It's what I do

Nearly wrote this the other day, glad I didn't now. Couple of good days off does wonders for calming you down.
Now I know there's a whole load of stuff going on in the outside world that is worthy of debate- the TSG trial going on in South London caught my eye- the 'whistleblower' is either the bravest PC ever or slippery and dangerous- but today I just need to let off a bit of steam.

I don't have any regrets about getting promoted. Save one.

I don't know what it is about Custody. I always knew that I'd get custody postings, after all as a response monkey it always came with the job, being the one behind the desk. Just of late, for a number of reasons, I'm in there a lot more than I'd expected, and I might add a lot more than is reasonable. That and a couple of other things mean I am seriously fed up with where I am and what I'm doing at the moment.

Problem is, I really don't know what else I want to do. Psychologists out there would have a field day I'm sure talking about self image and identity but blue light uniform work is all I've ever wanted to do. Being the one who turns up when you call 999 is what I do. Okay granted far too often half the reasons people call 999 are a load of nonsense (that's the advantage of being promoted, I can delegate those calls off!) but ever since I can remember as a small boy getting excited about seeing a police car with it's sirens on, I'm at my happiest at work now when I'm the one behind the wheel of that police car.

Which is why I get so fed up looking at the same set of walls going throught the exact same inane questions to the next character being hauled through the doors from the yard.

I'm always keeping my eye out on the internal website to see if anything else is coming up. Problem is, there really isn't that much. I'm not interested in the Detective side of things. Traffic is an option but it's still on the politically unacceptable list it would seem and they're all downsizing- or at least having to work below their minimum strength (leading to the obvious question, what exactly is the point in a minimum strength) so vacancies are not on the horizon, and I don't know if I've got the patience to wait. Armed response isn't an option unless I can somehow persuade Mrs Simon of the merits (I know, who really wears the trousers etc)

Safer neighbourhoods? I'm yet to be convinced of the political merits and it's effectiveness. However the hours (weekends? Ha!) and lack of custody postings means I may have to give it a go.

Thing is, wherever I go, after a few months I know I'll be wishing I was back on response team, crap shifts, tedious postings, dubious line management and all. It's what I do.

Sunny Times

Saw the Sun has officially told the world that the incumbent government has lost it's support. Waiting for the return of the "Woz the Sun wot won it" headline....

Anyhoo it's rare I find myself agreeing with much that particular comic has to say for itself but their editorial on the state of law and order since Labour came to power rings actually pretty true:

"But they FAILED on law and order, their mantra "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" becoming a national joke. Knife murders are soaring. Smirking criminals routinely walk free in the name of political correctness, while decent people live in a virtual police state of snooping cameras and petty officials empowered to spy and to punish"

The next line could have come straight from a Gadget post:

"Billions more spent, insanely, making benefits more lucrative than a pay cheque - creating a huge, idle underclass for whom work is a dirty word"

I could go on about centrally enforced performance targets forcing the Police Chiefs to chase the easy targets of sanction detections at the expense of other things that don't always result in a tick in a box. The whole desperate tale from Leicester being a case in point. Harassment and antisocial behaviour- adult bullying, basically- is a long term process to sort out which goes against the ingrained police culture of once a crime report is closed (whether sanctioned detection or not), the matter is sorted. Chiefs are reluctant to spend money on a unit which doesn' t bring in the results they are required to produce.

It is no surprise that many police forces have one or two officers on the antisocial behaviour unit (who deal with the paperwork side of amassing evidence for ASBO's) whilst there are many more resources put towards the Crime Management units, i.e. office dwellers who have targets to reduce certain crime types by reclassifying them where possible, and chasing up those elusive SD's.

I'm technically not allowed to have a political opinion but I won't be sorry to see this government go. The question I'm asking is whether I dare think the Conservatives are really going to be any better.

PCSOs

I know that I'm not so prolific a blogger as some of the other police bloggers types floating around (I note Gadget even writes the odd piece for the Telegraph column these days) but the old posts linger around and presumably crop up in searches.

I get emailed every time someone leaves a comment and a post from a long time ago still attracts comments. It started here with a general question about whether PCSO uniforms should be more distinct from sworn officers, followed up here and it appears that this theme still provokes reactions today.

3 years ago PCSO's were still quite new and controversial and media wise things seem to have calmed down. I'm curious to see if attitudes have changed. My own experience now is that apart from a few exceptions, PCSO's generally see their time as that role as merely a preliminary to joining the job proper. At least half of the last street duties intake were ex-PCSO's. I'm not surprised as they see as much nonsense as we do with a tiny percentage of the powers to do anything about it, and combined with the lack of any career structure its no wonder they apply once their year is up.

Wondering what people think of PCSO's now, whether they've proved their worth or otherwise and the same question again, whether they should be more distinct from sworn officers to make it easier for the public to know the difference.

Oh the irony

Suburbiaville is pretty much like any other town that happens to have a reasonably agreeable train link to the nearest proper urban centre.

That means parking restrictions. For anywhere within a bordering unreasonable walk to the station has restrictions between what normal society calls working hours. Where there are parking restrictions, there are parking wardens.

Now I admit I don't have anything against these girls and boys most of the time (probably because when I have to park a car with a blue strobe light on I don't worry too much about what little signs on a lamppost say), and if anything I have a degree of sympathy because they can get an inordinate amount of grief.

Quite a few times we get called to help, at which point whilst making sure nobody actually does rip anyones head off we invariably reel off the same standard lines about civil dispute, civil remedies, and generally advise people to pay the fine and then claim it back later.

(Note- this may sound somewhat contrite but this is actually how we do have to deal with these- a parking offence is not a criminal matter, and no matter what the protestations I have no power to order one of the wardens to rescind the ticket. Having been on the recieving end of these things I know how sometimes they can make your blood boil. Which is usually how we end up getting called, to stop it becoming a real criminal matter should the blood perhaps more literally boils over.)

Anyhooooo I happened to be out and about the other day when another of these calls came out to a parking dispute where things were getting out of hand. I wasn't a million miles away so I flicked the little blue switch and pootled along.

I turned around the corner. I am always surprised at how quick these parking warden people manage to get their colleagues round as there were a right old crowd there, at least 6 of them. Anyway I eventually managed to find what was going on.

I managed to supress my laughter when I realised the clamped motor was a council parking enforcement one! It seems one of their chaps had popped in to see a friend or something and had parked on private premises. Just the owner of this particular private premises had paid out for a private firm to clamp naughty unlicenced parkers. The signs were even up. Unlucky for him the private enforcement van turned up while he was still having his tea and digestive and he didn't scramble out of the place in time to stop the clamps going on.

So we had the usual standoff going on whereby removal bloke was attempting to remove vehicle but the driver had sat himself on the seat and was refusing to move. Yes, the driver was a parking warden. Many a time I've dealt with this situation on the flipside.

So I have to admit I was kind of expecting the council blokes to listen to me when I told them once again that I can't make him rescind the ticket. The private contractors were professional ones (I know some are real cowboys) and even had copies of the land registry to show the extent of the private boundary. I told him until I was blue in the face about civil remedies. I pointed out to him just once or twice that the rules are exactly the same for the dozens of times they call us to something like that, just that this time he was the one having to pay out the cash.

Would he listen? Would he heck.

He started going on about allegations of assault and rang 999 when I told him I was not going to deal with this allegation. Spoilt little boy reaction to someone not getting his own way as there was no assault unless you count a tug of war on opposite sides of a motorbike handlebar. Thank you very much. That's two completely and utterly pointless crime reports that are going to go nowhere that I've got to waste my time writing now because it's now officially recorded that there's an allegation of assault.

A colleague turned up and took over (saying exactly the same things), just in time before I lost my temper. I wasn't far off I tell you.

It was eventually resolved when after the best part of 45 minutes he finally listened and stomped off to a cashpoint and got the money. I had to get signatures from them to confirm that the assault allegation wasn't an assault. This was was solely to cover my backside from when the office monkeys picked up the "crime" report the next day and go apoleptic there were two suspects for an assault at the scene I didn't arrest!

So yes. Off the road nearly two hours dealing with what was little more than a grown adult having the tables turned on him and having a right strop about it!

Just thought I'd share.....

Stop, search, write

Well. Apparently stop and search forms are to be reduced to the bare minimum if the home secretary is to be believed.

Forgive my cynicism, but I'll believe it when I see it for two reasons:

1) In the name of efficiency I suspect we'll have to finish using up all the old forms first
2) It wouldn't surprise me in the least if my own force bottles out of this in the name of local accountability and we get an amended version which has more stuff to write on it.

In the meantime, I'd love to know where this claimed million hours of paperwork saved figure has come from and how it was figured out. It certainly wasn't from the response team jockeys whose paperwork burden remains as daft as it ever was.

Never believe someone official when they say they've taken x number of obsolete forms out of circulation. All they mean is that they've been replaced with a new version.

Old enough to play the lottery....

Shift in custody the other day, had a few in for immigration offences.

Immigration jobs make permanent custody sergeants moan, going on about taking up cells and creating them what they feel is unneccessary work. I generally ignore them as most custody sergeants fit the grumpy old man profile very well and if they weren't allowed to moan about something then they'd probably implode.

I'm not bothered about dealing with immigration offences. They do tend to take longer to deal with and there's a whole set of detention and questioning powers I don't really know much about but on the whole they're not that hard.

What does annoy me though is the little bit of small print somewhere in the immigration laws that if someone claims to be under 16 then they cannot be deported but have to be taken into care. Now this in itself I don't object to, for if there is a genuine child who has found his way into the country by whatever means then we should look after them.

I do object when fully grown adults, who wouldn't be challenged on a door at a 25 yrs above only nightclub, claim they are 16. Despite it being as plain as day- and I acknowledge there are some 14 year olds who can pass off as over 18 or even 20 - that someone is a close to 16 years old as your average Shadows single, they are treated as though they are until proven otherwise.

Unfortunately, the people at Social Services who are deemed wise enough to officially decide that someone is not under 16 don't work weekends.

The end result I had was that I had no choice to but to release this bloke (aged between 25 and 30, at least) into the "care" of social services who placed him in a foster home.

Don't get me wrong, but placing a fully grown adult about whom absolutely nothing is known, into a home full of the most vulnerable young people and teenagers in society, is a disaster waiting to happen. But unfortunately until that disaster happens I have no choice in whether I can release them or not.

Back to basics

Was being sociable the other day and was chatting to some people I had just met. Conversations as they often do turned to work and what I do.

I explained where I work, being a response team monkey somewhere in a suburb. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at their surprise when I said just how many police officers there were at any one time. It made me think for the unitiated i.e. those probably not reading this (never mind) there is a spectacular gulf between perceptions of police numbers and the reality of those on the streets who turn up when you call 999.

There's about 250,000 people resident within my particular part of the policing front line. It has a mix of everything from major trunk routes, well to do areas, old and new estates, some spectacularly notorious and in their "heyday" weren't strangers to featuring in media, and was where police trod carefully and didn't go alone. Some of them have been knocked down now, tower blocks being gradually replaced by compact brick housing on narrow roads. New buildings don't disguise the fact the same people live there.

So with this number of people, major arterial roads, a number of less socially well to do housing estates how many police officers are on duty at any one time? There used to be at least 4 parade stations in my area but it's now down to 2. Between us, we're lucky to have 30 officers.

There is an oft-quoted saying in Suburbiaville that Poo rolls downhill (you can guess what the unsanitised version is). Well, response team is in the coal pit at the bottom of the valley beneath the cliffs the top of which where the poo starts rolling from.

If there is an increase in a particular type of offence- e.g. street robbery- then response teams have new targets to tackle it and get given new fresh tarted up reporting standards by the "specialist" CID units who investigate it, as we were clearly not up to standard. When these specialist CID units fail to meet their targets then officers are taken away from response team duties to man up these teams. I have to supply officers to act as jailers in the custody suite. I have to provide officers to man the front offices. God help us if there's a crime scene anywhere needing a uniform to stand outside. Suddenly the number of officers who are actually there, in a response car with the ability and training to respond to you when you call 999, is pushing 20.

Funnily enough a couple of hours into a shift and with the volume of calls we get, e.g. a couple of shoplifters or someone presenting false documents at a bank (happens a heck of a lot), then we're down to just one or two cars covering the lot.

Now there are of course a couple of other people floating around- catch the right time in the day and you'll have the SNT (also known as NPT) out and about. But it's not their job to answer 999 calls. Someone told me the other day that we're allowed to deflect a single call a day to the Safer Neighbourhood Team. One a day. That's handy.

The effectiveness of the SNT teams is something I remain to be convinced by. Took a call the other day and was met by pretty much the entire street, up in arms about a perpetual problem they have, and the complete failure of the relevant SNT to do anything about it. I'll talk a little bit more about the other issues I have with a police force entirely geared towards the SNT model another day.

Policing is so ridiculously political these days and absolutely everything must be geared towards meeting the needs of the community. Problem is, there are so many different communities within a wider community which can often have polar opposite desires and intentions, and it would be frankly impossible to meet the desires of all of them.

As far as I'm concerned, from my own point of view, policing is really simple.

1) People don't want crime to happen to them in the first place
2) If it does, I'd want someone to turn up in a reasonable time to do something reasonable about it.

Now quite often there's nothing we can do about any particular crime. Your car window gets smashed between 10pm and 8am short of the culprit leaving a business card we've got little hope. But I wouldn't mind it properly reported and you know perhaps seeing someone on patrol between 10pm and 8am once in a while.

Problem is, whilst we are busy chasing our tails trying to meet the myriad different needs of so many different communities, there's nobody left on the response team to try and do anything like directed or reassurance patrol. Unless we're taken off response team duties to go and do that (yes, that happens).

And lets not forget all the officers doing office jobs in units with titles like "Detection Team", "Crime Reporting Integrity Team" doing their best to massage figures to meet whatever the governments latest targets may be.

Blimey. I've been ranting for ages. Apologies. Regular readers of police blogs will be more than aware that the policing situation is riduculous and that the blue line is gossamer thin when it comes to the capacity and ability to answer 999 calls. But on the offchance someone just stumbles across this post as one of their first police blogs, this is the reality.