Compare & Contrast

The Bitch is back in Town

Back-stabbing ex-police officer Nina Hobson’s meteoric rise to mediocrity over a year ago in the "Dispatches" TV programme hasn’t gone entirely to waste, apparently.

The ‘journalist’, Ms Hobson appears to have been given her own 3-part series on ITV which starts tonight with an ‘undercover investigation into the real ingredients in childrens’ food’.

Judging by the level of information she managed to expose on the Dispatches investigation into what police officers really get up to on duty, we’ll probably be treated to such revelations as ‘children’s food includes ingredients’, ‘kids eat them’ & er, that’s it.

Personally, I’ll probably save that particular half hour of my life by just reading the back of the packets. 

200’s Top Tips

Continuing on from my last post, I present a list of my top tips for smooth operations between the control room and the front line.

1. I don’t need to be reminded or asked to attach a Police National Computer (PNC) check to a log; I attach all PNC checks to logs if a log exists, it’s what I do.
2. I don’t need to be reminded to get the helicopter to a car chase or an intruder on. I could have advised the helicopter and had them on route by now but I keep getting interrupted by pointless requests for me to inform the helicopter.
3. If there was a description of the offender I’d have given it to you. My job is communication & I do know what to communicate. I can’t ring the witness back to get some actual information which might be of use to you because I keep having to put the phone down to answer your radio request for a description which I said didn’t exist when I gave the job to you.
4. No, I don’t have a better location, if I did have a better location I’d have given it to you. I have no interest in keeping useful information secret.
5. Yes you can have a dog, I wish I’d have thought of that.
6. No, I didn’t know you were busy doing an arrest enquiry, you didn’t tell me. Just like you didn’t tell me you’d arrived at the previous job, you didn’t tell me you’d left the previous job and you didn’t give me the result or what you wanted to do next. Whilst I have mastered the command & control system, the mapping system, the intelligence database, the crime reporting system & the radio console, I’m not quite up to speed on telepathy.
7. Yes, I know you are intelligent enough to wear your personal protective equipment when sent to a knife fight, but the bosses don’t and they’ve told me to keep reminding you on every job with an element of danger so their arses don’t get sued when you foul up. it really isn’t my fault I appear to be teaching you to suck eggs.
8. I really don’t mind giving the address to you twice when giving you the job, once on route and again when you’re in the area and I don’t mind when you’re in the right street and still asking for the door number, but really, there are two of you, surely the one in the passenger seat carries a pen?
9. There really is no such thing as a quick search of the crime system to check whether some skanky bit of old crap you’ve found in the street really is reported as stolen.
10. Yes, I can do a vehicle check for you, but you know I’m on my own and can hear me dealing with an immediate assignment and being asked different questions by three different units whilst trying to ring the informant back, can’t it wait a while?
11. I know you’re keen to talk to me but do you really have to cut in on the radio as soon as there is a break in transmission, knowing that I’ve just been given a long and complicated update which needs to go on a log. I have contacts with many different resources but the updating log typing fairy isn’t on my list and logs don’t update themselves.
12. I’m a 6′2, 18 stone hairy-arsed copper, not a touch typist

Er, at the risk of inviting a similar list of complaints against controllers, I think I’ll end there…for now. 

Word to the Wise

Sometimes I thik coppers on the street think all us controllers do all day is sit around on our arses and surf the internet. They’re right in some respects; we do sit on our arses all day - it’s a tough job but someone has to do it.

Just like any job I suppose, there are quiet times and there are times when you don’t know whether your arsehole is drilled, ored or countersunk (as one of my training school sergeants used to say).

You spend the whole day dealing with rude, intolerant, me me me people trying to put their own needs & demands ahead of everyone else & the language is often atrocious. And that’s just the police officers on the radio. Wait til you have to speak to the public on the phone.

I can take a joke with the best of them - I joined the police 28 years ago and am still here, if that’s not the biggest joke I don’t know what is but I do sometimes get fed up with the constant reminders from both members of the public and police officers how to do my job correctly.

I know most of the tricks in the book. I’ve been pulling many of them for longer than quite a few of the officers who talk to me have been alive.

So with this in mind I’m preparing a list of handy hints and tips to make life better for me in the control room and you out on the street.

Pass the Weed

Well it seems to be official, cannabis does not harm you. It doesn’t turn you into a quivering wreck dependant on your next fix or robbing old ladies to fund it. In fact, there is some evidence that it can do you good, enhance your social status & your future employment chances & earnings potential.

The evidence for the above comes from recent revelations that at least 10 government ministers partook of the weed in their youth.

A new prime minister could have ushered in a new era of frankness & honesty. Whereas before, an MP caught with his or her fingers in the cookie jar of their historical youth would have gone out of their way to deny or at the very least not admit such transgressions of illegal drugs use, now they are falling over themselves to confess it.

This does seem strange given the murmerings in the corridors of Whitehall suggesting the government may be about to do a U-turn on their reclassification of cannabis which took it from the higher levels as a legal no-no.

I think there is a reasoned debate to be had about legalising cannabis and indeed all drugs, maybe more of that another time, but for now it’s gratifying to now that cannabis use is not the great bringer of doom some suggest.

Government ministers - people who think only of themselves, leaching from those around them to fund their sorded habits, robbing everyone blind as they descend into even more power-crazed fantasies? Surely not.