Knowing the ground

As I've mentioned before, we're a small force with a small central control room.  We operators can therefore get moved around to different areas.

I've been working on a part of the force area that I don't know very well lately, and although I've slowly got to know it (and of course we have maps), there's just no substitute for knowing the ground.

Today I was back on my favourite patch, the area that I actually know, live in, and drive about in.  I know the landmarks, I know the local names for things, I know the wealthy areas and the dodgy areas.  More than once, I directed officers to certain locations from my own knowledge, not the map.

It was like slipping into fifth gear.  With a decent map and software that I know, I could, theoretically work anywhere in the country - but it's so much easier with local knowledge.

Suicide and Cynicism

A surprising amount of police work is what you might call social work with a stab vest on.

Well, I say surprising...  it surprised me, when I was new, but any police officers or staff reading this will just be thinking, "and?"

Social Services are even more strapped for cash and resources than we are, and they don't operate 24 hours, so we tend to find ourselves very familiar with the vulnerable people, mad people, and suicide risks on our patch.

Small digression: I visited our local Ambulance control room a while back and spent an entertaining half-hour playing the name game - we had all the same regular callers and swapped some good stories about the real characters.

Anyway: we (call-takers especially, despatchers and officers slightly less so) hear threats of suicide so often that they start to wash over us.

There's the frequent callers, who generally don't get beyond a nice chat with someone in the call centre.  All the calltakers know them, and they know the drill.  There's the crooks, who think it will get them out of a spell in custody.  There's the people actually standing on a motorway bridge or tall building, who are generally quite happy to come quietly once an officer arrives.  I rather suspect this last category are people who know they need help but haven't managed to get it through the NHS, so they get themselves sectioned - I actually feel an enormous sympathy for them, being forced into that situation to get the help they need.

And then, just occasionally, there's the one who succeeds.

They're never called in by the victim himself - it's always a manager, concerned because he hasn't made it to work, or a neighbour worried by the lack of movement and buildup of post.  He - and it's always been he, in my experience - has never indicated anything of the like before.  He's kept it all to himself, never shared his dark feelings with anyone.  Often, he's completely unknown to the police or social services.  He's just very efficiently done away with himself.

We get very blaise about suicide threats - especially when (as so often!) they come from hardened crooks or regular nuisance callers.  I hear my colleagues say, "let him do it then" or "why should we stop him if that's what he wants?"

I understand where that frustration comes from.  I know why they say it.  But I never say things like that.

And when they do succeed...

When I have to deploy an officer to a bloated, flyblown corpse, everybody's defences go up, and the tasteless jokes start flying... 

Who mourns them?  Who grieves for these sad, lonely people, with no friends and no family?  Who lifts a glass and sheds a tear?

I do.

Who Owns Stuff

Give me two seconds with the Police National Computer and I can tell you who owns most vehicles on the road, barring exceptions where the record has been lost (sometimes accidentally, usually deliberately).  Those cars are invariably being driven very quickly away from the scene of a ram raid.

All my cars have been cheap old bangers, as I'd rather spend my money on fun stuff than car loans, so I don't tend to think of cars as being very valuable items and yet tracking their ownership is easy.

The real headache is tracking down stuff I actually consider valuable.  This week I've spent what feels like an inordinate amount of time trying to find out who is responsible for: a private road, a piece of rural land, a large derelict building, a dog and two horses.  That's plus the small bits of property - bicycles, those electric thingies that old people get around on, lost bags...

I don't own a lot of stuff, but my valuable electrical items are marked, and my dog is microchipped.

Bring on the day that everything - and I do mean everything - wears a numberplate.

National press talks rubbish. Again.

My attention was drawn to this story by a friend in London who saw it on the local TV news there.

It is, as I have come to expect from the press in general, a load of absolute bollocks.

I can't comment on exactly how the LAS are using Airwave, but I will claim an expert knowledge of the system itself.

Airwave doesn't work in the rain?  Absolute stuff and nonsense.  There is anecdote and rumour to suggest all sorts of things - it doesn't work in the rain, sets close to each other cancel each other out, it works best if you lie down...  I've heard the lot from our officers and I'm sure Ambulance crews have come up with equal amounts of toss to scare each other with.  I'm surprised that the HSE fell for it though.

The handheld terminals are very sturdy and I'd be extremely surprised to hear of a panic button not working.  I've known sets to still work after a pretty comprehensive beating, and even a dip in a swimming pool.  Anecdotally, the transmit button seems to wear out first - guess what, it's the button that gets used the most.  Even if a panic button were to fail, the user should realise that immediately from the way his set reacts and start yelling for help with his normal transmit button - that should get a pretty swift response from a professional control room!

As always, the response you get will depend on the training level of control room staff and other officers.  I remember the first time I got an emergency activation, in training.  All the awoogas and flashing lights went off and I didn't have a clue what to do, so my tutor immediately took over and got that officer the help he needed.

Apparently on the TV news report there was criticism of the old LAS pre-Airwave radio system because it didn't work in the tunnels during the 07/07 incident.  Well, duh...  An advantage of Airwave is that it can be made to work in tunnels through a system of repeaters along a cable, given a fairly hefty investment.  If the will and the cash are there, it can be done.  If not, we're reduced to yelling - no kind of radio signal will ever be made to penetrate solid rock.

Airwave is not perfect.  It is also not new.  It's tried and tested, and if it's used properly it's a damn sight more effective than the old-fashioned radios.  It's not cheap to implement, and staff using it need to be properly trained.  It all costs money.

I use the thing for 36 hours every week and I'm highly trained on it.  I know what its strengths and weak points are, and how to work around them should it become necessary.

Suggesting that there is a fundamental problem with the system itself is irresponsible and wrong.  Shame on you, BBC.

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In addition, Reynolds has just posted something about this on his most excellent blog.

No more Pledge!

Hurrah!  No more Policing Pledge - we now exist only to fight crime.

Or do we?

Does this mean that we stop looking for teenagers who've gone "missing" because their parents can't be bothered to discipline them and look after them properly?  Picking up drunks and mad people from the street?  Dealing with verbal-only domestics?  How about all the welfare checks on confused little old ladies that we do?

Yet another example of a politician spouting out a nice soundbite without actually having any understanding of the situation.  Why do I even sound surprised?

Why are you a copper?

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.

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.