Thursday 24 November 2011

No, No, No (a Conservative government should recognise that)

Read this.

I'm not working longer.  I'm not contributing more.

I'm going to fulfil the contract that I signed up to - and so are you!

You have no right to change it.

Hands off MY MONEY or I call the police.

Oh...  Bugger.

Fraud

I'm generally a very calm person, but I found myself shouting at my computer screen today when I came across a Channel 4 News article claiming that the proposed Unison strike on 30th November would cost approximately £500 million and that we spoiled public sector workers should suck it up and go to work anyway because there simply isn't enough money in the public pot to pay our pensions as promised.

Now, that's bad enough.  As it happens I'm on a rest day today so I watched You've Been Scammed on BBC1 this morning (so much classier than keeping up with my frequent customers on Jeremy Kyle) during which I learned of the existence of a government agency called the Insolvency Agency which, among other duties, wraps up companies which take money for services that they actually have no ability to offer.

So...  We've been paying into our pensions all this time (and let's not hear any "gold-plated" bollocks, they're good pensions but no better than a decent private-sector employer) and now they say they can't afford to pay out?  Sounds like a job for the Insolvency Agency to me.

But wait.  Here comes a conflicting set of figures.

Like most of my colleagues, I'm a member of Unison.  Like most of my colleagues, it's not because we're red-flag waving 1970s British Leyland workers but because Unison supports its members when, inevitably, a member of the public makes a complaint against us.

Unison says that the Local Government Pension Scheme is in rude health, that it currently takes in more money than it gives out, and if all contributions suddenly stopped it could support its retirees for another 20 years.

I don't know The Facts, but I've read widely around the current crisis and I've arrived at the conclusion that it was caused by a greedy group of banks aiming for profit with no regard for the good of their customers.  This shouldn't be any surprise - George Soros did much the same thing single-handed in the '90s, but we're looking at all the banks coming up with the same idea at the same time rather than a single individual this time around.

My own experience has taught me to trust what Unison says over and above the sewage that issues from the current government.

I believe that my pension, which I have been paying into in good faith, is being plundered in order to rectify the mistakes made by reckless bankers in the pursuit of wealth.

I do not work in the pursuit of wealth.  I work damn hard in a pretty unpleasant shift pattern and I earn almost exactly the average salary for a British male of my age.  I do it because I believe I do good work, and because I believe my colleagues are above reproach.

If you think this doesn't matter to you because you don't work in the public sector, ask yourself this: Are you immune from burglary?  Is your car theft-proof?  Will you, your spouse, your children never suffer from mental health issues?  Or addiction?  Will you never know anyone lose their job and become dependent on benefits?

At the moment the press seem to conspiring with the government to display "the public sector" as your enemy, as a cost to society.  We are not.  We look after your kids when you can't, we reassure your grandparents when they're alone, we protect you drunks from yourselves, we also look into real crime on the rare occasions that we have time.

Let us have our salary and our pensions.  We love our work, but we can't buy food with love.

Saturday 29 October 2011

Definition of a Missing Person

I've been reading Winston Smith's excellent blog for some time, and I couldn't help thinking of him while this incident was going on.  I'd have loved to hear his take on it.  His chronicling of the failures in our system of "care" for young people has a direct link to policing as so many of our frequent fliers come from the "care" system.

So.  Imagine you're the manager of a care home in Shitsville.  Two of the young men in your care, aged 15, are well-known to police for a variety of minor nuisances and Anti Social Behaviour, possession of drugs and the odd theft and burglary.  You happen to know that these two owe money to a local drug dealer at the moment, so when they calmly walk into the care home's lounge, remove the 40" flat-screen TV and walk out with it, you immediately call the police.

Not to the report the theft though (although the call-handler does her job well and creates a crime report for that).  Oh no.  You're reporting the pair of them missing.

I can only assume this must have been down to one of a care home policy because surely no sane, rational human being would react to the theft of £700 worth of taxpayer-funded hardware by reporting a concern for the safety of the thieves.

One of our policies states that all mispers have to be managed by the duty Response Inspector, so I gave him a phone call.  He's new to the division, having transferred over from a part of the county where there aren't any care homes.  By coincidence they all seem to be on Y Division, so he's new to all this nonsense.  I haven't met him yet, but he seems to have a sense of humour so I succumbed to the temptation to give him the details completely deadpan.  He got the joke, but was a bit baffled as to what to do with the job, his view being that they were surely wanted rather than missing.  I get the impression that he wanted to simply ignore the "missing" aspect and leave CID to crack on with investigating the theft of the TV and arrest them at their leisure.  You can't just ignore the fact that someone's been reported missing though, so we let CCTV know, put out their descriptions on the radio (although the response team all know them well) and kept the job open to await developments.  The Inspector's last sentence to me on that phone call: "Surely they won't be stupid enough to go back, will they?"

I had a private bet with myself that he was wrong on that, and I awarded myself a chocolate bar when I won it.  Towards the end of our shift, the care home called back: the two miscreants had returned, clearly under the influence of cannabis and minus a flatscreen telly.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the county, another customer from one of the Y Division care homes is calling 999 (because he hasn't got any credit left on his phone) to ask if he's been reported missing, because he's missed the last train, he hasn't got enough money for a taxi and the home will usually send a car to collect him.  He hasn't been reported missing, but the call handler phones the home anyway to ask them to pick him up.  Sadly they don't have any drivers available.  The temptation is to leave it at that and let him take his chances...  but he is only 16, and anyway the local NSO happens across him at this point.  His hands are tied: he doesn't want to be a taxi, but we have a duty of care to under 18s.  Sure enough, we end up transporting him home.  Country's finest taxi service, we are.

Wednesday 24 August 2011

Chasing for crime reports

We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing people to make allegations and put on crime reports when they clearly don't want to, and I'm curious to know if other forces do it too.

Whenever I question this, the answer is that we have to follow the Home Office counting rules, which means that we have to officially record every crime we are made aware of and generate a crime number so that the government can accurately track crime statistics across the country.  I can see that this is necessary, but don't believe for a minute that it's accurate - different forces work in different ways, and anyway it's far too easy to massage the figures.

Don't assume that I mean the figures are massaged to make forces look good, or to make certain areas look safer than they are - the way my force works, I sometimes think that management are deliberately trying to make the place look worse than it is.  The street level crime maps at http://www.police.uk/ are quite fun for this - I live in a very quiet and safe area, and yet it comes up with about a hundred reports of anti social behaviour per month.  I suspect a lot of these are absolutely rubbish, locals complaining about kids making noise in the skate park and so on.

The really annoying ones for us in the control room are the jobs where someone has called something in, maybe made an appointment to see officers, then cancels the appointment and stops answering their phone.  We end up calling them back every couple of hours, leaving answering machine messages, sending officers to put calling cards through their doors...  Sometimes if a person drops off the radar there's a concern for their safety but for most of these cases it's quite clear that they've just changed their mind about reporting whatever it is that's happened and don't want to talk to us any more.  Often they were drunk at the time of the original call, and the sober mind realises that the matter's not worth pursuing.  I wish I didn't have to waste so much of my life chasing these people, but supervisors and closers rarely let me close an incident without a crime number on it.

It would be hilarious if a member of the public tried to get us done for harassment after turning their phone on and finding all the messages we've left...

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Leave

Bloody hell.  I chose a really good couple of weeks to go on holiday, didn't I!

So, no juicy first-hand information to share, no insider news, just a slightly educated commentary.

I have, of course, been getting cross at the half-digested versions of facts being presented on the TV news, especially the thin-ness of the analysis around the facts.  16,000 extra police deployed in London tonight sounds fantastic, but no-one's asked where they come from.  The Met don't have 16,000 extra officers lying dormant in stasis until they get charged up and sent out, so the answer is surrounding forces and cancelled leave and rest days.

No human being can carry on functioning at those stress levels for long without rest days, so I worry for those Met officers.  I also worry about the proportion of my force which has been working in London, not only because some of them are personal friends but also because I understand how thin the capacity is back here at the moment.  We simply cannot afford to have a major incident or even a busier-than-usual shift at the moment.

Incidents like the current riots, the Norway shootings, Derek Bird and the Mumbai incident always lead to a round of "How would we have coped with that?" in the mess room.  The debate isn't a pretty sight and the consensus is generally somewhere along the lines of, "We'd be fucked."  The Control Room is ludicrously short-staffed, under-trained for major incidents and morale is low.  When I speak to officers on the outside I find much the same thing: they're totally committed to job of protecting the public, but struggling with kit that doesn't work properly, bizarre and conflicting instructions from senior management and concerns over pay and pensions.

Getting back to today's news, there was the usual round of criticising police for being too tough, or not tough enough, whichever it is this week.  I think the number of arrests quoted on the Six was 150, which shocked my other half ("What!  There were thousands of them, why didn't you nick the lot?") and impressed me ("Blimey, we've only got space for half that in the whole county's custody suites!")

It doesn't matter anyway, because the whole lot will be out on bail this time tomorrow.

That's not just cynical bandwagon-jumping, by the way: on my last run of nights, we nicked the same bloke for breach of time/location conditions (ie: You must not be in Shitsville Town Centre between 20:00 and 08:00) six nights in a row, then on the seventh night Custody refused to take him but told us to drop him off far enough away that he couldn't get back in time to breach again.

The courts are simply a joke to repeat offenders who know how to play the system to get off with a rap on the knuckles.

I have a regular rant on about standards in society, respect for parents, teachers and police which I will spare you because the bloggers who inspired me to start this have said it all far more eloquently than I know how to.  Go read this from Inspector Gadget, this from PC Bloggs and this from Winston Smith, and if you hadn't read them before go back and read the whole lot.

My inner Guardian reader is ashamed to say this, but we've just got to get tougher.

Saturday 6 August 2011

Sat Nav dependence

I know, I know, I know.  There are a thousand blog posts and stupid Daily Mail stories about idiotic sat nav use.  But I just have to get this off my chest - bear with me.

Recently we had a job where the victim was from a couple of hundred miles away, and for reasons that I won't bore you with she had to come here to do something.  We wanted her to come to a police station, but she insisted on meeting officers at a motorway service station and going onwards in convoy because she didn't have her sat nav with her and wouldn't have been able to find it.

Seriously?  In any town the police station is a pretty good landmark: all you have to do is follow signs to the town centre then pick up signs to the police station or ask someone.  It's not hard.

Typing this up reminds me of a job from the winter when there was heavy snow.  We had a call from some lads who'd got themselves stuck on a country B road that hadn't been cleared.  When we finally got to them, they said they didn't know the area because they were visiting from London and just following their sat nav.  Did it not cross their minds that it might be more sensible to stick to the main roads when there's been heavy snow?

I have a sat nav and I love it, it's a really useful tool.  But it doesn't do all the thinking for me: I have to engage my brain when driving as well.

Reality

Things have been getting on top of me a bit lately.  Lots of petty bickering between rotas, lots of office politics, everyone worrying about losing their jobs because of cuts and what's going to happen to their pensions.  All in all, work is not a very pleasant place to be at the moment.

So when the opportunity came up I jumped at the chance to swap my office chair for the passenger seat of an Astra and spent a day out with one of our Response officers.  It was a really nice little shift: nothing really major or out-of-the-ordinary happened, but we got a couple of blue light runs, did some really grassroots bread-and-butter police work, and helped a couple of nice elderly people.  I'd borrowed a radio so I could follow what was going on, and finished up doing a lot of the updating so I really felt like I was part of the unit and helping out.

I've met some of the Response team before, but it was great to meet the others and put faces to the voices that I hear every day.  They're a good crowd, young and keen.

It was a fantastic reminder of why we do what we do and I came home re energised, ready and willing to go back to the coalface and crack on.  That feeling lasted until I got into the control room the next day, where our briefing included a pointless bollocking for a minor and fairly irrelevant mistake, and then read my emails which included a new way of running a certain part of our operation in a way which is a bit more complex, takes more work and doesn't seem to give any advantages, and a depressing update from the union about our pensions.

Like that young, keen crowd on the outside, I just want to do my job well and help people when they need it.  I wish we could cut the crap and let us get on with doing just that.

Thursday 28 April 2011

Same Old Same Old

I'm just home off an unusually Q night shift (still in work mode so I can't say the Q word) in which I've probably worked on less than a dozen jobs. 

On almost all of them, I knew what to expect before I'd even read the job, just from the location field which is the first I see of a new job sent to us from the call centre.

On the couple that I couldn't immediately predict from the location, I read the job and knew what we had from the name that appeared either as the informant or within the first few lines of free text.

I tend to move around areas a lot, and a couple of times I knew what was happening on other desks just from overhearing a couple of words those operators were giving out on their channels.

It's amazing how much of our work is generated by the same few individuals.

I know from friends in other "caring" professions that any ambulance controller/A&E doctor/mental health professional/social worker would tell you exactly the same thing.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

The Thin Blue Middle Line

So, a new bit of paper has come out containing wisdom which will affect all our jobs and futures.  This link opens it as a .pdf.

As a rule - and I'll admit to some bias here - I'm quite a big fan of front-line and visible policing, so the title pleased me.

I was slightly less pleased to learn that I apparently work in a "middle-office" - whatever one of those is, I've never heard the term before.  I've always considered the 999 call centre and the Force Control Room indispensable parts of the front line.  I find myself reconsidering my place in my little world.

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Where Reality meets Customer Service

Forgive me if I can't be bothered to check the exact dates, but it's about a year since Theresa May scrapped the Policing Pledge, specifically ordered Police Forces to stop using it, and Inspector Gadget started a list of Forces that were still following it.

I'm sad to report that my Force is still on that list. Not only that, but I still see calltakers proudly writing “pledge quoted” on call logs.

Once a month, my colleagues in the Control Room have joint Propaganda Sessions (sorry, Training Days) with our colleagues from the Call Centre. The calltakers generally seem to take the propaganda on board much more than anyone else, perhaps because their role is purely taking that initial call and they are somewhat insulated from the rest of the policing world.

I should probably clarify that comment. For example... Every force has got its regular callers, people who call many times a day with the same story. Experienced calltakers have a bit of a chat with them and them let them go, but generally they're very convincing and every now and then they cause control room staff great amusement by causing an inexperienced calltaker to put a Grade One job on.

Or that old chestnut, “the caller is distressed.” The caller may well be distressed, but I'm still going to risk-assess the jobs on my queue to the best of my ability and I will never, ever dispatch your poorly-parked vehicle before someone else's concern-for-safety, no matter how distressed you are.

We work in a culture where management tell us that the customer is king, that you should always listen to what the caller is saying, and that we should always trust the calltaker's judgement. We also live in a world where the vast majority of our callers are scrotes, and where every single dispatcher, officer and in fact everyone who works in Response knows that the job you arrive at bears no resemblance to what you were told on the radio.

I can hear Ambulance staff nodding along at this point.

Anyway, at a recent propaganda session we had one of the Chief Inspectors for the call centre present, and she was stressing the importance of response targets. I can recite these in my sleep: Grade Ones to be despatched within 3 minutes, on scene within 15 minutes; Grade Twos to be despatched within 15 minutes and on scene within an hour.

One of the calltakers was brave enough to call the “one hour” promise into question, as it gives them nothing but grief. If they quote it, they get an earful along the lines of “I need someone before an hour!”

I pitched in here, pointing out that the calltakers don't have access to the bit of the dispatching software that tells them which officers are available . Saying “within an hour” is therefore a complete fabrication. Why on earth have we got into a situation where we are telling customers completely made-up arrival times, which might make them angry to the point where they give our calltakers abuse?

The fact is, if I've got someone free they'll get to you in the amount it takes to get from where they are to where you are in a diesel-powered estate car. If I haven't got anyone free, you'll have to wait until I do. If your situation is really serious, I bloody well will get someone from somewhere, but it could be anyone – an NSO, a dog unit, a firearms unit or maybe even a Control Room PC...

Wednesday 9 March 2011

Cuts, death by a thousand cuts

Well, you read the news, don't you? You know what's going on. You know that the banks have royally fucked up and that you, me, the public sector worker and the mortgage payer are footing the bill while they keep getting (I don't say earning) their bonuses.

I won't go into detail here in case I say something that identifies my force, but it feels like the place is being gutted up the middle, like the next email we get from senior management will say something like, "please hand in the pennies you find underneath your desk because we need them."

It doesn't seem to have impacted front-line response policing yet, but it's a hair's breadth away.

Upon which... I'm clearly biased because of the job that I do, but I happen to think that front-line response policing is the most important thing we do and should be the last bastion against cuts.

Am I wrong? Honest opinions please.

Friday 4 February 2011

Street level crime maps

Have you had a play with the new crime maps at www.police.uk yet? They're great fun.

My initial reaction is that they'll only serve to increase the general public's fear of crime for no good reason. I've looked at a few areas that I know to be very quiet and safe, and found 100 plus incidents reported in the last month.

They're also going to scare the high ranking officers that exist in ever force whose only concern seems to be our image.

I got an email from someone in another force who's been briefed this week by senior management to the effect that their force is recording too much and that they must no longer create incidents for piffling little calls that are going nowhere, but give advice and hang up without creating a log.

Coincidence? You decide.

Sunday 30 January 2011

Climbing the walls

It's been a damn stressful few days - fairly inevitable, as we're on lates around payday - and I'm really feeling it.

I don't mind being busy. I'd rather be busy than bored. The problem with busy, though, is that if we're busy everyone's busy, and everyone's expectations of everyone else will rise, everyone's stressed.and tempers fray. Add in the fact that we're all human and several of my colleagues have got problems at home just now and you've got a recipe for some snappy words. Plus most of our supervisors are on leave so we're working for strangers who work a bit differently from what we're used to...

So, a precis of what's happened since my last post.

Lots of death earlier in the month - we got the impression that a lot of old folks and suicide risks held on for Christmas and then gave up the ghost late December and early January.

Lots of nutters. Police are superstitious about the full moon, and that enormous reddish globe hanging over us earlier in the month seemed to bring on all the full on, knife-wielding, Grade One loonies.

Lots of edge-of-seat stuff that turned out to be utter pony. In the last few weeks, I've seriously believed that we've had a helicopter crash, a major new terrorist threat, an incredibly well-organised car-crime ring capable of hitting three high-value targets at the same time and a domestic-related murder with the victim buried in concrete under a new housing development, all of which turned out to be complete and utter horseshit.

Plus all the usual rubbish from the public. Just as an illustration, I popped down to our call centre earlier to see a friend there and he was taking a 999 call about a car with the music playing too loud when I showed up. Unusually, though, our SMT seem to have started making sense about certain issues. Watch this space...