Archive for the The Job - Comment category
May 9th, 2008
The armchair quarterbacks are already hot on the case in the shooting of barrister, Mark Saunders in his Chelsea flat on Thursday.
Amanda Platell, in her Daily Mail article "Did police really need to shoot this broken man?" she criticises the actions which led police officers to shoot dead a man who had been taking pot-shots with a lethal firearm out the window of his posh London home, both at neighbours & police.
Showing her astute & intimate knowledge of dealing with deranged men with guns she says, "Why couldn’t they have fired tear gas into the flat? Or used rubber bullets or stun guns instead of lethal force? Why didn’t they allow his wife to try to talk him out, as she desperately wanted to do?"
I’ll give her a clue, because they didn’t want to risk themselves or any other innocent person dying!
She says, "As for speculation that Mr Saunders had sought "suicide by cop", it’s a convenient story."
Someone who lived opposite gave a little more insight into a man who had clearly lost the thread, the witness, named only as Lesley, said: "There was a man opposite my house shooting into my daughter’s bedroom. He just kept on firing cool as cucumber. He didn’t even bother to open the window, he was shooting through the glass. There are bullet holes in my daughter’s bedroom wall. People were screaming at him ‘What the f*** are you doing?"
Reports say that on 3 separate occasions the ‘broken man’ fired at officers. They tried to negotiate but after five hours they entered the house, shots were fired & Saunders was hit five times. There is some criticisms that he was hit so many times by more than one officer. I’m reminded of the time an American Officer was asked something along the lines of "Why did your unit fire 56 times at this man". He is said to have replied "Because that’s all we had."
It’s tragic when someone is killed in this way, but often they are masters of their own destiny. Whatever the reason he picked up a gun & started shooting at people the sad fact remains that there is a high chance you will be dealt with ‘appropriately’ and sometimes that means being shot dead. The fact that he happened to be a nice, rich & successful barrister is neither here nor there.
May 2nd, 2008
There are some people that I really begrudge devoting police resources to. One such group includes parents who can’t control their children & expect the police to go & collect them every time they refuse to come home.
Another is people who engage in drug dealing & then fail to pay their ‘bills’ & want police protection whenever their ‘business partners’ threaten to come round & blow their bollocks off with a sawn-off.
I’m sorry but there are some people who just shouldn’t be entitled to any kind of service at all. If you decide to break the laws of the land by involving yourself in buying & selling illegal drugs & then expect the police to protect you the moment things go pear-shaped, I think you should go to the very bottom of a very long list of people more deserving of a police response than you.
And that’s not even to get into the debate about the fact that you don’t work, don’t pay tax, cause untold misery on the rest of society & still expect a service?
April 30th, 2008
I’ve been working up to this one for a while… if you want to read it you’ll probably need to make sure you take regular screen breaks & have also brought something to eat; I won’t be held responsible if you collapse through malnutrition by the end of it.
What’s the biggie? Well I guess it’s one of the biggies, should drugs be legalised?
Here goes…
Drugs have been used by humans for thousands of years. We know that alcohol was used 10,000 years ago. The Sumerians used opium 5,000 years BC, 1,000 years ago opium was in widespread use across China. Tobacco came to Europe in the 1490s. Cocaine was first isolated into its pure form in 1844. In 1885 the Royal Commission on Opium concluded that it was “more like liquor than a substance to be feared and abhorred”. Heroin was first synthesised in 1898 in Germany. Coco-Cola contained cocaine until it was replaced in 1903 by caffeine.
Drug use has long been part of many cultures and in many parts of the word such use of mind-altering drugs is still commonplace and legal in some societies, one only has to look at TV documentaries exploring tribal cultures.
Drugs were not illegal prior to the last 100 years or so.
The 1961 UN convention on drug prohibition was instrumental in 150 states criminalising the production, supply & use of a selection of psychoactive substances. When the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act came in, the UK had fewer than 5,000 problematic drug users. The figure now is between 280,000 and 500,000 (mostly heroin & cocaine), depending on where you get your figures, and the substance has been illegal while billions of pounds of money has been wasted in the attempts to cut drugs use through law enforcement.
The question really arises as to why current illegal drugs have been banned and why should they remain banned. The only reason I can see that drugs have been banned is because of the possible harmful effects on health. The current high crime levels are a recent phenomena and simply didn’t exist at the time when drugs were criminalised.
If it is purely for health reasons then why not ban other drugs such as tobacco and alcohol both of which have a far greater devastating effect on health and society than drugs ever have?
It is not the role of government or society to prevent self-harm by legislation, otherwise there would be strong arguments for banning tobacco, alcohol, sports, tea, coffee, e-numbers etc etc. Government must give us the tools to explore freedom of speech, choice and expression and the knowledge to do that safely and without harm to our fellow citizens.
The Problem
UN estimates that global trade in illegal drugs is $400 billion a year which represents 8% of all international trade. It is 3rd in global trade only to oil and arms.
UK Government estimates that the annual cost of drug-related crime is £16 billion.
Customs & Excise quote that a kilo of cocaine which would cost £1,000 in South America to buy should, under normal economic conditions cost about £1500 by the time it reaches the UK but in fact costs around £30,000. Estimates of the mark-up from production to market of between 2,000 and 3,000 per cent make it the most overvalued commodity on the planet. It is purely the illegality of the drug which pushes the price so high. These costs are hugely inflated as a direct result of the risk involved in production, delivery and supply.
A study by York University for the Government estimates that every drug addict in the country costs the taxpayer £35,455 – a total of £11.9billion. It said the annual cost for policing, courts and prison terms was £10.6billion. GP visits, emergency treatment and mental health treatments was put at £1.3billion and other social costs such as the loss to the economy from users not working at £63million. The report says that this is an underestimate and does not take into account any costs associated with recreational drugs users who are able to hold down a job whilst indulging their habit.
Other estimates put the amount of problem drugs users as half a million which would take the annual cost nearer to £17billion – that’s 17,000 million pounds!
Current info suggests that the average heroin addict needs between £50 and £100 per day to fund their habit, and that the vast majority of problem addicts have no income to fund their habit so must turn to crime.
Cocaine and heroin are not in themselves particularly valuable not in the same was that gold and diamonds are valuable. The only reason that they have any value is exclusively because their production, supply and use is illegal which artificially creates high monetary values for them.
Such is the power of the criminal element who have seen drugs as a good earner that in certain countries those who hold the balance of power are those that control the drug cartels. The gross domestic product of Mexico is something like £280billion, the drugs money which goes through that country is something between £70 and £200 billion. Drugs wars in countries like Mexico & Columbia are actually wars with tens of thousands killed in the last 20 years. The amount of corruption in countries like some of those in South America is incredible and reaches to the highest government levels, all because of the trade in illegal substances.
In contrast, tobacco, alcohol and prescription drugs are all easily available and affordable. They are quite legal and it can be strongly argued are more of a menace to society than illegal drugs.
Because they are so freely available the levels of crime associated with them are completely different. There is very little property crime committed by alcohol abusers (most crime associated with alcohol is violent crime), there is almost no property crime associated with tobacco users. There are 1million prescribed drug ‘addicts’ and they do not commit crime in order to get their prescriptions.
The fact that a far smaller proportion of crack & heroin users commit far more crimes is down purely and solely to the fact that their drugs are prohibitively expensive because they are illegal.
Alcohol not only harms the person taking it, it frequently kills and maims others.
The US Dept of Health estimates that 100,000 Americans die of alcohol related problems per year, 450,000 die of tobacco related problems but only 10,000 die of drug related problems. So a drug which kills 10s of thousands of people a year and is responsible for misery for millions of people is tolerated yet cannabis, which on it’s own has not been shown to have killed anyone is completely banned.
Have a look at the following figures for the USA:
Deaths in the United States in a typical year are as follows:
- Tobacco kills about 390,000
- Alcohol kills about 80,000
- Workplace accidents kill 60,000
- Automobiles kill 40,000
- Cocaine kills about 2,200
- Heroin kills about 2,000
- Aspirin kills about 2,000
- Marijuana kills 0,000
There has never been a recorded death due to marijuana at any time in US history.
All illegal drugs combined kill about 4,500 people per year, or about one percent of the number killed by alcohol and tobacco.
Tobacco kills more people each year than all of the people killed by all of the illegal drugs in the last one hundred years.
And alcohol and tobacco are legal? Go figure!!
Whilst researching this ‘essay’ I came across the following quote which I find funny-strange yet quite apt to my own viewpoint:
“Anheuser-Busch, brewers of Budweiser, hair-test employees to be sure that they are not using any drugs less dangerous than the one they make.”
There are something in the order of 1.7million people in US jails, 80 per cent are there for drug-related offences & 10million have been arrested for cannabis possession since 1965. Think of the cost.
Many thousands of people have a criminal record as a direct result of a policy which treats criminalisation of drugs on a lottery basis. If you happen to choose the one which is legal you’re OK despite the greater risks to yourself and the greater costs to society, whereas if you choose cannabis which causes far less problems you will get a criminal record and possibly a prison sentence despite otherwise good characters. I bet there are people reading this now who have smoked cannabis or have friends and relatives who have or do smoke cannabis but who have never committed any other single crime. So you use drugs, get a criminal record and then suffer the social consequences of having a criminal record. Drug prohibition has turned otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals
A survey of 150 long-term addicts in a particular clinic showed that about 100 of them had been spending £700 a week on drugs which amounts to £36,400 a year. The survey also showed that each one of these people had previously been imprisoned for an average of four years…. at a cost of £24,000 for each year of imprisonment. That’s £36,400 of other people’s money and you can bet the probably had to steal 5-10 times that amount in real value to accrue a resale value equating to £36,000
Law Enforcement
Current policy is a failure. Eighty per cent of addicts found guilty of a crime and sent into compulsory rehab under a Drug Testing and Treatment Order (DTTO) re-offend within two years. Those not forced into rehab have a 71 per cent re-conviction rate. And the figure for those put on probation and given community sentences is best of all at 66 per cent. It’s incredible how people who have no treatment for their problem have a higher success rate staying off drugs than those who are forced to undergo drug treatment programmes.
Custom and Excise officers only seize an estimated 10% of illegal drugs entering the country. Addicts need to raise huge amounts of money to pay for their habit.
There is more law enforcement targeted throughout the world at anti-drugs operations than any time in the history of the planet yet the drugs problem is at its worst, surely this should show the complete and abject failure of governments to prevent the ever increasing spiral of drugs misuse? Does anyone reading this think that drugs are now harder to get than when they were kids? They’re probably cheaper than they were 10 years ago.
We spend billions of pounds a year fighting something which only does so much harm because someone somewhere decided to pick it from a list of harmful substances and ban it, whilst leaving more harmful substances completely legal. AND WE’RE WASTING OUR MONEY!
Solutions
It all leads up to this really and I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer but I do think that it is a better solution than we have now.
Legalise Drugs.
And I don’t mean open sweetie shops selling them to anyone who wants them, I mean legally regulated and controlled. Policies in Holland, Portugal, Switzerland & Russia are seeing some drugs decriminalised. We already have a system for handing out drugs through pharmacies and doctors where people can get good quality health advice and guidance and don’t need to jack up using shared needles round the back of some derelict crack house.
Take production out of the hands of the drugs barons, produce a product which is not mixed with baking powder or anything else that happens to be lying around, which is as safe as it can be and is of measured quantity so you know how much to take and don’t need to risk an OD.
Bring the price down to a reasonable economic level and not one based on an illicit trade with mark-ups of 2000%. Which will cut crime levels dramatically. Even if you’re a complete cynic, if a drug user’s £100 a day habit is cut to £1 a day he has to rob an awful lot fewer old ladies a year.
Maybe open up clinics where people can take drugs in relative safety with medical staff on hand to help, advice and initiate drugs treatment programmes.
Proper investment in successful treatment programmes, not ones which cost millions and have an 80% failure rate. The very fact that the only way to get on a drug treatment programme is to get convicted at court and have it as part of the sentence or be very rich and go to that place all the footballers and pop stars go makes it impossible to get help without entering the spiral of crime/prison. I don’t have much experience of drug taking but I do know that there aren’t many people who actually want to be hooked on drugs. The fact that drug taking is largely the domain of the socially deprived can’t be coincidental.
Proper education from an early age based on reality. There is little point in telling someone that drugs are evil & horrible and you might die, if what they actually see is that some drugs can be quite pleasurable and people aren’t dying. Tell people the truth about drugs. Expect that some people will experiment but give them the tools and support to understand their actions and consequences and give them the support to stop.
The argument that making drugs legal merely to cut the crime rate is like making burglary legal is a total spurious argument. With all other crimes there is a victim; it can be argued that the only victim in drugs misuse is the user, therefore the analogy is a completely false one. And it’s not about legalising drugs so there are less crimes on the figures, it’s about minimising the real and huge effects these particualr crimes have on real people every day in every town up and down the whole country, including the massive massive financial loss these people have to suffer.
You may say if we legalise drugs there will be many more users and that may be the case, but those users won’t be committing crime to fund their habit and your mum won’t be as frightened to walk down the street in case she gets mugged by a druggie and there will be more money in the pot to fund drug treatment, education and a whole host of other things which we could fund having made billions of pounds of savings by decriminalising drugs. I’m not so sure that millions of people will be whooping it up in the streets because they are now allowed to take heroin. The vast majority of us know the risks and choose not to do it, but if we do try and, and get hooked we can say it’s our own choice, we don’t commit crime to fund it, we’ll probably still have a job and who are you lot to ban us from our pleasure, just like smokers do now!
Legalisation is not a cure-all; people will still die and there will still be an illegal market (although much smaller) as there is in any commodity. But it seems to me to offer more to society than the current outlook.
I don’t think it is acceptable to say to my neighbour when all her worldly goods have disappeared and her husband has been battered over the head and had his wallet and mobile phone nicked that we could have prevented it but we didn’t because it is all the fault of some scumbag drug-taker.
Taking a different approach to the way we deal with drugs is not about treating the minority of society who can’t be arsed to work and just want to sit around all day doing heroin and taking handouts; it’s about protecting the important people in life from harm, crime and an ever downward spiral of social disintegration and in order to do that, you just might have to adopt a new radical approach, ‘cos the one we’ve had since 1961 has completely and utterly failed.
April 28th, 2008
So the police have been told to cut down on ‘management speak’ or "ploddledeygook" by the Plain English Campaign.
I’m surprised it’s taken so long. I’m sure those of us within the police have been suffering an ever-increasing circle of management introducing language which comes straight out of their posterior orifices for at least 10 years. It happened around the time that someone thought it was a good idea to try & run the police like a division of the Ford Motor Company.
It’s difficult to give some of the really grat examples, because I don’t know whether some of them just apply to my force & which ones are national, so I had a quick scan through some adverts for jobs in the police & came up with a few.
"…we’re at the forefront of work place modernisation & citizen focus…"
"…Business Change Manager … managing a portfolio of projects within the Business Preparation and Implementation Strand….guidance to a range of stakeholders…"
"…intensifying our total war on crime…"
…part of our bold blueprint for continued success…"
"…deliver a sustainable change in the way which the county is policed…"
"…provide multi-agency command band training influencing and participating across a broad spectrum of agencies…"
"…staff officer to the chief people officer…"
"…our force moves towards a model for policing that will deliver a programmed, flexible and efficient, localised policing service which puts the community at its heart…"
"…deliver a sustainable step-change in the way in which the county is policed…"
and the last one for now, "…we welcome applications from all candidates, including those from minority ethnic groups & women…" and there’s me thinking all applicants meant white men only.
April 25th, 2008
The wife of a BTP officer who committed suicide has been speaking out against the target-led culture which pervades modern policing.
PC Ian Hardwick, 41, had been an officer with BTP for 16 years when he stepped in front of a train in Leeds in June 2006.
His inquest was told he felt depressed & unable to cope with demands put upon him by senior officers at his Sheffield base.
Mrs Hardwick has told how a new system of weekly performance targets created poor morale & a culture where officers were cherry picking jobs so that they could meet their own individual targets. She said, "It got t the stage where intelligence was even kept secret - officers were not passing it on to the next shift as they needed it for themselves to get another box ticked & the job done."
I can vouch that this is not limited to the BTP. It’s the same in my force. Some officers are cherry picking jobs. I’ve lost count of the amount of times officers have not been free to attend run-of-the-mill, everyday jobs (for which they’d get no detections or performance indicators) but are suddenly free when a job come sup which will get them an easy arrest.
I’m sure there are many cases of officers racing to a job from different directions just so they can get their hands on a body.
A little while ago it was brought to my attention that someone on a particular shift was dedicated to sit at a computer monitoring all the logs being created which had the look of an easy arrest, they then advised officers on their team to get to the job ASAP & snaffle the arrest even before the log was sent over to the control room for allocation. Traffic officers were attending Sainsburys just so they could get an arrest for their targets. I’m sure this is widespread.
If intelligence come sin with the likely location of some wanted scrote or other, surely this person should be taken off the streets ASAP & not when the person keeping this info to themselves is next on duty or is next looking for a boost to his personal performance indicators?
We all know it goes on, the trouble is that nobody with any say in the matter has the balls to stand up and say "wait a minute."
April 24th, 2008
In a recent article in the Police Review, Inspectpr Simon Hepworth of West Yorkshire Police, waxes lyrical about the ‘new’ government initiative of neighbourhood policing.
Entitled ‘Keeping Policing Local’ he says the recent publicity by the government promoted "a localised brand of policing & promises the public access to a dedicated & visible neighbourhood policing team."
Inspector Hepworth is a neighbourhood policing team inspector & is "pleased to say there is nothing new in this initiative" - well no shit Sherlock!
He explains "West Yorkshire Police moved towards the primacy of neighbourhood policing over a year ago & our chief constable, Sir Norman Bettison, has long been a champion of this format."
I seem to recall that Inspector Hepworth has previously written criticism of police bloggers. It’s a shame he hasn’t been reading this one or he’d have discovered that neighbourhood policing initiatives date back far longer than his ‘forward thinking force’.
Insp Hepworth ends his article with some advice to improve the success of this ‘visionary‘ style of policing. "To be most effective, neighbourhood ethos needs to be spread across all parts of the police organisation. An ideal model of neighbourhood policing would [be] to have patrol teams, proactive beat managers [e.i. neigbourhood PCs] & CSOs working in the same area every day. They could be backed up by CID & local intelligence officers who would also concentrate their efforts in the same small area.
"A police station in each town would be ideal. The lack of a loal nick is something the Home Office should address to get the best out of its new idea. Ultimately, local police stations mean local policing."
Pretty much as it was in the 1970s & 1980s, before they sold all the neighbourhood & rural officers’ houses & offices & decided to put everyone on squads.
April 20th, 2008
The backdated-pay debacle is currently at the High Court with both sides battling to influence the judges into siding with them.
For the Government, Jonathan Sumption QC represent the Home Secretary, Jacqui Spliff, claimed that giving officers a full 2.5% rise would not have been unfordable.
In what can only be described as another cynical ploy to win public support he said, "The money could not have been found without using resources from police authority budgets, particularly the counter-terrorism programme."
This is despite the fact that most chief constables & police authorities supported the full award & had already found sufficient funds in the budget to sufficiently cover the award.
So the £12 million needed to cover the reneged agreement has to come from the ‘counter-terrorism’ budget? It can’t come, for instance, from the budget used for MPs expenses & fraudulent claims, or the budget used to fund the £1,000 a month benefit payments to failed terrorists, or the same budget used to hand out fraudulent benefit payments to people such as Shannon Matthews extended family. Or what about the budget used to install even more speed cameras & devices to prosecute even more people by camera thus doing absolutely nothing for road safety other than bringing in millions more in revenue for the government to give away to anyone who wants it (except the police).
The government are on a ‘terrorism’ frenzy instilling fear into as many people as possible, what better way to try to make the cops out to be the bad guys by suggesting that if they get their full award, people will be put in even more danger.
Cynical, me?
April 12th, 2008
Following on from the BBC Scotland programme on assaults on police, news comes via the Police Review of a worrying development.
It appears that the Home Office are no longer collecting data on the amount of assaults on police. The Home Office refused the magazine’s repeated requests to confirm it still collected the data. They merely replied, "As part of an overall drive to cut data recording, we are currently reviewing whether to continue collecting data on assault on police officers."
When asked for the most recent figures it could only supply data from 2004/2005.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary failed to include officer assault figures in its 2008 annual report, published in March.
Figures gained from individual forces by the Police Review recorded 21,845 officers were attacked in 2005, an average of 60 assaults a day, one every 24 minutes. In 2006 this rose to 25,368, an average of 70 a day.
Is it me or is this just another example of the contempt shown by this government to the police with yet another failure to protect us? How can anyone tell what measures need to be implemented to protect officers if the government can’t be arsed to find out how big the problem is & whether it’s getting any better or not?
April 3rd, 2008
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.
March 27th, 2008
A chief constable calls for the ’stiffer’ sentences available for those convicted of possession of firearms to be implemented fully.
The government introduced a minimum 5-year sentence for possession of a firearm in 2004. This means that anyone convicted of having an illegal gun should go to prison for a minimum of five years. Of course, as everyone knows what this actually means is a minimum of 2 1/2 years since people only serve half their sentence. (isn’t it about time we got rid of this notion of serving half the sentence & either give them half the time & make them serve it all, or stick to the full sentence, at least that way people would know what the penalty was?)
The government have confirmed that most criminals don’t get the bare minimum sentence. In fact in 2005 the average sentence for this offence was 47 months & only 40 per cent of offenders were given the statutory minimum of five years.
You can argue ’til the cows come home whether a particular sentence is a deterrent or not but the fact remains that there is absolutely no point at all in announcing a minimum sentence & then sitting back on your arse & letting judges hand out whatever sentence they they can drag out of the tealeaves in the bottom of their daily beverages, which is what the government does. Actually, I’ve just realised what the point of a minimum sentence is. It’s so the government can announce it’s tough on crime, get lots of headlines and more soujourns back to Whitehall for tea & medals.
Gun crime continues to rise. There are many facets to fighting it, sentencing is just one. There are plenty of people within the criminal justice system who think that 5 years is nowhere near enough of a deterrent to carrying a gun.
A spokesman for the Home Office said that although the minimum sentence was not being used as per the guidelines, the average sentence for this offence had ‘risen sharply’. Well that’s alright then.
March 26th, 2008
You’ve not got to spend much time around the police blogs to see how target-driven policing is ruining a) policing & b) the service to the public & society.
There can be not better example than the one I had today when I was speaking to an officer I bumped into up at HQ. You tend so see some very old faces up at the HQ, either because they work on one of the myriad of offices up there or they are visiting for one course or another.
I’d not seen Greg for a while. Inevitably the conversation revolved around the job & what we were both doing. He’s working on one of the Divisions currently pressing to up their detections with extra operations I mentioned a few days ago. He’s currently on what we used to call ’section’ or ’shift’ or ‘relief’, which basically means if you dial 999 & need a police officer, he goes.
Only he doesn’t, not if he can get away with it.
He has targets for arrest, crimes detected & tickets issued. He has a favourite place where you can issue tickets like shelling peas. We all know places like that, if we fancy some easy ‘process’ (police-speak for knocking someone off for minor non-arrestable offences) we can go to one of a number of places where you can guarantee to catch someone out. It might be a particular junction where poelpe are always jumping lights or a section of road where everybody speeds.
Greg’s favourite place is a little junction with a no right turn. If you sit up on the side road you can watch people making no right turns and pull out behind them for an easy stop. You issue a ticket & get to up your quota for the month for little work.
Greg said he might be sitting round the corner from a dwelling burglary which gets reported, (not an "intruders on" because everyone will go to those) but one where the family comes home after a day out to find the door kicked in & the family jewels missing. Greg said that there was no way he was volunteering for the burglary if the call came out for someone to attend "Look, I can get my quota in by dishing out no right turn tickets, that keeps the sergeant off my back, keeps the inspector off his back & the chief inspector off his back. I ain’t gonna volunteer for a burglary when I’m not gonna get an arrest, I’m not gonna get a detection & I’m just gonna pick up a load of paperwork & enquiries which will lead nowhere, not when I’m behind on my tickets."
My initial reaction was ‘that’s appalling’, I mean the nuts & bolts about this job when all’s said & done is helping people. But then I realised that when you’re sitting in briefing getting a bollocking from the local chief inspector because the shift hasn’t made enough arrests or issued enough tickets it’s not easy saying you’d rather be out there serving the public.
Perhaps more of us should do just that. Easier said than done though, I think.
March 25th, 2008
Oh my goodness, 45 minutes to midnight, & I’ve not had time to post today. Again. This is getting harder & harder.
Anyway, time for something very quick & probably not too well thought out.
One of the key initiatives over the last couple of years has been the implementation of a ‘neighbourhood’-type policing. I think the Met started calling it "Safer Neighbourhoods". It basically means that there is a team of officers/PCSOs dedicated to problem solving (another catch phrase) on the neighbourhoods & estates. I don’t know if it was a trial in the Met but it seems the government are keen to roll it out to everyone else.
Everywhere has got to have safer-neighbourhood teams. They’re trumpeting various themes, one of them is ‘a name in every neighbourhood’ where everyone is supposed to know the name of their local officer/PCSO. Vast amounts of money is being spent on making sure their names are known. Gordon Brown is even suggesting anyone should be able to ring their local officer on a mobile phone.
Great, new initiatives, government making bold announcements. It’s all back to Whitehall for tea & medals once again.
Neighbourhood policing. That’ll be like having a local officer on every estate, some of them might even live on their beat, they might have offices where locals can come & see them at designated times of the day rather than going into town to the local nick (which will be closed). Something like we used to have until someone thought it was a waste of resources, put all the neighbourhood officers on squads or retired them & sold off all the police houses.
March 23rd, 2008
Another day, another story abiut the police turning down a potential recruit because of political correctness.
22-year-old Craig Briggs has been turned down by Greater Manchester Police (they’re the ones who are currently at least 1 under strength at the moment) because he has ‘England’ tattooed on his forearm.
Craig has wanted to join the police since he was a child, but was told to go & get some life experience - presumably because he wasn’t black, gay or female - so he joined Her Majesty’s armed forces in the Yorkshire Regiment. He applied to the police after serving 4 1/2 years including a tour in Iraq. He was asked to send in photographs of his tattoo & was later told he had been rejected by the recruitment department.
His rejection letters stated "Home Office policy precludes applicants with tattoos on lower arm, hand, face or neck that are prominent, which may cause offence and/or invite provocation from the public or colleagues.
He was told by the senior recruitment ‘consultant’ "A family who aren’t of English origin who see England on your arm could feel you might discriminate against them."
Presumably these rules have come from the same people who refuse to let people fly the Union jack from their house or office, want all nursery rhyme words changed & want to ban Christmas. The same departments who want us to celebrate diversity as long as it’s other people’s culture & not our own.
The consultant added "we live in a diverse society and try to ensure we give equality to everyone".
I wonder how equally Craig Briggs feels GMP have treated him.
March 21st, 2008
In the last week there will have been hundreds of burglaries reported to police. Homes up & down the country will have been broken into. Several hundred more people will have been attacked & either robbed or beaten up, some of those will have been at gun-point & many others at knife-point. People will have had their personal property stolen & damaged, communities will have additional adjustments on their route to being trashed. A few ill have been murdered, raped or killed in acts of wanton neglect on the roads of the country.
All of these will have had a varying degree of effect on the victim. All of those victims will rightly be expecting a full & thorough investigation into the circumstances in the often futile hope that someone will be brought to book for the crime.
The residents of Northamptonshire might be wondering, with all this going on around them, why the police have been wasting their time investigating a bloody children’s puppet.
In a recent edition of the Basil Brush show (a small toy fox with someone’s hand up its arse), a favourite children’s TV character for some 40 years, a sketch involving a gypsy woman trying to sell the puppet some lucky heather & wooden pegs, was met by a comment which a viewer found offensive & racist towards the traveling community.
As a result the Hate Crimes Unit from Northamptonshire’s finest carried out an investigation into the matter. They announced today that no further action was being taken.
Have we really come so far in society (& under a Labour Government) that a puppet on TV can crack a joke & the police will investigate this as a crime?? Wasn’t it the case that if anyone was annoyed about the content of a TV programme they wrote to the TV channel & were either told, yep, "sorry we made a mistake, we’ll try to do better", or told that "sorry, but we’ve done nothing wrong", and that was it? I wonder how many tax-payers in Northamptonshire are happy with the time & money an investigation like this has taken.
This is exactly the prophecy of comedians like Rowan Atkinson when the proposals to bring in religiously aggravated offences, to fall in line with racially aggravated offences. Oh no, said the government, the law is not there to limit free speech, this sort of thing won’t happen. Yeah, right.
This is exactly the sort of thing which happens when you bring in legislation which has at its core, the ethos of social engineering. Free speech? Doesn’t exist. No longer are we trusted to hold views & opinions which differ to those ‘in power’. No, we must legislate against anyone who doesn’t agree with current themes & theories. What before, might be classed as ‘bad taste’ worthy of either a bit of advice or a cold shoulder is now a crime which must be recorded, investigated & someone must be sanctioned for it.
The answer, it seems, to everything is to legislate, legislate, legislate.
This is why police officers are no longer trusted to to use discretion. Social change must take place with the agreement of those being asked to change, forcing them to do it will not work. I’d suggest it merely creates more problems than it seeks to solve. What the complainant should have been told when they called this one in is "speak with the BBC Sir/Madam, it’s not a police matter."
Boom Boom!
Beware, this is a dangerous & evil criminal
March 20th, 2008
You can tell it’s nearly April. The end of the financial year approaches. There are currently no end of special operations throughout the force area dedicated to eeking out the last little detection to make the end-of-year figures look a little better.
We have officers take off regular duties specifically to go out & get detections. We in the control room are told these officers MUST NOT be used for ‘normal policing’ assignments & must be left alone to drive up & down looking for people to stop so they can get what in the trade is known as a ’sanction detection’, i.e. a recordable offence for which some kind of penalty is paid. It matters not whether the sanction is being locked up, charged & remanded in custody for a really serious offence, or a fixed penalty ticket for possession of cannabis. The only difference being one is much easier & much quicker to detect.
Ostensibly, the bosses can announce that they are targeting burglars, i.e. the people most members of the public want locked up, the truth is rather different. On my last set of lates my units arrested no burglars but gave out 8 fixed penalty tickets for possession of cannabis.
And who said detecting crime was hard?
March 18th, 2008
Every job that the police get a call about gets its own unique reference number in the form of a log on the computer system. This records details such as how the call came in - telephone, 999, from another authority (fire, ambulance etc) from an officer or wherever - telephone number, name & address of the caller, what the complaint, information or request is all about, background information and finally, the response it will receive (none, low, high, immediate).
Not all calls result in a response i.e. officer attending, many are resulted at the point of the call, usually with relevant advice or guidance or a simple thank you for the information.
All jobs have a result code which sums up what happened & what the job was all about. This makes auditing easier for end of year stats & also to assist in planning. For instance, we can tell how many injury RTCs have happened, how many domestics, how many arrests for shoplifting etc etc.
The one code we don’t have but I think could really use is the code for ‘Get a Life’ we could call it the ‘GAL’ result. It can be used for all the calls which people think we should be dealing with but in actual fact would be a complete waste of time. This is different from all the 999s we get asking for a taxi or the number for the local laundry.
- My ex partner told my son I was a useless mother - GAL
- The man across the road flicked the Vs at my wife last night - GAL
- I want to complain about double-glazing retailers cold calling me - GAL
- I want to complain about the police shutting the road (when someone died) making me late for work - GAL
- My neighbour’s CCTV films me when I use our joint entrance - GAL
- I’ve been woken up by the police helicopter - GAL
- My neighbour’s cat poos in my garden & I want something done about it - GAL
If we had the GAL code we might be able to concentrate on real police work & assisting members of the public who actually deserve a better response.
March 17th, 2008
Successful management.
Someone should send the managers on a course. There must be one somewhere where you can find out how to get the best out of your staff.
I bet the following advice doesn’t appear anywhere on the syllabus.
Take a shift of staff, deplete them by at least a third but increase the workload they are expected to do. As a result of insufficient staff, get volunteers to work overtime at enhanced payment rates, every single day. As a knock-on of staff shortages, refuse 90% of leave applications. If anyone mentions the thought of going sick because they repeatedly can’t get leave, threaten to stick them on. If a member of staff needs a day off for something really special, like a family wedding or moving house, make no efforts to accommodate them but make it plain to them that if they dare go sick on that day they will be disciplined.
I’m lead to believe that sickness levels are at an all-time high. I wonder of there is any correlation between sickness levels, workplace stress & the shoddy way this place has been run recently.
March 11th, 2008
I was listening to the radio this week & Colonel Bob Stewart was on air discussing the current favourite of the red tops, the government’s betrayal of the armed forces by not providing the right kit. He said something which I thought was quite apt to the current betrayel of the government & senior officers of the police.
He said the problem with the armed forces was that they have a ‘can do’ attitude. Rather than being honest & upfront about their capabilities, when asked to do something, the Army always say, "sure, can do". They then go to war with the wrong kit, the wrong about of troops, the wrong policies because nobody has the balls to say "wait a minute, you can’t expect us t do that with this."
We do that all the time in the police. The government want to bring in a new law for us to enforce we say "sure, can do". They chiefs take away officers from the street but still expect us to deal with everything without making mistakes and making sure all targets are fulfilled we say, "sure, can do".
They take staff away from our shift and then give us even more work to do on top of the stuff we were doing before we say, "sure, can do".
Because we keep saying "can do" the decision makers see that whatever they do gets done so they can lop a few more staff off the list, take a bit more cash off the budget, accept a few more special operations or target fullfillment. All because nobody has the balls to stand up and say, "No, bollocks, we ain’t doing that until it’s resourced & managed properly."
Everyone suffers, the staff & the public.
March 10th, 2008
I seem to spend more of my time at work getting pissed off with everything (as I’m sure recent posts testify). I say pissed off with ‘everything‘ that’s not strictly true, it’s being pissed off with the people who (can’t) run the control room.
I’m fed up to the back teeth working late turns single-crewed, when I haven’t got time to fart, can’t update all the logs which need updating because there is too much radio traffic and everyone wants me to do everything for them, now. And fed up having to ask someone else to cover my channel whilst dealing with their own so I can go & have a leak. The last time I needed permission to have a piss was in junior school.
I’m fed up having every bloody annual leave application refused because it takes the shift ‘under-strength’. I’ve had so many refused leave applications they’re gonna have to retire me 3 months early to fit it all in. I’ve been in this job over 28 years and never before been refused permission to have a holiday in the summer with my family because some fuckwit can’t staff a department which has been staffed pretty well for 28 years to my knowledge & probably an awful lot longer.
And when I get home from work after yet another day when I’ve walked out of the control room with my head spinning and had another rest day canceled due to lack of ability to plan ahead, it really pisses me off when the bloke over the road, who has a garage & a drive & could take two cars off the road, chooses to park his bloody car in the space outside my house so I have to go down the road to park.
Sometimes it feels like I’m just surrounded by tossers.
March 6th, 2008
This week the ever-advancing osmosis of the Big Brother (as in Orwell’s 1984, not the Channel 4 shite) marches on in the UK.
We are already known throughout the world as the surveillance society with more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world (per head of population). The government has realised the opposition to ID cards so is introducing them gradually hoping it will be accepted more readily. We’ve had calls for a national DNA database and this week sees Met Chief Ian Blair calling for a European DNA database.
My attitude might surprise a lot of people, especially fellow police officers, but I am against a national DNA database. That is, I’m all for criminals being on such a database, after-all, there are certain rights which I believe you forfit once you decide to commit crime. But I disagree strongly that innocent people & those who have never even been arrested or suspected of a crime should be forced to give up such a fundamental right as to who has access to this information.
I don’t have time to expand on that now, but will go into more detail when I have a free couple of hours.
DNA Databases, ID cards, CCTV, remote prosecution via static cameras, these are all attempts to cover up the fact that all of the problems they might be able to solve have been left to fester by governments who prefer quick fixes to long term problem-solving.
