Just a quickie today - BTW, thanks for the comments on yesterday’s entry regarding suggestions for improvement, keep them coming.
If you’re patrolling the streets of the UK and truly nothing is happening, all the crimes are locked up and no house is being broken into, nobody is risking death on the roads & the nick is fresh out of cannabis warning forms, you could consider some activity back at the police station. We used to call it ‘down time’, or rather the bosses called it ‘down time’ & they expected to use your ‘down time’ productively. The truth was that you never actually had any time when you were effectively free to do some little project or other for some HQ department, usually consisting of filling in forms or surveys.
Anyway, this is what they get up to in the good ol’ US of A during down time.
This sign is guaranteed to strike fear, loathing or even possibly caution into most drivers on the UK road system at the moment.
Some police forces are getting ever more devious in their attempts to catch speeding motorists. We’ve all seen speed detector vans parked at the side of the roads, usually they are in sections of road which have signs displaying the presence of speed cameras. If you see a stretch of road with these signs & don’t see any fixed cameras, it’s probably because they use detector vans in that area.
Derbyshire Police have been using this van for speed detection work:
They appear to have their very on version of a makeover show because the van appears to have ended up like this:
You might not be able to make it out at this scale but the index numbers are the same, the ‘workman’s van’ appears to have a towbar added. It’s even got authentic rubbish piled up on the dashboard.
Derbyshire police denied the van’s dramatic makeover was a disguise to snare unwary road users.
In North Wales they’re using a horsebox from which to catch speeding drivers:
You can see video footage of the horsebox in action below.
So, what do we have here, a useful tool in the battle to reduce road fatalities & improve road safety or a cynical ploy to catch more speeding motorists & increase revenue?
I’m not sure, to be honest; part of me thinks that if you’re out there & breaking the law, then you can’t complain if you get caught, but then part of me thinks that if we’re going to prosecute motorists we should do it fairly, openly & without recourse to devious tricks to ‘out-whit’ the motorist.
What do you think?
If you’re interested in further reading the ACPO Code of Practice for Operational Use of Road Policing Enforcement Technology can be found >> here << (it’s a 110 page PDF file!)
Sitting in the control room I sometimes wish I could just reach out & press the fast forward button.
Sunday afternoon on a slow channel, ten hours to go. And as for a couple of hours call-taking later on I’d definitely just skip those chapters altogether. I bloody hate taking calls; there’s something about the amount of time I’ve put in to this job so far which makes me feel I’ve done my fair share of talking to drunken numpties.
The x16 slow button would come in really useful for when police officers are resulting their jobs or passing information when they talk faster than I can type. And I’d certainly use the replay or even the pause button when Charlotte from the call centre comes over to discuss one of her calls & pouts over the top of my workstation, which is just the right height for her to rest her breasts on.
Training days I’d use the x32. PDR reviews I’d just skip altogether as they are a complete & utter waste of everyone’s time.
Actually, thinking about it, if my work life was a DVD I’d probably just take it back to Blockbuster & swap it for Speed II or something.
It is with sadness & deep regret that I have to annouce the death of a well-respected friend.
‘Sharpie’ passed away with barely a whimper in May 2008. Few will have noticed, even fewer will be concerned. Sharpie came into our lives a mere 3 & a bit years ago & in her short life managed to touch the hearts of practically no-one. She brought joy to literally tens of people, and no more.
I’m talking, of course, of that shining light in the gloomisphere of police publications, ‘The Sharp End‘. The last issue came out this month. After 38 issues - it started in January 2005 - someone has pulled the plug. The magazine itself doesn’t mention why, it just says basically, "so long & thanks for all the fish" (or is that the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy?).
I’ve mentioned this mag before a couple of times. It seems that I’ve been about the only one discussing it because if you put "sharp end magazine" into Google, you come up with my blog entries third & fourth entries down. I won’t repeat my thoughts on the Sharp End, strap-line, "The Real Life Magazine for Real Life Policing Issues", yeah, right. Unlikely Cop did a reasonable review of it in February 2007. But save to say that it never really captured the attention of those of us in "real life Policing" situations and was basically just another managerial attempt to show how well they are policing the country.
It may be that it was designed to only run for 3 years & 4 months, it may be that the Home Office decided to withdraw funding, or it may be that nobody read it. Whatever the reason it has been withdrawn, I doubt many will be bothered.
I was watching Traffic Cops again this week. I know, I can’t help it, it’s like a burger flipper at McDonalds going home & watching Ready, Steady, Cook.
And to make matters worse, I get really involved in it all. When they’re chasing the baddies my heart rate increases, I’m willing them on to box them in & drag them out through the quarter-lights. It’s like being at work only you’re in one of those old World War II RAF control rooms trying to push pieces around the maps on the TV screen before you. I suppose it’s a way of taking part in some of the things I no longer do, like chasing baddies. Being in the control room and assisting with pursuits is all well good but you can’t beat being out there & doing it.
The thing which came to me though was how many times can these film crews make programmes about Traffic Cops. We used to have traffic cars all over the place. You couldn’t eat an apple at the wheel for want of BMWs & Volvos queueing up to pull you over & issue a ticket.
These days the story is somewhat different. They’ve taken all the traffic cars away. Road Safety & Education is no longer a priority & there are easier targets to be met. So decimate the traffic departments & send the troops elsewhere but that means there are only so many crews the BBC can go out with. I’m not sure how long Traffic Cops has been going but it must be a few years, they’ve done a few forces too and then there’s Nightwatch & the same programmes on the other channels.
There can’t be many traffic officers who haven’t had a camera crew with them.
So if you’re a BBC producer & you need a rather handsome, fine looking & experienced copper to drive a big white traffic car around for a few days, give me a call.
When I give out a job on the radio, I give as much information as I have so that the unit attending is as fully briefed as to what they will be dealing with as possible. I can still remember being on the receiving end of such calls.
I don’t keep secrets. If the information the officer wants is available to me, I’ll pass it, usually without prompting. I’ll often say something along the lines of "that’s all the information we have." (Which doesn’t stop people asking for a description or direction of travel or more information).
Quite often the information is known to the person calling in but the call-taker doesn’t ask for it. I’ll often ring the caller back myself on the grounds of ‘if you want a job doing properly, do it yourself’. I’ll then find out the information which is actually useful to us (such as descriptions of offenders, where they are now, which way they went, details of vehicles involved, current location of the informant, etc, etc et-bloody-cetera).
One of the biggest problems we have in the operations centre is an ‘us & them’ attitude between the controllers & the call-takers. We should be working as a team to provide the best service, both to the people who call & to the officers on the street. Instead we have controllers slagging off call-takers for failing to obtain useful information and call-takers slagging off controllers for making snotty remarks on logs about how useless the call-takers are.
Unfortunately, we seem to be adopting the Walmart Strategy of piling it high & selling it cheap with some of the call-takers. We are getting lots of new employees (there is a reasonably high turnover - I wonder why) so we have lots of inexperienced staff. They are not being trained properly & nobody is interested in improving the situation (except people like me who aren’t allowed to affect policy), so the crap logs they create just keep on coming. This goes on for so long that the main offenders are now training the newer staff. There is no way on this planet that someone who hasn’t really ever been shown how to make a great log & take all the necessary information can train someone else to do it. Within a couple of years we’ll have a workforce where nobody knows how to do their job properly.
One of our serial offenders on crap log creation has just been promoted to supervisor level down the call centre.
We’ve suggested that they ought to get the call-takers to come & sit with the controllers on the radio channels so that they can see what happens when detailed information is left off the log & also why we need what information. They can see, first-hand, the problems caused when correct information isn’t taken at the first opportunity. We’ve also offered to go & sit with them in the call centre to advise & guide while they are taking calls & creating logs.
The problem is that in order to do either of those things you need to release staff from their position. There isn’t enough radio staff to enable anyone to be missing from their desk, so that’s out the window - we don’t have enough staff to fill all the positions as it is. The telephone lines don’t answer themselves & there are stats to be targeted on what percentage of calls are answered within so many seconds.
As long as the chief can report that we’re meeting our call-taking targets, nobody gives a rat’s arse about the quality.
Back in September 2007 I blogged about the case of the sensationalist reporting when Jordan Lyon drowned in a quarry pit trying to rescue his sister.
You may recall the headlines along the lines of "Two PCSOs watch boy drown". There was some pretty poor vilification in the police forums & on some police blog sites.
"OUR reports on the inquest of Jordon Lyon who drowned trying to rescue his sister (September 2007) stated two Police Community Support Officers from Greater Manchester Police stood by and did nothing.
We wish to clarify the two PCSOs arrived after Jordon disappeared under the water and they summoned help and directed other emergency services to the scene.
We apologise for any distress our report may have caused."
Another week, another chap kicked to death by feral scum.
This week’s Pondlife Award goes to mark Elliott, 21, Curtis Delima, 19 & Gerry Cusden, 16 who were drunk when they attacked & killed 47-year-old Mark Witherall when he caught them burgling his home in Whitstable, Kent.
Mr Witherall disturbed these pieces of scum & chased them outside where they attacked him, clubbing him to the ground with a spirit level. Laughing, they then kicked & stamped on him as he lay defenceless. His life support machine was switched off five weeks after the attack.
Judge Timothy Pontius told the youths "You turned on that unfortunate man like a pack of hyenas. You attacked him with sustained & merciless ferocity."
Elliott was sentences to 23 years, Delima to 20 years & Cusden got 16 years.
Mr Witherall leaves a 10-year-old daughter & an 8-year-old son.
I got mine, filled it in & sent it off this morning.
I’m talking about the Police Federation Poll on the pay award & industrial action.
The poll is conducted by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Federation. Apart from the generic data agethering questions, such as rabk, force, length of service, sex, ethnicity etc, they ask 2 questions:
Do you think the decisions made by the Independent Police Arbitration Tribunal should or should not be binding on the government?
In the current absence of binding arbitration on the government, do you wish the Police Federation of England & Wales to start to lobby for a change in legislation to allow police officers full industrial rights?
I answered yes to both.
Have you returned yours?
PS: not that it will make any difference, of course.
I love conspiracy theories. I used to be a big fan of the X-Files & not only because Gillian Anderson was in it & I loved Kevin Costner’s JFK even if you can grow a beard during it.
The latest one appears to be over the death of GMP Chief Constable, Michael Todd.
It appears to stem from comments made by one of the Mountain Rescue Team who has been interviewed as saying that normal protocols weren’t followed when people first became aware that Todd might be somewhere in the Welsh mountains. Things like, not a full team being sent out, people going to the wrong location. The killers in this one are the sighting of a Chinook helicopter (search & Rescue use Seakings) and the sighting of “Men in dark suits were swarming all over the place. They were not in uniform. We took it they were spooks – Government agents. They weren’t normal plainclothes detectives, and they didn’t introduce themselves to us.” Clearly these were top secret agents of the CIA, MI5 and/or any other government unit which doesn’t exist, possibly Chinese trained killers who had ditched their blue & white trackies & just happened to be in the hills training for the Olympic Torch run.
Chinooks only appear when there is top level sneaky beaky stuff going on like them crashing into Welsh Mountains full of intelligence officers, wait a minute, wasn’t Michael Todd investigating that case??? Case Closed MI5 responsible.
You can find more details of the conspiracy theory at Grough’s Blog. Postman Patel, also discusses the case several times. Codshit also discusses the case - at some length (to be honest I haven’t read it all yet as I’ve had to bandage my chin when I hit it on the edge of my desk falling asleep). There’s another one at Eclectic Katie Smith.
Perhaps more anon, in the meantime I’m off to dust down my poster of Gillian Anderson & warm up the plastic laminator.
(Oh, you have to sing the title of this entry to the theme tune of the X-fles)
The government’s latest wheeze to save money from police funding is to reform the way the police handles overtime.
In 1994 they decided that inspectors would receive a pay rise if they agreed not t be paid for overtime. The scheme was implemented & they received an additional £3,500 in their salary but now no longer receive extra pay for overtime. I don’t know how the figure was arrived at, but I guess that £3,500 times by how many inspectors there were in the country came to something substantially less than the total annual overtime bill for them.
This was great if you happened to be one of those (many) inspectors who worked 8-4 behind a desk, didn’t work weekends or do any overtime. It was like a £3,500 gift, every year, for doing bugger-all extra. If you were a front-line inspector who did lots of overtime & had to work rest days for various events it was in effect a pay-cut. There were many stories of inspectors routinely being forced to work many more hours, after all, it didn’t cost the force a penny more.
The government are now considering this as a viable option for the rest of the service. I’ve not seen any figures mentioned but they are trying to save an apparent estimate of £250 million which is the current annual budget for overtime.
A few years ago they decided that the first half-hour of overtime would no longer be paid for. This saved them a few million a year & means that if you want paying for overtime you need to do a minimum of an hour. This means officers already work many hours a year for nothing.
If this scheme comes in I expect there will be many cases of officers rubbing their hands. I’d benefit now as I don’t do any overtime, so giving up the right to be paid in return for a few grand a year extra would be lovely. Many others would suffer.
If the government really wanted to reduce the overtime bill there is a simple measure they could take - employ more officers.
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.
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…
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."
I had an email from someone who came across my blog the other day. Peter from New York is doing some research and wondered where the phrase "The Job" came from.
For those of you not in ‘the job’ this is a term which has been used for many years to describe police work. I can recall when I joined almost 30 years ago fellow officer asking when I joined ‘the job’ or asking how long have you been in the job then.
I’ve never really thought about it and I don’t have the first clue whether this term is limited to police work. Do teachers refer to being ‘in the job’? or doctors or soldiers?
If anyone has some insight into where this phrase comes from please let me know so I can pass this on to Peter. I’ve Googled (is that still legal in private?) but not come up with anything yet.
I’ll tell you what’s great about mine. The bogs here have the best hand driers I’ve ever come across.
There’s nothing worse when you’re out for a night’s drinking than having to spend valuable drinking time standing around while wringing your hands under a mildly cool wisp of air which comes out the machine with the same force as a mosquito’s fart.
Digressing slightly, but isn’t that one of the worst-used phrases in the English language?; Nothing worse…. nothing worse than, whatever it is. There’s nothing worse than waiting in all day for a parcel that never comes, you say? Yes there is! Having your balls nailed to an oak tree while a tiger chews its way up your penis as the mad axeman of old London town charges at you with a very angry look on his face & an even angrier axe whilst holding two 40 foot steel poles during the biggest lightning storm the world has ever known just after your wife has run off with that bloke round the corner & their new baby having taken your entire Dr Who DVD collection is worse than waiting in for a bloody parcel which never came, if you don’t mind me saying.
Anyway, the warm air blowers in our bogs are fantastic. The air comes out at a speed weather presenters get really moist about. There are some probationers I know who would have serious health & safety issues just standing under one (yes, some of them these days will fit under one standing at full height).
That’s why going for a piss at work is one of the most pleasurable experiences of my working day.
Welcome to you if you’re visiting me from a link on the Safe Speed Forums. There have been a few over the last few days, according to my logs.
Safe Speed has been working for safer roads in the UK for several years. I’ve visited it from time to time because we share a kind of ethos in that neither of us believe the government’s approach to road safety in the last 10 years has been effective, there being far too much importance placed on prosecuting drivers for excess speed with systems which abregate responsibility for driver training & education to a little lens in a grey box & a few printed forms.
I’ve never been a believer in the slogan "Speed Kills". It’s too simplistic, yet another example of the government summing up an entire policy with a simple catchy sound bite.
The forums over at Safe Speed provide hours on entertainment. There’s lots of informed & erudite discussion on road safety & related matters. Unfortunately, there are lots of stories which basically amount to "Help me get of a speeding ticket please".
One of the best I read was a guy who wanted to get off his speeding charge because he was followed by an unmarked police vehicle & "due to matters going on with his family" (I think someone had been beaten up or was a mafia hitman or something), he thought the best idea was to speed away from the police vehicle (at speeds of 135-140mph!). There are plenty of people on the site who can give you the best advise to get off a speeding charge. I’m not a betting man, but I’d not stake much on this particular guy getting off.
The guy who ran it, Paul Smith, died in December from a heart attack. I’d heard him on the radio a few times, funny how you build up a picture which turns out to be nothing like the real person. I imagine others have taken over the running of the website now.
It might be time to give it a bit of a redesign; it’s always had the look of one of those sites run by well-meaning individuals which could look so much more professional.
It seems a BTP Inspector who was after a promotion on transfer to Bedfordshire Police has been denied a place because his prospective new force wasn’t too happy with his Facebook entry. Insp Chris Dreyfus, British Transport Police’s head of royalty and government protection, was offered the job with Bedfordshire Police. Their checks revealed that Insp Dreyfus had been cautioned by his force over content on his Facebook entry which allegedly "included graphic details about his gay lifestyle and photographs showing him posing in his uniform at a London tube station."
Oh dear, what, police officers posting personal information on the ‘net & getting into trouble? they’ll be blogging next.
Hot on the heels of my recent story of travelling scum comes another fine example of the genre.
Prize for scum-sucking pond-life of the week goes to traveller Robert Cole, 32, who has been jailed for life for the murder of Arthur Gregg, a frail pensioner who had been conned out of £25,000 for "shoddy workmanship" by "builder" Cole, who was part of a group of "unscrupulous travellers" who ripped off vulnerable pensioners by cold-calling them at home and then demanding huge sums of cash for small jobs.
Mr Gregg suffered 41 injuries including 24 wounds to his head & neck, 2 skull fractures & 8 broken bones in his face. He was last seen alive by staff at his local building society when he told them the builder was waiting for him outside & needed paying. The building society told him he had only £10 in his account & so he left. he was found dead at his home 3 days later. His telephone had been ripped out to stop him calling for help. Cole also stole his car & sold it for £102.
The attack happened after Mr Gregg’s family found out he was being conned by the bogus builder & took control of his bank account so he could no longer give money to Cole.
Cole denied the murder blaming it on 2 other travellers but was convicted after his DNA was found in Mr Gregg’s house & his the victim’s blood found on Cole’s shoes.
