Just Slow Down

The Daily Mirror were reporting this week that 99.99 per cent of cops are let of speeding tickets.

A Freedom of Information application showed that police cars set off  speed cameras 107,000 times in the last year, but only 150 police officers received tickets. *

Sarah Fatica from the road safety charity “Brake” said the figures were “incredibly worrying“. I’d agree, very worrying for victims of violent crime that there is a call for police vehicles to slow down & stick to the limits.

Last week we had a job where a lady on her own had been woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a door opening. She dialled 999. I sent all 3 cars available to me & a couple of traffic cars also made their way. Every single one of them went through 1 set of speed cameras & 3 of them went through 2. That’s 11 of those 107,000 activations.

They went on a  silent approach just in case whoever had opened the lady’s door was still in the area; we didn’t really want him/them to hear us coming from 2 miles away at 3 in the morning.

The first car which arrived on the scene drove past a VW Golf which was wheel-spinning out of the lady’s street in the opposite direction. The second car which arrived turned just as the Golf was driving past & was able to neatly slot in behind it. Within 3 minutes both traffic cars were behind the Golf, which refused to stop, they all went back through the speed cameras the other way.

To cut a long story short, we followed the Golf until it turned into a cul-de-sac & they 3 male occupants tried to run off. Two were caught by the car & another was chased down by PC Speedy about 200 yards down the road.

They’d burgled 3 houses in 3 different towns & had property from 2 of them still in the car.

By my reckoning we activated the speed cameras maybe 24 times on that one incident & it only lasted 7 or 8 minutes.

I really don’t think many police drivers are driving around at high speed for the fun of it; in our force, if you go through a speed camera, it better be documented on a current log or you can expect a ticket. I sometimes get very frustrated during an incident when I’m trying to direct resources, or pass & receive information when some officer who isn’t really at the sharp end of the job calls up to have it documented that although he’s still 5 miles from the scene, he’s just gone through a speed camera in the next town. But I understand why they do it, they’re arse-covering so they don’t get a ticket.

I think I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I wonder what everyone’s reaction would be if we drove everywhere at 30mph. We’d not catch as many people, prevent fewer injuries & deaths, but at least it would keep the Daily Mirror off our backs.

* mind you, the Mirror can’t seem to get it’s figures correct, in an article in August 2008, it said that in 2006 the police set off the cameras 900,000 times. I’d have thought a reduction of nearly 800,000 in just 2 years would be applauded. But I expect, being the Mirror, that neither figure is actually correct.

Ready, Steady, Cook!

I don’t know about all this fuss over the police ‘cooking the books‘ on violent crime. I didn’t realise there was any story in it, to be honest; we’ve been classifying crime to the government’s best advantage for 30 years, I have no reason to believe it’s not much longer than that.

What I don’t understand is that we’ve actually done anything wrong. The nuts & bolts of it are that we’ve apparently been under-recording violent crime & classifying stuff less serious than it actually was.

The example I’ve seen on TV all seem to revolve this around the GBH with Intent offence. GBH (grievous bodily harm) is a serious injury usually involving some kind of serious wound or broken bone, so a black eye would be ABH (actual bodily harm), a fractured eye-socket would be GBH. A more serious offence than straight GBH would be GBH with Intent, so not only did you cause a grievous injury, you actually meant to injure him.

The example the reports are giving is that someone who, for instance, tries to hit someone with a broken bottle but misses should be charged with GBH with intent, because they obviously meant to injure someone.

Maybe we have a lot of failed violent thugs. You can picture the scene. “I’m a failure officer, I really meant to do him some damage but I only managed to cause a little love-bite sized bruise, please record this as a GBH with intent, it’ll go down much better on the litter-clearing community service I’ll get.

I guess, ultimately, it is part of the government’s modern ethos of recording ‘everything’ in the biggest arse-covering exercise we’ve been through which means we now criminalise people for throwing cream buns & pushing each other in the playground.

New Police Pay Deal

So, a new three-year pay deal.

2.65% this year, 0.05% less each year thereafter.

Excellent Service

The Telegraph reports today that Norfolk Police are refusing to investigate one in four crimes. Unless there is a realistic prospect of catching someone, they will now decline to attend reports. The reports says that car crime, vandalism & thefts from outhouses will go largely uninvestigated.

I’m surprised this is news, I thought it was standard practice, to be honest. We stopped attending all crimes years ago. Most crime investigation goes along the lines of;

• crime is reported
• police officer turns up at some stage
• police officer asks if victim knows who did it, victim usually says no
• police officer asks neighbours if they know who did it, they normally say no.
• police officer notes that the incident wasn’t recorded on CCTV anywhere
• police officer makes report of crime & says he doesn’t know who did it either
• nothing else happens

We now don’t attend most crimes. There are some we always attend, even if it is several days later (as it often is). We attend all burglaries & assaults. We won’t attend thefts where there isn’t a named offender; you could lose some seriously expensive stuff - many, many thousands of pounds worth & we ain’t interested (but if you tell an ethnic minority to go back home, we’ll be round like a shot.)

We don’t attend damage or graffiti (unless it’s racist), we don’t attend most credit card fraud (we get the banks to report it, they rarely do, the stats must look really good these days).

We don’t do all this despite the fact that we have more police officers than we’ve had in history & in theory could attend every report of a crime within 15 minutes, guaranteed, if only all those officers were working on the front line.

In all the thousands & thousands of times I’ve done house to house enquiries after the fact, I can’t think of a single occasion where someone said, “Oh yeah, I saw it all, Jimmy Shit from down the road did it”.

Personally, even though most crime investigation is really a waste of time, I think it’s shocking that we don’t attend most crimes. If there is one thing we could do to boost the image of the police & make people feel a little better about their loss, it would be to actually turn up.

I think the reason we don’t attend is to make the crime figures better, after all, how many people must there be who have had a crime & said ‘well I don’t bother reporting it because the police never do anything, there’s no point’? There must be millions. (Actually, I have no idea, but it supports my argument better if we accept there are loads of unreported crimes)

Tough on…something

Recent reports from the Home Office indicated that they were going to get tougher on offenders caught in possession of knives.

This year has seen record amounts of fatal stabbings particularly of teenagers in London.

Investigations have revealed precious little evidence of any offenders being sentenced to the maximum prison term.

An article in the October issue of ‘Police Life‘ reveals what this tougher action will consist of.

Anyone who is convicted of a knife-related offence who is unemployed & sentenced to the maximum 300 hours of community service (or ‘community payback’ as it’s now being called) will complete their sentence in intensive blocks of up to 5 days a week.

The Home Office believes that this will represent a significant loss of liberty & free time & there will be “continued tough consequences” for not turning up. It doesn’t say what those tough consequences are but I’m not sure I’ve seen any evidence of toughness so far.

Justice minister David Hogan (who he?, Ed) said: “Offenders sentenced to pay for their crimes within the community can already expect to work hard & lose much of their free time. By introducing an intensive five days a week payback (that word again) for many knife crime offenders we are further toughening these punishments.”

He went on to say that initially this will only affect “the small number of knife crime offenders who are given the largest community payback sentences instead of custody.”

The tough on knife crime stance doesn’t really sound so tough, does it?

Up the Workers

The Police Regulations forbid police officers from taking an active part in politics & also prevent us from taking any form of industrial action.

Why is it then that the Met Black Police Association can do something so political as to take active action in seeking to prevent black & ethnic minorities from joining the police?

They announced recently that it would boycott recruitment drives among ethnic minorities, saying it would use an advertising campaign to “actively discourage” black and Asian people from joining the force because they were treated unfairly.

Sounds like political & industrial action to me.

Hello, is that the Stasi, I have some information…

Just as I look forward to getting my full pension ex-PC Stuart Janaway has had his taken away. He was sacked this week by Greater Manchester Police following a disciplinary investigation into his association or otherwise of the British National Party.

Janaway was found to have worn a BNP badge whilst off duty at a football match at Old Trafford in 2006. Details of how this came to the attention of the rubber heel squad doesn’t appear to be reported but at some stage they received information that he might have items connected to the right-wing party at his home address & obtained a search warrant. A photograph of his wearing the badge at the match was found.

The former chief of GMP, a serial shagger who topped himself earlier this year, made an order in 2004 banning employees of GMP being members of the BNP, National Front & Combat 18. A GMP spokesman has admitted that there was no evidence found that Janaway was a member of the BNP & the BNP itself has said that he is not a member. Never-the-less he has been ‘required to resign’, for a discipline offence which he doesn’t appear to have committed.

There are several things which concern me. Firstly, what are the police doing getting search warrants to investigate disciplinary offences? I guess they would have had to prove to a magistrate that they had sufficient cause to search his house for property linking him to a criminal matter, what was this matter? nobody is saying.

Secondly, WTF has it got to do with GMP what their employees think? Surely they should be concerned with what their employees do? I have no wish to support the BNP or much of what they stand for but I support their right to believe what ever they want to believe; they are a legal political party.

I’m also worried that the ‘thought police’ are creating more problems than they are solving. There is little equality in the way discipline matters are investigated. If you send an ‘inappropriate email’ or tell a dodgy joke you can get the sack, but threaten to cause harm to an ex female partner or try to get away with a criminal offence by perverting the course of justice, you can keep your job & even get promoted.

PC Tariq Mahmood, in the same force as Stuart Janaway, fled the scene of an RTC in which 2 people were hurt, he then sprayed his car to cover up any evidence of the collision and tried to persuade his sister & girlfriend to say they had been driving at the time of the accident. He was fined one week’s wages.

Compare the two cases? Was there fair justice in either of them? I don’t think so.

There he was, gone

So the Met Chief, Sir Ian Blair, has resigned.

Apparently, his position has become untenable without the backing of a man whose sole reason for his rise to high office has been the fact that he is a posh & talentless buffoon.

I’ve really not made my mind up about this one. I often bang on about how senior officers never suffer consequences for failings for which they ultimately are responsible, yet I am annoyed that his resignation has come as a result of what seems to be just political interfering from someone I wouldn’t trust to wash my police car (if I had one).

I expect that several wannabees are currently retrieving their previously crafted CVs & well-evidenced PDRs which they wrote over the last two years for just such an occasion in readiness for the application process for the top policing job in the country.

Doubtless the Black Police Association will be out celebrating & announcing proof of their stance against Blair in his resignation. Hopefully, the list of applicants won’t include names like Dizaei & Ghaffur.

Bring back the Stocks

Am I the only one somewhat sad that both guys in this photo were nicked this week?

The guy on the right is flooring firm manager Simon Cramer, who discovered the guy on the left Mark Gilbert had fraudulently cashed on the the company’s cheques & made it out to himself.

When Gilbert arrived for work, Cramer & some other employees grabbed him, tied his arms behind his back & put him in the company van to drive him to the middle of an Essex town. They then marched him through the town centre with a home-made placard round his neck reading “Thief. I stole £845. Am on my way to police station.”

Cramer said he was merely effecting a citizen’s arrest but the police took a dimmer view & arrested him for false imprisonment.

OK, maybe they took things a little too far in the way they ‘arrested’ the alleged thief but there is something in me which says ’serves him right’. I suspect that the humiliation & embarrassment of being paraded through the town centre with a big sign round his neck will have done more than the potential threat of a case at the local magistrates which would probably never get to court anyway either through being cautioned, or dropped by the CPS.

I suggest we do away with all the fixed penalty tickets for disorder, drunkenness & minor violence & instead parade people through town centres for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. I reckon it will have a much bigger effect than an £80 fine (a large percentage of which are never paid).

76 Trombones

Freedom of Information, don’t ya love it?

The latest release about the police is that we are currently spending squillions of tax-payer’s cash on brass bands.

South Yorkshire are spending about £20,000 a year of their band. GMP have spent over £200,000 in the last 9 years. Apparently, they’re spending all this cash on instruments, travel & refreshments. The authors of the stories suspect that about 1million quid has been spent in the last 8 years.

This is amazing. I’ve been in the job 30 years & never seen a police band. If I’d realised I could have had a new trumpet & some sandwiches courtesy of the chief constable, I’d have joined up years ago. They’ll be telling me I can have time off to bang out the rocking vibes of the Hovis advert to some OAPs at the local Derby & Joan next.

Where do I sign?

I’d like to make a complaint

If you want your police officers to be polite & efficient, don’t move to Hertfordshire. That’s the conclusion from the latest figures released on the number of complaints against police.

The IPCC has revealed that there were some 48,000 complaints made against officers last year. A quarter of those were for rudeness or incivility. Complaints resulting from people being stop-searched were 560. That seems pretty good considering there were nearly 1 million stop-searches carried out during the same period.

So what’s Hertfordshire got to do with it? I’m glad you asked, they come lowest in the bean-counter charts for the number of complaints per officer. The county comes out at about 475 complaints per 1,000 officers. The best force was Durham with a mere 158 complaints per 1,000 officers.

Doubtless chief officers up & down the country will be studying the stats with interest & you can guarantee that they will be delegating to superintendents who will delegate to chief inspectors to “do something about it“. Chiefs don’t like coming near the bottom of any performance indicators.

So money in the form of staff to come up with a strategy, staff to implement it (who will be different) & staff to monitor it & create Exel spreadsheets (different again), will be diverted from front-line policing so that the force gets a better ranking next year.

This will probably mean that more people will have to wait for a police response - probably several days - and thus more people will make complaints, and the force will come lower down the rankings next year until the whole cycle begins again.

It’s for the Children

I bumped into an old work friend of mine this week. I haven’t seen her for about 8 years, she was one of my old probationers back in the day when they thought I might have something useful to pass on to the new recruits.

She’d popped up to get the results of an interview for the Youth Team.

I’m not sure what the Youth Team do exactly. They don’t appear to wear uniforms & they work with kids, probably they just take them to Sri Lanka or Butlins or somewhere & try to persuade them not to be naughty.

Anyway, she got the job so she had a grin like a Cheshire Cat & that wasn’t just at seeing me suffering behind a radio terminal, although I couldn’t help thinking she was getting some glee at my obviously suffering demeanour.

We talked about her new job & how she got on in her interview. I was somewhat surprised to learn that although she was starting on the unit, she couldn’t actually work unsupervised with any of the little dears until she had undergone a CRB check.

That’s as in Criminal Records Bureau check, the same one that teachers & social workers & paedophiles take to stop them working with children.

So my colleague, who prior to going on the Youth Team could walk into someone’s house, deem that the child was at risk & pick them up & walk out placing a Police Protection Order on them, couldn’t work with a recidivist 16-year old career criminal in case she’d somehow been convicted of a child sex offence during her previous exemplary employment with Her Majesty’s finest.

Strange.

Make That Two Pairs

I can’t be the only one drawing up the deckchair & preparing the knitting (or was it crocheting) at the spectacle of the Met Police’s ongoing battle between the top ranking officers & the public executions about to take place.

It seems Met chief Ian Blair has taken my advice & suspended Commander Ali Dizaei over the various allegations of not doing police-type stuff.

The Guardian described affairs as Scotland Yard’s race row ‘erupting’ again. I wouldn’t say it’erupted so much as being bubbling away furiously for the last few weeks. The end game is going to be fantastic. I wonder how many will end up shot down in flames.

I suspect that no matter what happens. The ordinary copper will lose out with everyone slagging ‘the police’ off again. The Black Police Association will up it’s campaign against ‘the police’, and ethnic minority groups will continue to be underrepresented within the ranks of the force, er, service.

Trouble at t’ Mill

How has this man still got a job?

Commander Ali Dizaei has been a controversial figure in the Metropolitan Police for some years.

Iranian-born Dizaei, was acquitted of corruption charges several years ago following a multi-million pound investigation.

He is currently under investigation by the Met again, this time for allegedly misusing Met credit cards. Coincidentally, he heads the Black Police Association which itself has had some financial ‘controversy’ having mislaid thousands of pounds of it’s government/charity funding & failing to file accounts for years in a row.

Last week the Daily Mail accused Dizaei of colluding with a fellow Iranian, millionaire solicitor Shahrokh Mireskandari, himself a controversial character, in undermining the police case against a female client of Mireskandari whom he is defending for killing a cyclist in a hit & run accident in London. The 4×4 used in the crime was later found. The female owner of the vehicle awaits trial over the incident. She was invited with 2 members of her family to Dizaei’s 3rd wedding reception & Dizaei is accused of attending meetings at the lawyers office with the express purpose of pointing out flaws in the police investigation to maximise the defendant’s chances of being found not guilty, not the kind of behaviour you might expect of one of the country’s top ranking officers.

Mireskandari is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for his claim to have won his law degree from a university in Hawaii which appears to be a mailing address office closed down by the US authorities. He was convicted in the States of a telemarketing scam & moved to the UK. His firm has been subject of investigations into overcharging clients including a case where a fixed fee of £1000 was agreed for work but the final bill came to £19,000. In another case they charged an airline company £500,000 for work which a specialist judge found was worth just a fifth of that amount.

Mireskandari is legal advisor to the Black Police Association.

Back to Dizaei, his recent problems don’t stop there, he is now also under investigation accused of making up evidence after arresting a man during an incident at an Iranian restaurant. Dizaei says he was hit with part of a hubble-bubble pipe after a bust up with a male. He arrested the man.

The CPS has said that after examination of CCTV footage & ‘other evidence’ it has found ” ‘a number of significant factual conflicts” & dismissed any criminal case against the man. The Metropolitan Police Authority have passed the investigation to the IPCC.

Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily Mail this week, describes Dizaei as “a disgrace to the uniform”.

Dizaei & the Black Police Association are now threatening to start a publicity campaign advising ethnic minorities not to join the police because of racism within the force.

I heard someone say on hearing that Sir Ian Blair had suspended Tarique Ghaffur that Blair had finally “grown a pair”. It seems that he may need to grow another pair; I see no way he can let Dizaei remain in his post under the current circumstances.

Time will tell.

Punch & Judy

So, the public Punch & Judy match that is the spat between Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair & Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur has resulted in Ghaffur being suspended from his duties, or put on ‘gardening leave’.

I can’t say I’m surprised since Ghaffur went public with his press conference bleating about being racially & religiously discriminated against. He alleges that he has been treated less favourably than white officers & also that he has not had his contract renewed because he is over 50.

Ghaffur comes as the latest in a line of officers who have tried, sometimes successfully to sue the Met for discrimination. I have no doubt that there have been examples of discrimination within the force. I can honestly say I have never seen or heard any racist behaviour. I have seen several cases of black or Asian officers who have been treated more favourably than white colleagues & I have seen two cases of Asian officers who were totally bloody useless & failed to make their probation who took the force to an industrial tribunal - sometimes known as playing the ‘race’ card, both lost. There was no evidence that they had been discriminated against.

I don’t know the Met Chief personally, but from what I do know, I don’t believe him to be a racist & I find it incredulous that he would behave in any way which could possibly be construed as racist.

The recent industrial tribunal brought by one of the Met’s other senior officers, Commander Shabir Hussain agreed. They found the Met had no case to answer when Shabir brought a similar case against the Met just last week. Shabir, who rose to one of the highest police ranks in the land, complained that he had been overlooked for promotion to a similar rank as Ghaffur 4 times while white colleagues were promoted. Rather than accept that other officers might be better than him, he decided he was being racially discriminated against & brought a case. The tribunal found that there was “no substance” to Shabir’s claim. He had demanded £750,000 compensation.

Ghaffur is seeking £1million compensation at his forthcoming tribunal. I hope the same things happens at his tribunal as Shabir’s. I’m guessing the legal advice the Met is getting is the same; it’s a bold move to suspend an officer who is making racial discrimination claims against you in such a public arena as the police. They have a lot to lose.

Ghaffur must be the victim of his own petulance. Rather than build his case & deal with it through the same channels as everyone else, he decided to take it public, he held a press conference & invited press & TV & publicly made his accusations against the Met chief - he is suing him personally. His publicists, legal team & the Black Police Association are also engaged on a course of publicity of Ghaffur’s plight, almost as if they are getting their retaliation in first. The damage this has done to the Met must be rather great & I think Blair had no choice but to put up or shut up.

Of course, whatever the outcome of the eventual tribunal, whenever that is, Ghaffur & Shabir are on a no lose basis. If they win the case they are quids in, literally many hundreds of thousands of quids. If they lose, they go back to the same job, take their £90,000 & £180,000 respectively & have no penalty for making false or malicious claims. It’s a win, win situation.

Ghaffur is the third highest ranking police officer in the country, has a salary of £180,000 more than any other chief constable, he is an ethnic minority officer who has risen to the highest echelons of the police. When he retires he’s entitled to a payout of over £550,000 & a pension of £80,000. It would take rather a lot of convincing for me to believe he has suffered discrimination.

We’re Doomed

Well I’m not as I’ll not be here but lots are.

Thousands of coppers are going to be out of a job if Lib Dems get their way. The latest idea to reclaim the streets, cure crime & generally solve the nation’s problems is for police officers to undergo yearly fitness tests. They want beat bobbies to pass an annual fitness check or get a desk job.

Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: “Frontline policemen (that’ll annoy lots of people) must be fit enough to do their job properly. Free gyms for officers & fitness tests will help ensure our police are a match for the yobs & criminals who blight our neighbourhoods.”

To be fair, I think they have a point. But I suspect that a great many officers, particularly those with longer service, would struggle to pass any kind of meaningful fitness test which would mean queues forming to cover all the desk jobs that aren’t available or re-employment at pie testing factories or somewhere.

It’s a shame that the chief officers haven’t had the same opinion. I can remember when most police stations had some form of mini-gym with multi-gyms & weights available. I even used to use one myself at my last but one, two & three nicks. The bosses decided they needed the space for filing police complaint forms or other such importance & have taken most of them away.

We used to get time off for representing the force at sports events, this was also taken away. There is little to no encouragement from the employers to keep their staff fit unless you happen to be on a firearms squad.

I haven’t had a fitness test since I left training school 30 years ago & the fitness training we did a couple of times a year during riot squad training was a pain for a day, but most people never did anything in between & still managed to pass the shield run 6 months later.

It’s a great idea in theory, I’ll be interested to watch developments from the luxury of my settee & a bag of chips if the Lib Dems ever get it implemented. (labour will probably steal the idea, spend millions advertising what a fantastic idea it is & then do bugger-all about it, anyway)

Smile for the Camera

Oh dear, PCSO Bloggs won’t be pleased. Another opportunity – if one were required – to slag off PCSOs again.

The headline read “Photographing thugs is assault” & referred to the story of a resident in London plagued by anti-social behaviour from teenagers at a local school. The headmaster had advised him to identify the offenders so the school could take some action.

David Green went out to photograph the youths, one of whom promptly threatened to kill him while another phoned the police on his mobile.

The report claims that a PCSO arrived & warned Mr Green that taking photos of youths without their permission was illegal & could lead to a charge of assault.

I have no idea whether this was actually what the PCSO said & neither, it appears, does the Metropolitan Police who told the newspaper that they had no record of the incident.

If it is true I’m not sure where the PCSO got their information from; there is nothing illegal in taking photos of people without their permission. If to do so could lead to a charge of assault then I’ll be at the front of the queue to bring a violence case against my local council who insist on taking my photo every time I go into town.

I’ve mentioned before similar cases of people being given misleading information & warnings in regards to photography in public places. We all make mistakes, fortunately mine don’t appear in large print in the national newspapers.

Hello, Police…

South Wales Police says it has seen a 10% drop in the amount of unnecessary 999 calls after it changed the way its call-takers answered the phone.

Apparently, when callers are greeted with the phrase, “South Wale Police, what is your emergency?” it encourages callers to realise that they haven’t actually got an emergency & stops them dialling 999 in future.

I think we should do the same in my force. A 10% cut in wasted calls would be very handy, how many extra doughnuts can you fit in when you do 10% less work?

I’d refine the opening phrase even more though to get an even bigger drop in calls. “Hello, police emergency, if you haven’t got an emergency this call is going to cost you £10 which will automatically be charged to your telephone bill, thank you for calling, we’re here to help make your community safer in partnership.”

I bet we’d get a significantly bigger drop in wasted 999 calls than South Wales’ piffly little 10%!

One out, all out

Apparently we’re going on a work to rule, the police that is. I’ve read it in 3 papers today so it must be true.

Of course, we can’t actually work-to-rule because we are banned from industrial action. The press reckon that because we’re being shafted again over pay, we’re going to stop doing the job all the favours & good will that is required to keep the machine rolling.

All the unpaid extra work, voluntary rest day working, all that kind of thing.

They printed an extract of a letter from the Federation to all its members which reminded officers of their duties & requirements & hinted that there were also a lot of things which we do as a given that we’re not required to do.

I’ve not seen anything which recommends any kind of withdrawal of good will, and to be honest, I don’t think it would work. There are too many people who will see some people withdrawing their overtime as a wonderful opportunity to grab some extra OTs. An awful lot of people rely on extra cash each month either just to get by or to keep them in the lifestyle they have grown accustomed to.

I expect that nothing will happen and we’ll get shafted either way.

Woof, woof

More doggy capers in the news recently.

The ACPO guidelines on the use of police dogs are being re-written. Peter Vaughn, deputy chief constable of South Wales Police is the mouthpiece on them.

He is quoted as saying, “The draft guidelines outline a general principle that forces should consider what steps can be taken to avoid offending people. This might include different categories of people such as those with a fear of dogs, for example, or asthma sufferers who may be sensitive to dog hair.”

The response in the national press is unsurprisingly one of piss-taking & derision. The Express sums it up with their headline “Sorry Sir, is it all right if we set our police dog on you?”

I’ve not seen the guidelines so I have no idea if the DCC’s comments have been taken out of context. Either the press are picking up on an element & extrapolating it to the nth degree for a story – the press doing that, surely not – or someone really has forgotten that the job of the police is to police