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.