After a recent post about people failing to do anything about the unacceptable behaviour of certain ‘celebrities’, it’s refreshing to see that British Airways are happy to buck the trend.
‘Supermodel’ (whatever one of those is) Naomi Campbell has been banned for life from flying with BA after an incident this week where she was arrested for spitting at police officers after BA refused to load one of her bags as it was overweight.
She is alleged to have ‘flown’ into a rage when her bag wasn’t put on the plane. She abused staff & police calling them assholes & is further alleged to have spat in the face of one of the police officers, for which she was arrested & lead off the plane in handcuffs. Several reports are also accusing her of racist behaviour calling police officers "fucking white honkeys" & calling a female officer a white slag, as she was lead away in handcuffs.
A BA source said, "Banning her will send out a worldwide message that such behaviour is totally unacceptable."
Ms Campbell appears to be a serial sufferer of failing to control her temper. I seem to recall 2 previous incidents involving her violence in recent times, one involved chucking a mobile phone at another woman.
Let’s hope the Crown Prosecution Service show the same resolve as BA & charge her when she answers her bail in May.
Well done BA! Might not be able to run a new airport terminal or look after thousands of other people’s bags but it’s good to see the one bag they do know the location of happens to belong to a stroppy celeb who can’t get her own way, again.
It’s official. This blog is shite, it says so on the internet so it must be true.
Commenting on police blogs, PCSO Bloggs says, "After a while, though, you run out of material. You say your piece and then all that’s left is to comment on political news stories and post the odd YouTube video."
Oh dear, I commented on a political story this week AND posted a YouTube video, so it must be me she’s talking about!
And now, with this entry, I’ve gone & done another post which lacks material, is old & unoriginal… Wait a minute! It’s brand new, it’s all my own work & therefore must be original, things are looking up, perhaps it’s not me after all.
Mind you, I’ll give PCSO Bloggs one thing; it is very difficult coming up with something to post day in, day out, every bloody day for 7 months. 420 posts & counting (as opposed to PCSO Bloggs’ 79 posts.) So what I lack in quality I certainly make up for in quantity which is all that matters, according to my pie-eating tutor.
Maybe I’m just being a little sensitive & paranoid & it’s not me that the good PCSO is complaining about or maybe this blog really is shite.
I’ve never fallen asleep on nights in the control room, honestly, I haven’t.
Which is more than can be said for some. It’s not too bad when you’re doubl-crewed because your partner can pick up any jobs or radio traffic that comes in.
It’s not because of any moral duty that I don’t knock out a few ZZZs. It’s more to do with the fact that I have to be in motion in order to enter the land of nod at work.
I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat while sitting in the passenger seat of a fully marked patrol car, but if the car parks up, that’s me instantly awake.
One nick I was at had a guy who drove the area car. On a night shift he’d often drive out of the rear yard & head straight for some woods on the edge of town whereupon he’d park up, switch off the lights & recline the seat. There was me for the next hour studying the local wildlife, counting the stars & trying my best not to look like a dogger.
You can tell the ones who kip on nights. For the inexperienced amongst you, here are some tell-tale signs to look for when the shift comes back at 6 in the morning to hand the keys over.
they don’t actually come back at 6, or 6.15, or 6.30. If they’re not back by 6.45 start checking the likely spots, secluded parks, multi-storeys without CCTV, police station garages.
There is dried dribble down their chin.
There is an imprint on their forehead of the word FORD spelled backwards.
The switchboard is taking reports of a policeman who appears to be sitting on a petrol station forecourt whilst under the influence of death.
The last one happened to a mate of mine. When he fell asleep it was 5.30 in the morning & the petrol station was closed. When he rose from his slumber it had been open twenty minutes & people were filling their cars with petrol all around him.
Our shift all went round someone’s house after one late shift around Christmas. I fell asleep on the sofa. I still have the photograph of me with a world record for the most Christmas decorations someone can balance on a sleeping person’s face in one go.
The ‘management’ must love big operations. It gives a chief inspector or superintendent months off chasing stats so they can write an operational order. This guarantees that once the operation is finished they will be awarded a chief constable’s comendation while the real police work goes largely unnoticed.
I think most operational planning just means getting hold of the last operation & copying it then changing a few words so it looks fresh, new & dynamic.
The operational order is duly produced & packed full of useless information. It can run into a couple of hundred pages & lists in minute detail lots of interesting things like who is on duty & what squad they’re in & roughly where they should be. There’ll be lots of stuff about ‘community impact’ & diversity - there always is.
There won’t be anything in there of any practical use to the control room when someone calls up & asks something remotely practical. Or there may be but it will be buried somewhere in the 200 page manual, but when an officer is after an answer in the next 15 seconds, it’s not much good telling them to stand by while you spend 2 hours reading through in the hope the info you need might be in there.
On major operations, as a controller, you spend the time fielding questions you can’t answer, hoping someone else is listening out there on the airwaves & will jump in to rescue you. I have this feeling everyone I talk to on the radio thinks I’m a numpty & wonders why I don’t know the ins & outs of a cat’s arse on every aspect of anything that might happen during a major music festival or sports event or protest or disaster. I don’t know because nobody ever consults the control room to find out what information we need to be a part of a successfully run operation.
On the last one I did someone thought it would be a good idea to transfer all the people who were stuck on the roads leading to the event & wanted to complain through to the radio operators in the temporary control room we had set up for the event. Instead of telling officers I didn’t know why the sandwiches had run out I had to put them on hold to tell angry motorists I didn’t know whether they’d get in before the event finished. Deep joy.
We took some flak in the local papers for ages after that one. The superintendent & a couple of inspectors still got their commendations, so that was nice.
I’m, on the whole, a supporter of PCSOs; I work with quite a few who are excellent and do a lot of great work in their community, have assisted in many arrests, detained quite a few suspects & dealt with loads of calls the police officers are either too busy for or can’t be arsed with. (even if some of them do go round in pairs)
It is with some disappointment, then, that I bring you the following clip:
Every 20 minutes an officer is assaulted, stabbed, run over, shot & beaten…..
So says a recent BBC TV programme on BBC Scotland; Police Attacks: Officer Down. You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer but you’ll have to be quick.
Last year there were 13,000 attacks in Scotland, 11,000 of those were in Strathclyde (which covers Glasgow). 35 officers in Scotland are attacked every day. In 2007, 1,000 needed hospital treatment.
Among several reports, the documentary told the story of PC Shirley Tindall, stabbed in the head during an unprovoked attack when she knocked on someone’s door. The offender was sentenced to 1 year imprisonment. He served 17 weeks.
The programme reported the whole legal system which should protect police officers against attack, has failed. Another case involved a male charged with 2 counts of attempted murder after ramming several police vehicles whilst being captured for a previous attempted murder of a female CID officer. 4 officers were hospitalised as a result of being repeatedly rammed. He pleaded guilty to driving offences & the crown accepted his not guilty pleas to attempted murder under plea-bargaining. He was sentenced to 24 months for disqualified driving & no insurance.
Of 12,000 assaults on police 3,000 made it to court. The courts are accepting guilty pleas for breach of the peace or other crimes if the assaults on police are dropped. Other offences are deemed more important than assaulting an officer.
The reporter visited Barlinnie Prison. One criminal (above) charged with several assaults on police during his career admitted that he had plea-bargained the assaults on police away on almost every occasion he had been prosecuted. He admitted threatening police with a handgun after an armed robbery. The charge was dropped when he pleaded guilty to the robbery.
The researchers applied under Freedom of Information for figures of how many assaults on police were plea-bargained away. They never received an answer.
Statistically, the average officer is likely to be assaulted 24 times during a career, the figures are rising…
Yet another story of how our illustrious MPs have their snouts in the trough.
Today we are graced with the news that a three-year battle by Parliament to block us from knowing how much certain MPs have claimed on ‘expenses’ was lost & they were forced to reveal the truth. Having seen them it’s no wonder they wanted to keep this stuff secret. I mean, it wouldn’t do the people who pay their wages being entitled to know how much of it is trousered under the guise of ‘expenses’.
Not only do we find some MPs paying their children tens of thousands of pounds for doing non existent work but they’re also claiming tens of thousands of pounds for mortgages on mortgage-free properties. Apparently the rules allow them to get the public to pay for a second home, even when that second home has already been bought & paid for. In 2005/2006, Gordon Brown was allowed to claim £18,000 for a mortgage-free London flat. Claims include such things as over 6 grand in food for John Prescott (now we know who ate all the pies), Tony Blair had a new dishwasher & we also paid for his TV licence. The Speaker of the house is already being investigated for claiming £4,000 for his wife’s taxi fares. (that’ll be the chap who is charged with heading the investigation into MPs expenses - talk about lunatics taking over the asylum!).
So let me get this right & correct me if I’m wrong. MPs who apply & are successful for a position within their party & then get voted in are entitled to a second home. OK, I follow that, especially if they live more than 100 miles from Parliament & don’t want to commute like the rest of the people who work in London. So we have to pay their mortgage on the second home & when they retire, move on or fail to get re-elected they get to keep the house which has probably increased massively in price thus making a huge profit on a second home which we’ve paid for? And they don’t have to pay anything back?
And we have to pay the extra expense of food because, presumably they didn’t eat anything when they weren’t MPs and being an MP incurs additional expenses such as eating? And the free house their getting on the tax-payer has to be cleaned so they can claim, say £4,981 (Gordon Brown) to clean the house. My house is quite clean but it didn’t cost 5 grand to keep it that way.
Oh, and the reason they refused to reveal these figures & it took a 3-year legal battle? Because it would reveal their address & security information about them & their houses. Nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to keep their little nest eggs free from interference. Strange that, given that the info came out today & I didn’t see anything about how many CCTV cameras are installed at 95 Take-us-for-a-ride Mews.
You know, when I joined the job, our wages were considered quite low. In order to attract people into the job they had to offer inducements, these were in the form of either free accommodation or a rent allowance which we could put towards a house. We were able to claim medical fees back. Some of us had expenses towards clothing if we didn’t wear the blue suit provided. We could claim the cost of injections to protect us against some of the diseased with whom we come into daily contact.
Gradually, over time, all these expenses were taken away by the same people who are grabbing sheds full of cash from people who don’t know any better (us).
And they had the cheek to deny us £200 in back pay.
You know, one of the things about blogging when you’re a police officer is the sheer amount of stuff you can’t say. Not because you’re breaking some secrecy or revealing stuff which shouldn’t be revealed but because of you do reveal it you identify which force you’re from. There is no protection if you are a police officer, unless you are revealing some kind of criminal act, you are afforded no protection by revealing things which the public ought to know about their police service.
I’d love to be able to tell you about various projects undertaken by our force which cost from a few hundred grand up to several million which, when looked at from outside the force would be seen as a complete waste of public cash.
There is no end of examples of technology which has been bought & paid for & either never worked & was binned or doesn’t live up the potential of the private companies who marketed them to us or the senior officers who swallowed the advertising hook line & sinker without understanding the requirements of the technology & the practical limitations.
The amount of cash which gets chucked down the drainhole for unnecessary building work, expenditure on non-essential stuff like office equipment which was totally wasteful & only done in an effort to spend the budget, fearful that if this year’s wasn’t spent, next year’s would be decreased. I don’t suppose we are any different from any other public service in that respect.
Of course, most of these things would almost instantly reveal the identity of the force concerned.
I don’t suppose there’d be much interest in anodyne stories with no detail, people want to know the details, it’s human nature.
Mind you, if I said ‘we bought a system for a few hundred grand & it doesn’t work’ the professional standards departments in half the forces across the country would think I was talking about their force.
You’ve got to feel sorry for MP Harriet Harman, she was snapped this week walking round her constituency in Peckham (London) wearing a stab-proof vest in company with a few of the Met’s finest (two PCs and Superintendent Knacker of the Yard who last did some foot patrol before ’stabbies’ were invented).
You can imagine the conversation between the members of the Safer Neighbourhoods Team (like that’s not an oxymoron).
PC A, "Bit of bad luck getting that f****** Harriet Harman today. I’ve got 3 council meetings & a dangerous dog to square off."
PC B, "So what we gonna do?"
PC A, "Walk behind her & don’t talk to her, they might not think she’s with us."
PC B, "Obviously, we’ll have to leave all the talking to the boss in case we say something which is factual, but what about making her look really stupid?"
PC A, "Ideal! Tell her some bollocks about health & safety & make her wear a stab vest"
PC B, "And get one that’s 2 sizes too small so she really does look a like a twat."
