Sir, The Superintendent’s an Arse (again)
Some senior officers come up with some cracking schemes to get them noticed by the Chief (and thus grease the rungs of the slippery promotion ladder even further).
We had one who realised that the more coppers there were in the establishment, the less of them there were actually on the street. This is a well-known phenomenon in police circles where giving extra resources decreases the ends results and is known as Newtons 4th Law of Police management Cock-ups.
Apparently, complaints from members of the public saying that they never saw a police officer were increasing.
Our boss’s brainwave to solve the problem, and a quick path to tea & medals on the chief constable’s croquet lawn, was to get all the police cars in the division recalled up to the garage where the mechanics were instructed to wire up the lights so that a static blue light on the roof bar was switched on whenever the headlights were activated.
This meant that during the hours of darkness we were lit up like christmas trees. The good thing was that more people saw us, you couldn’t help seeing us with a blue light displayed everywhere we went! The thing was that the only people who benefitted were the scrotes & criminals who now had a head starts as they could tell a police car was coming from at least 1/2 a mile away.
When the new policy filtered through to ground level, quite a few PCs stuck reports in basically saying it was a bloody stupid idea & arrest rates would tumble as naughty people would see us coming for miles and just run off before we’d even reached the scene. These reports were ignored due to the fact that they actually came from people who knew what they were talking about rather than a numpty in an office who did 18 months of police work and the rest of their careers getting promoted and sucking up to whichever management gimmick was next in vogue. The superintendent, being an arse (as most of them are)ignored our pleas.
He ignored them right up until the moment the chief wanted to know why the arrest figures on the division were pointing the wrong way on his graph at Police Towers. Shortly after this epiphany moment all the cars were recalled to the police garage to have their wiring looms altered back.
