So, for example, if I want a unit to go to a job it goes like this:
"Out" is the signal that I've finished - there should follow a respectful pause and then another unit may transmit if they so wish.
What actually happens during a busy hour on the air (or a really shit hour, as I tend to call them) is a load of fragmented conversations, like the one above but interspersed with units interrupting each other, desperately trying to butt in with their own updates, and tell-tales scrolling up one side of the screen telling me that people are trying to transmit but are unable to get in. There's a domino effect: when the air's busy enough to overload the one poor human operator who's running it, it's also too busy for our radio system and there are a lot of police officers out there pressing their transmit buttons and getting a disappointing "busy" beep back. When they do get through, they're frustrated and annoyed because they've had to wait so the tension goes up another notch.
Hours like that are characterised by lots of fragmented events: lots of jobs going out all at once, lots of officers calling for an ambulance, lots of officers stopping vehicles, then just when you think it can't get any worse, CCTV calls up with a big fight on Shitsville High Street... and then the calm voice of the Custody Sergeant cuts across it all with a laconic, "Do you have a double-crewed unit available? Only I need to transfer a prisoner to hospital." At that point, your brain explodes and kind people lead you away to a nice cup of tea while your colleague takes over. Actually, that's a complete lie - you swear very loudly, then press the transmit button, say, "Received, will do," and get on with it.
A Really Shit Hour is characterised by the feeling that you've just spent an hour bareback riding on the really big horse in that Western film, just about hanging onto its mane by your fingertips, all the while knowing that incoming jobs are piling up unread and trusting to your colleagues to yell if there's something that you really need to pay attention to.
There's the Really Big Incident. Mostly, we can predict demand - we know that we need more officers and more operators at 2300 on a Friday than 0400 on a Wednesday, for example. But the really big, bad bastard of a job can turn up at any time. It sits there behind you while you've got your feet up on the desk reading the paper on a mid-week night shift while all the good folks are asleep, waiting to catch you with your pants down and bite you in the arse. It's the armed siege, the fire in a block of flats, the unexploded WWII bomb, the dog-walker who's come across a badly burned body. There was a moment when a despatcher saw the Cumbria shootings come in, thought, "what's this then?", clicked on it and thought, ooooooooooh fuck. Then shortly after that, lots of people in the Control Room started shouting very loudly.
Last Really Big Incident I was involved in, there were only two of us on the desk for that area. My mate was on the radio and I was on the phone when the Inspector came over and said to him, "I want a new channel opened up for this incident and I want you running it because you're up to speed with the job." He said, "Yes Ma'am" and did so - neither of them realising that I was on the phone (not easy to tell when we all wear headsets!). I can't even remember who I was talking to - I just hung up and took over the normal Bravo Sierra Control channel while my mate went off to Bravo Sierra Major Incidents with everyone who was on the Really Big Incident.
There's my own personal hell, my least favourite kind of non-busy. You see, there are times - a lot of times - when we don't actually have any response capacity. Shift change. Briefings that run on and on because the SMT have decided to talk to the troops. Times when we have simply run out of troops and have nothing left to give.
At these times, the radio goes quiet but the jobs keep coming in. You read them and digest them, impotently doing all the intel checks in full knowledge that no-one's going for hours yet, knowing that somewhere there's a frightened person waiting for a uniform to turn up and fix it, all the while digging your fingernails into the desk, in fear of a really serious job coming in while you know you've got no-one to send...
...then there's the kind that all Control Room Inspectors dread, where there are two incidents that require their attention running (two separate firearms incidents, for example) and they start to get a feel for how we despatchers operate all the time.
it's gone a bit banzai
the shit's hit the fan
it's all gone tits-up
and my personal favourite:
the wheels have all fallen off
These can all be used in different tenses and contexts, of course, like:
"Sorry but there will only be two of you on the desk tonight."
"No problem, we'll be fine unless all the wheels fall off."
I've also settled on a few definitions of busy-ness in a Control Room.
There's the kind where the public are busy calling us, new jobs are piling in all the time, and we have to read the new incoming call logs, understand them and prioritise them in our heads. This is like an English exam set by a teacher with a cruel sense of humour and a real ability to deal out punishment. Suddenly seeing four new jobs appear at the same time, with the little counter next to them telling us how fast we need to work in order to meet targets, delivers a big rush of adrenaline - not the most useful thing, when you need to calmly read four logs, risk-assess them, figure out what units you have available and prioritise accordingly, with the radio babbling in your ear all the while. The punishment? That nasty tickling at the back of your neck, all the time there are unread jobs on the queue, that horrible feeling that there's a nasty surprise in there - that the calltaker has accidentally mis-clicked (it doesn't happen often, but it's easily done, especially when you're in a hurry) and sent us a suicide-in-progress as a low-priority "grade three."
*
There's the really satisfying kind of busy, when a really juicy job comes in with loads of useful information on it, and you're off the air and have the time to dig deep into our various computer systems and come up with some leads before a police officer has even seen it. It has been known for despatchers to lead arrests in this way - digging deep into our intel and recording systems and finding out where offenders are likely to be. A colleague of mine was credited with getting someone on Attempt Murder not long ago in this way.
*
- Bravo Sierra Three One, Bravo Sierra Control
- Bravo Sierra Three One receiving, go ahead
- Three One, I've got a grade two intruder alarm for you, 11 Acacia Avenue, Quietsville, received?
- Three One, that's received, I'm towards.
- Thank you, Bravo Sierra Control Out
"Out" is the signal that I've finished - there should follow a respectful pause and then another unit may transmit if they so wish.
What actually happens during a busy hour on the air (or a really shit hour, as I tend to call them) is a load of fragmented conversations, like the one above but interspersed with units interrupting each other, desperately trying to butt in with their own updates, and tell-tales scrolling up one side of the screen telling me that people are trying to transmit but are unable to get in. There's a domino effect: when the air's busy enough to overload the one poor human operator who's running it, it's also too busy for our radio system and there are a lot of police officers out there pressing their transmit buttons and getting a disappointing "busy" beep back. When they do get through, they're frustrated and annoyed because they've had to wait so the tension goes up another notch.
Hours like that are characterised by lots of fragmented events: lots of jobs going out all at once, lots of officers calling for an ambulance, lots of officers stopping vehicles, then just when you think it can't get any worse, CCTV calls up with a big fight on Shitsville High Street... and then the calm voice of the Custody Sergeant cuts across it all with a laconic, "Do you have a double-crewed unit available? Only I need to transfer a prisoner to hospital." At that point, your brain explodes and kind people lead you away to a nice cup of tea while your colleague takes over. Actually, that's a complete lie - you swear very loudly, then press the transmit button, say, "Received, will do," and get on with it.
A Really Shit Hour is characterised by the feeling that you've just spent an hour bareback riding on the really big horse in that Western film, just about hanging onto its mane by your fingertips, all the while knowing that incoming jobs are piling up unread and trusting to your colleagues to yell if there's something that you really need to pay attention to.
*
There's the Really Big Incident. Mostly, we can predict demand - we know that we need more officers and more operators at 2300 on a Friday than 0400 on a Wednesday, for example. But the really big, bad bastard of a job can turn up at any time. It sits there behind you while you've got your feet up on the desk reading the paper on a mid-week night shift while all the good folks are asleep, waiting to catch you with your pants down and bite you in the arse. It's the armed siege, the fire in a block of flats, the unexploded WWII bomb, the dog-walker who's come across a badly burned body. There was a moment when a despatcher saw the Cumbria shootings come in, thought, "what's this then?", clicked on it and thought, ooooooooooh fuck. Then shortly after that, lots of people in the Control Room started shouting very loudly.
Last Really Big Incident I was involved in, there were only two of us on the desk for that area. My mate was on the radio and I was on the phone when the Inspector came over and said to him, "I want a new channel opened up for this incident and I want you running it because you're up to speed with the job." He said, "Yes Ma'am" and did so - neither of them realising that I was on the phone (not easy to tell when we all wear headsets!). I can't even remember who I was talking to - I just hung up and took over the normal Bravo Sierra Control channel while my mate went off to Bravo Sierra Major Incidents with everyone who was on the Really Big Incident.
*
There's my own personal hell, my least favourite kind of non-busy. You see, there are times - a lot of times - when we don't actually have any response capacity. Shift change. Briefings that run on and on because the SMT have decided to talk to the troops. Times when we have simply run out of troops and have nothing left to give.
At these times, the radio goes quiet but the jobs keep coming in. You read them and digest them, impotently doing all the intel checks in full knowledge that no-one's going for hours yet, knowing that somewhere there's a frightened person waiting for a uniform to turn up and fix it, all the while digging your fingernails into the desk, in fear of a really serious job coming in while you know you've got no-one to send...
*
...then there's the kind that all Control Room Inspectors dread, where there are two incidents that require their attention running (two separate firearms incidents, for example) and they start to get a feel for how we despatchers operate all the time.
Friday 18 June 2010
Police Staff
I know I'm late on this one, but I can't really set myself up as a police staff blogger without commenting on the recent stink in Surrey. I caught the BBC News clip on iPlayer and it was fun to see inside another force's control room - quite surprised that they let cameras in though!
There's a summary of the proposal in national terms here and a more local view of things here. The Thinking Policeman comments here.
I'm just a worker bee, so I'll refrain from too much comment on the national issues - people like Chief Constable Rowley are paid much more than me to understand such things.
From a local point of view, I'd say that our Control Room has a healthy mix of officers and staff. We are mostly staff, with a few PCs who are off active duty for various reasons and a few retired officers who have come back as civilians. It would be a complete and utter waste of your money to have a PC in each of those chairs, but it's really good for us staff to have their experience in the room so that we can ask for advice if we need to. On the other hand, I worry that our Call Centre is too civilianised - we see some bizarre things on call logs sometimes which suggest that the calltaker doesn't really understand the way we work and what's going to happen next. I'd like to see calltakers encouraged to go out on attachment with officers in various roles, and have some current and ex-PCs scattered through the room, as we do. Or maybe replace the civilian supervisors with Sergeants.
Should SOCOs be police officers? I'm not sure about that one... our civvy SOCOs do a good job, but would the experience of having been a police officer be useful to them, as it is in the Control Room? You'd have to ask one.
I think the role of PCSO is a really useful one, as long as we don't see too much "mission creep" and they do stay in a support role. They also generate a certain amount of work for officers, as they are likely to come across something outside of their powers while they're out-and-about and need to call up asking for Police assistance.
You, the public, asked for more "bobbies-on-the-beat" and the Pledge says that local officers need to spend 80% of their time "visibly policing." Clearly it would be a massive waste of money to train and pay Police Constables to stand around on Quietsville High Street just to keep to the pledge, so Quietsville gets one local Police Officer and a team of PCSOs. I don't see anything wrong with this scenario. Obviously Shitsville needs a different mix, because PCSOs don't have the power of arrest, but I would hope we can trust Neighbourhood Inspectors to make that decision.
I can't disagree with The Thinking Policeman's maths - 1575 police staff must indeed cost more than 255 police officers. It looks like the balance has gone a bit too far there.
I also agree, as a general rule, that we need more officers. We don't have enough to cover demand as it is - which is why the overtime bill is so large. Elsewhere, Mr Rowley has promised Surrey 200 new officers - let's hope we see that promise carried through.
I'm sorry, though, that The Thinking Policeman felt staff were not willing to do without breaks and so on. My colleagues and I very rarely take meal breaks, and those of us who were stuck at work in the snow earlier this year put in 12 hour shifts to cover for our colleagues who were stuck at home. We're proud to be part of the police and work hard in support of our sworn colleagues.
There's a summary of the proposal in national terms here and a more local view of things here. The Thinking Policeman comments here.
I'm just a worker bee, so I'll refrain from too much comment on the national issues - people like Chief Constable Rowley are paid much more than me to understand such things.
From a local point of view, I'd say that our Control Room has a healthy mix of officers and staff. We are mostly staff, with a few PCs who are off active duty for various reasons and a few retired officers who have come back as civilians. It would be a complete and utter waste of your money to have a PC in each of those chairs, but it's really good for us staff to have their experience in the room so that we can ask for advice if we need to. On the other hand, I worry that our Call Centre is too civilianised - we see some bizarre things on call logs sometimes which suggest that the calltaker doesn't really understand the way we work and what's going to happen next. I'd like to see calltakers encouraged to go out on attachment with officers in various roles, and have some current and ex-PCs scattered through the room, as we do. Or maybe replace the civilian supervisors with Sergeants.
Should SOCOs be police officers? I'm not sure about that one... our civvy SOCOs do a good job, but would the experience of having been a police officer be useful to them, as it is in the Control Room? You'd have to ask one.
I think the role of PCSO is a really useful one, as long as we don't see too much "mission creep" and they do stay in a support role. They also generate a certain amount of work for officers, as they are likely to come across something outside of their powers while they're out-and-about and need to call up asking for Police assistance.
You, the public, asked for more "bobbies-on-the-beat" and the Pledge says that local officers need to spend 80% of their time "visibly policing." Clearly it would be a massive waste of money to train and pay Police Constables to stand around on Quietsville High Street just to keep to the pledge, so Quietsville gets one local Police Officer and a team of PCSOs. I don't see anything wrong with this scenario. Obviously Shitsville needs a different mix, because PCSOs don't have the power of arrest, but I would hope we can trust Neighbourhood Inspectors to make that decision.
I can't disagree with The Thinking Policeman's maths - 1575 police staff must indeed cost more than 255 police officers. It looks like the balance has gone a bit too far there.
I also agree, as a general rule, that we need more officers. We don't have enough to cover demand as it is - which is why the overtime bill is so large. Elsewhere, Mr Rowley has promised Surrey 200 new officers - let's hope we see that promise carried through.
I'm sorry, though, that The Thinking Policeman felt staff were not willing to do without breaks and so on. My colleagues and I very rarely take meal breaks, and those of us who were stuck at work in the snow earlier this year put in 12 hour shifts to cover for our colleagues who were stuck at home. We're proud to be part of the police and work hard in support of our sworn colleagues.
Thursday 17 June 2010
Control
To you, I am Bravo Sierra Control. I am the fount of all knowledge. I send you to jobs. I do checks for you, if I feel so inclined. I track your cartoon police cars on my screen, so I know where you all are. I know if you're hiding in a police station with your feet up. I have overall sight of the division, so I know which officer is most appropriate to send, and I make that decision - not your Sergeant. I have divine right to interrupt any of you because the system is designed to give Control Room transmissions higher priority than anyone else. I am your God.
So who gave some of you bastards handheld radios that seem to be able to cut across my transmissions?
So who gave some of you bastards handheld radios that seem to be able to cut across my transmissions?
Wednesday 16 June 2010
Changes
When someone important in a business has a good idea, a project is started to look into it, feasibility studies are done, a budget is set, and then the work is carried out.
Things are a little different in the public sector. Someone important has a good idea, writes it down, and we on the front line are just expected to get on and do it, somehow.
For example, remember the Policing Pledge? Leaving aside the obvious facts that some of it is meaningless and some of it is impossible to deliver (how can a calltaker possibly know how long it will take an officer to get to you when he doesn't know which officer we in Despatch will choose, where he's coming from, or which sort of diesel-powered car he's driving?), the main problem with it was that we heard about it about three days before it was made public - and with a huge advertising campaign, at that.
Did hundreds of new Neighbourhood PCs and PCSOs turn up the next day so that they could spend 80% of their time "visibly working" as well as all the other valuable work that they do, you know, inside buildings? They did not. Did we get loads of new Response officers and cars so that we could handle non-emergency calls quickly, and promise to have someone available to go to all 999 calls immediately? I think you probably know the answer to that.
I don't disagree with the bits of the Pledge that actually make sense, and it's good for the public to have clarity on what they can expect from us. But as it stands, it's just words. Without an investment in recruiting new officers, it's completely meaningless.
We just carried on exactly as before, doing the best we can with limited resources.
It happens on a local level, too. Without going into detail, one of the Supers decided to fiddle with the way that a certain thing works on our despatching software. They obviously thought it was a brilliant idea and just went ahead and trialled it on a particular area. Unfortunately, they didn't ask us despatchers what we thought about it, and they didn't tell us, or our line managers, what they'd done.
You can imagine the swearing from my colleague who was working that area when her screen suddenly starting doing something unexpected. She also realised within about a minute that it couldn't possibly work.
Things are a little different in the public sector. Someone important has a good idea, writes it down, and we on the front line are just expected to get on and do it, somehow.
For example, remember the Policing Pledge? Leaving aside the obvious facts that some of it is meaningless and some of it is impossible to deliver (how can a calltaker possibly know how long it will take an officer to get to you when he doesn't know which officer we in Despatch will choose, where he's coming from, or which sort of diesel-powered car he's driving?), the main problem with it was that we heard about it about three days before it was made public - and with a huge advertising campaign, at that.
Did hundreds of new Neighbourhood PCs and PCSOs turn up the next day so that they could spend 80% of their time "visibly working" as well as all the other valuable work that they do, you know, inside buildings? They did not. Did we get loads of new Response officers and cars so that we could handle non-emergency calls quickly, and promise to have someone available to go to all 999 calls immediately? I think you probably know the answer to that.
I don't disagree with the bits of the Pledge that actually make sense, and it's good for the public to have clarity on what they can expect from us. But as it stands, it's just words. Without an investment in recruiting new officers, it's completely meaningless.
We just carried on exactly as before, doing the best we can with limited resources.
It happens on a local level, too. Without going into detail, one of the Supers decided to fiddle with the way that a certain thing works on our despatching software. They obviously thought it was a brilliant idea and just went ahead and trialled it on a particular area. Unfortunately, they didn't ask us despatchers what we thought about it, and they didn't tell us, or our line managers, what they'd done.
You can imagine the swearing from my colleague who was working that area when her screen suddenly starting doing something unexpected. She also realised within about a minute that it couldn't possibly work.
Tuesday 15 June 2010
Complaints
A quite frightening amount of our time is taken up by complaints - that is, members of the public complaining that the police did something wrong.
Having come to the police later in life, after working in business, I understand how important complaints are. I know the tired old statistic that happy customers don't tell anyone they were happy, and that unhappy customers tell 10 people they were unhappy. I happen to believe that statistic.
It's especially important that the police understand that statistic because we depend on public confidence. Policing is all smoke and mirrors: there are not enough police officers to make the public do what we want them to do, it's all down to trust. If everyone decided to break the law on the same day, we'd be buggered.
Like everything else in policing though, you approach something with the high intentions that I've outlined above and come against the blank grey wall of petty criminality. I especially like it when criminals' mums call in.
Like I said, complaints are important: so an Inspector deals with them. An Inspector even deals with them when Johnny Criminal's mum phones in to say, "I didn't like the way PC Smith spoke to Little Johnny when he arrested him!"
The Inspector then has to review the Control Room record, the Custody record, PC Smith's Pocket Note Book, speak to everyone and see if the complaint is justified.
Everyone involved in the arrest knows that Johnny Criminal is an appalling little scrote who would burgle his own Gran if only she hadn't moved to Spain to get away from him. Express that opinion out loud though, and you're fucked.
I just wish the Police as a body had the balls to give calltakers (or Sergeants, at a push, but not Inspectors) the power to say, "But Mrs Criminal, your son *is* an appalling little scrote, and while I'm sorry PC Smith used bad language, upon reading the log I can see that the officer concerned was quite right to put him in leg restraints before he killed his girlfriend and I am therefore treating your complaint with the contempt it deserves."
The calltakers should have the power to send appropriate complaints to Inspectors to be dealt with by an appropriate senior officer, and tell the rest of the compensation-chasing time-wasters to piss off back to the black hole they came from.
Having come to the police later in life, after working in business, I understand how important complaints are. I know the tired old statistic that happy customers don't tell anyone they were happy, and that unhappy customers tell 10 people they were unhappy. I happen to believe that statistic.
It's especially important that the police understand that statistic because we depend on public confidence. Policing is all smoke and mirrors: there are not enough police officers to make the public do what we want them to do, it's all down to trust. If everyone decided to break the law on the same day, we'd be buggered.
Like everything else in policing though, you approach something with the high intentions that I've outlined above and come against the blank grey wall of petty criminality. I especially like it when criminals' mums call in.
Like I said, complaints are important: so an Inspector deals with them. An Inspector even deals with them when Johnny Criminal's mum phones in to say, "I didn't like the way PC Smith spoke to Little Johnny when he arrested him!"
The Inspector then has to review the Control Room record, the Custody record, PC Smith's Pocket Note Book, speak to everyone and see if the complaint is justified.
Everyone involved in the arrest knows that Johnny Criminal is an appalling little scrote who would burgle his own Gran if only she hadn't moved to Spain to get away from him. Express that opinion out loud though, and you're fucked.
I just wish the Police as a body had the balls to give calltakers (or Sergeants, at a push, but not Inspectors) the power to say, "But Mrs Criminal, your son *is* an appalling little scrote, and while I'm sorry PC Smith used bad language, upon reading the log I can see that the officer concerned was quite right to put him in leg restraints before he killed his girlfriend and I am therefore treating your complaint with the contempt it deserves."
The calltakers should have the power to send appropriate complaints to Inspectors to be dealt with by an appropriate senior officer, and tell the rest of the compensation-chasing time-wasters to piss off back to the black hole they came from.
Gone
It was weeks ago now, but I still sometimes hear those gasping breaths in my ear.
Quiet moments, low moments when I'm on my own not doing very much, I still replay the sound of a man dying in my head. We all heard it through our earpieces - those desperate struggles for air while the officer on scene kept hitting his transmit button by accident while giving CPR.
He was a bad man, no loss to society, and if he'd led a law abiding life he'd probably still be alive. The kind of person I spend my working life fighting against, the kind of person prison's too good for.
But he died on my watch, and I don't like that. I mourn him.
I also worry for my colleague who tried and failed to save him - a man I've never met, but communicate with via phone and radio all day, every day. I know how hard he tried to save this criminal's life, and I have no way to ask him how he feels about it.
This is a seriously weird job.
Quiet moments, low moments when I'm on my own not doing very much, I still replay the sound of a man dying in my head. We all heard it through our earpieces - those desperate struggles for air while the officer on scene kept hitting his transmit button by accident while giving CPR.
He was a bad man, no loss to society, and if he'd led a law abiding life he'd probably still be alive. The kind of person I spend my working life fighting against, the kind of person prison's too good for.
But he died on my watch, and I don't like that. I mourn him.
I also worry for my colleague who tried and failed to save him - a man I've never met, but communicate with via phone and radio all day, every day. I know how hard he tried to save this criminal's life, and I have no way to ask him how he feels about it.
This is a seriously weird job.
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