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...
Wednesday 24 August 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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