Just a Thought
I don’t know much about Civitas, well, OK, I don’t actually know anything about them other than they are described in the papers this week as a "think tank". presumably this is where people get together in some kind of large container to think about things.
Recently, they’ve been thinking about police work or to be more precise, the lack of police work.
Apparently, we only spend 14% of our time on patrol. This finding must be why we spend 2 weeks every year filling in forms documenting everything we do every 15 minutes, so that Civitas can look at these forms & think about them.
Civitas have also thought about the police spending more time getting easy detections & ignoring things which are a bit more important, difficult & which the public actually want us to investigate. They say that we have to get so many "sanction detections" a month by either charging, cautioning or fining an offender, and arresting or fining a normally law-abiding person for a minor offence is a good way of reaching our targets. It says that the police insists on criminalising those whose offences are ‘trivial’ because it helps to meet our targets.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Civitas have been sitting in their tank & reading all the police blogs since we’ve been saying this for the last 3 years or more. There doesn’t seem to be anything in their report which you can’t find on one blog or another (or all of them).
I don’t know what the government will think of the think tank’s thoughts but I think it won’t make any difference to them because there are none so blind as those who will not see.
