Show me the Money!

As the Blandshire overtime ban continues, my force is falling further and further into depression. Unless all other police bloggers work for Blandshire, it is not the only one. Many of my colleagues rely on overtime to make up inadequacies in their paychecks, but this is not the worst effect of the ban.

We now have to hand over all work as soon as we hit home-time, with exceptions only when it is IMPOSSIBLE not to. This means where I used to arrest a shoplifter, return to the shop and take a statement and seize CCTV, I now arrest the shoplifter, transfer him or her into another panda so they can take them into custody, then go back to the nick and do my arrest statement - if I have time. The next shift will do all the chasing of evidence. If they have time. If not, the prisoner will be bailed back to me.

Still, in these dark days we can count on the Home Office to make up for Blandshire's failings. Two government-funded Operations are now providing overtime to us beleaguered PCs. God Bless Operation Safeguard, which will mean I can volunteer to transfer myself into a custody suite for twelve hour shifts any time over the next month or so. It is best not to volunteer, but to wait until a few days before a crisis when the Duties department will ring me at 10am when I worked nights the night before, to order me into work on a rest day which will therefore mean double pay. I have also started claiming for four hours overtime simply when I hear the voice of a member of police staff on a rest day.

We must also give thanks for Operation Overt. I have not been involved, but I know colleagues from many forces who have been delighted to spend fourteen hours sitting in the woods, especially in light of recent weather, for a few hundred quid courtesy of the Home Office. Modern policing is truly stupendous, that we can comb a forest by finger-tip for two months, at a mere cost of £150,000/day. I estimate that the overtime bill alone for officers sitting in the woods comes to about £40,000 a week.

I wonder if Mrs Mitchell of Blandmore who is being plagued by nuisance kids and vandalism would rather we found another minuscule scrap of a bomb to add to already overwhelming evidence, or that we trained and put another seventy police officers on the streets for a year.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright of PC Bloggs.