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.

They decided that in order to stamp out passport fraud, the answer would be to arrange for people applying for a passport to have face-to-face interviews. 216,581 applicants have attended these sessions up until July 2008.

The cost of introducing the scheme helped to raise the cost of a passport from £42 to £72 in 2005. The bil for the interviews has been some £96million & the monthly running costs are £2.5million, so that makes about 115million of our lovely English pounds.

Fortunately, this has all been money well spent; not a single case of fraudulent applications has been uncovered as a result of applicants having an interview and none of the 216,000 people had their applications rejected.

It makes you proud to be a tax-payer.

Take a look at the video & wait until the deed has been done for an appearance of a ‘professional’ witness.

The MOD has just paid out £2.4million to a Kosovan man who was accidentally shot in the face by a British soldier.

Six men were driving round a British-guarded building in Pristina in 1999, firing guns in the air to celebrate a national holiday.

A group of paratroopers, fearing they were under fire & in danger, opened fire on the jeep killing 2 occupants & wounding Mohamed Bici. He was subsequently flown to the UK & treated on the NHS. He was then granted legal aid to sue the MOD in a British court. He won £346,000 legal costs & £2,054,000 cash. The paratroopers were found innocent of any wrong-doing at an enquiry.

Royal Marine, Mark Ormerod was offered £214,000 when he lost both legs & an arm after being blown up.

A similar injury to Mr Bici’s would earn just £11,000 compensation should it happen to one of our servicemen.

I didn’t expect the senior executive to apologise regarding the death of Baby-P, after all, nobody in authority apologises for anything because an apology can be construed as an admission of guilt, but it was very interesting to see the little graphs & charts presented by Sharon Shoesmith to learn how good her department is despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

I had a case of ‘been there, done that’ on reading ex-Haringay social worker, Nevres Kermal’s story in the paper today.

This is a social worker who claims she tried to blow the whistle on Haringay’s social services department’s woeful practices in protecting children.

Ms Kermal claims she warned bosses & government ministers about poor practices in her department, but was ignored & subsequently targeted by those same bosses.

Complaints of being overworked & understaffed must ring bells in any public authority throughout the land these days. Money being mis-spent on team building trips abroad & tea parties for staff. Nothing new there.

Ms Kermal claims that when she brought matters to the attention of her managers they became hostile towards her. She says she outlined cases of neglect & abuse being ignored by social workers direct to Ms Shoesmith herself but was basically ignored.

She says as a direct result of her efforts to put matters right her managers instigated a series of trumped up charges against her resulting in her being investigated for an allegation of assaulting a teenager & further for being an unfit mother herself.

One could argue that these are merely the ramblings of a slighted worker who ended up being sacked by her department & is trying to get her own back. Given that there will now be 3 separate enquiries into the sad case of the death of Baby-P I guess time will reveal whether Ms Kermal speaks with forked tongue or not.

But I have seen similar situations within the police which clearly mirrors what Ms Kermal alleges to have happened at Haringay. Managers don’t like it when their boat is rocked. Rather than sort out the matters being brought to their attention, they take any criticism as a personal attack & do anything to get their retaliation in first. They can be particularly vindictive hen their little empire is under attack.

The thing is, I’ve never seen the Bill. Not once, ever. It occurred to me last night watching the BBC’s Children in Need. The cast of the Bill did a musical routine in the form of a tribute to the Blues Brothers - one of my favouritist films  with about the best car chase in movie history. Apparently, the Bill has been going for 25 years & I’ve not seen a single episode.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy police programmes, I used to watch Morse religiously. I still say the pinnacle of all TV cop shows was Hill Street Blues. It was truly cutting-edge in its time & sowed the seeds for all the great modern cops shows that came after it. NYPD Blue, Law & Order, CSI, etc can all trace their roots back to Hill Street Blues.

I saw an episode only last week on one of the cable channels. Fantastic, but dated. It’s one of the few tv programmes I’ve bought the soundtrack to. Mike Post, genius.

There were lots of Bill actors I recognised last night, sadly, none of which for being in the Bill (except that tall guy who has served almost as long in the fictional show as I have in real-life, can’t recall his name though). I’m sure I saw 2 ex-Eastenders, someone from Casualty & someone else from Waking the Dead.

I suppose the Bill is ingrained in the collective psyche of this country. I know a few years ago people would often ask me if being a copper was anything like the Bill. I always replied that I hadn’t a clue, but I bet whatever it is like it is a bloody site more exciting than real-life.

I expect that even farmers have some spare time to read other people’s blogs in between filling out all those European Free Money Grant application forms.

Talking about people visiting this site. I also had the good fortune to be listed at Stumble Upon last week. I have no idea what Stumble Upon is but it seems someone stumbled upon one of my posts & as a result I got double the amount of visitors than I normally do, always good for the old hit count. The thing is, the link on Stumbled upon wasn’t even one of my newer posts; it was from September 2007.

I suppose we should be grateful that we have blogs to visit, while we can. Since the police PSDs have only managed to close down some of the blogs, it’s only a matter of time before someone tells ISPs that they are no longer allowed to carry blogs deemed by somebody with power to be ‘unhelpful‘.

Doubtless any ban on blogging will be wrapped up in some kind of anti-terrorism, we’re doing it for your own good, kind of propaganda we are growing ever more used to these days.

Somebody commented on a recent post with a quote from Herman Goering: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

I guess that is as good today as it was in the 1930s.

Can you do whatever it is your system does to grab blog highlights to remove that bloody Brian’s Brief Encounters from your aggregating system?

It’s the same bloody post which he’s post-dated so it is grabbed up by your system every single bloody day & I’m getting really annoyed by it.

Do all your readers really want to read the same entry EVERY DAY???!!!???

I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest. Normal service will resume tomorrow.

]]> http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/913/feed http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/909 http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/909#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:00:28 +0000 200 http://200weeks.police999.com/?p=909 I don’t actually remember my first day in the job. I think it involved attending HQ & getting kitted out with uniform. I know we took the oath but I’m not sure if that was the first day or in the first few days.

Anyway, after a week or two we packed off to training school for ten weeks. Residential. I was never fitter in my life as when I came back from training school, I stayed at training school at the weekends whilst most people went home. We had nothing to do but sport & fitness work.

I do remember my first day at my designated police station. I was the total newb. I probably looked out of place because I was the smartest, the bull on the boots was still fresh & the creases on my shirt were unlike every one else on the shift. I was also the youngest.

I had such high expectations & ideals. Here I was a member of the most exclusive club in the world - so I was told - looking forward to doing my part to help, serve & protect.

My illusions were soon shattered as soon as I went for my first pee.

I pulled up at the urinal in the police station & the first thing I noticed was that there were bogeys on the wall and grafitti in black biro all over the place. I had to check I hadn’t stumbled into the pub across the road from the nick by mistake.

Graffiti & bogeys on the wall? At a police station? Done by Police officers? My disenchantment with being a police officer wasn’t to be negated over the next 30 years.

Take the Chaos Computer Club.

It seems the Germans have the same concerns over the introduction of identity cards & storage of personal data as we do in the UK.

A hacker from the Computer Chaos Club has got their hands on the fingerprints of the German Interior Minister, Wolfgang Schauble. The print came from a glass used by the minister at the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin.

An image of the fingerprint has been printed in a copy of a German magazine “Der Datenschlueder”. In an ironic masterstroke the fingerprint has been printed in the magazine but also supplied on a flexible rubber film with partially dried glue which will leave an exact copy of the print, much the same as the real minister’s print. It can be slipped over a finger & used to leave fingerprints on doors, telephones & biometric readers.

An anonymous research student has allegedly used this technique to fool 20 different biometric readers including the same model as used by Germany’s passport office.

A British group No2ID, has announced that they have obtained Jacqui Spliff’s fingerprints from a glass she used at a Social Market Foundation event after it advertised a £1,000 cash reward for the Home Secretary or Prime Minister’s prints.

If any of this is true it is a) very worrying that the government promises of the effectiveness of the ID card system appears to have been blown out the water before it’s even started and b) very funny.