Not-so-intelligent briefings

The virtues of Intelligence-Led Policing are forever being extolled in Blandshire Constabulary. It supposedly means that instead of police cars randomly roving Blandmore in the hope of seeing a crime, we base our patrols on recent crime waves and information received from police informants.

In effect, this means that if Roman Grove on the Porle is attacked nightly for two weeks and fourteen cars broken into, for the fortnight following the spate you can be assured there will be plenty of police cars about looking for the thieves. Meanwhile the thieves will have moved onto Grant Way, the intelligence for which should hit our systems at approximately the exact moment they move yet again.

In this way we can reassure all the Mops* who have just been broken into that we are doing something to combat the problem, without any danger of actually catching anybody in the act of anything.

Our daily intelligence briefings (which of course arrive by email) often contain delightful snippets such as:

• "Thursday is the third most popular day for auto crime in Cakton."
• "11pm-6am is when the overnight burglaries are happening."
• "There've been a lot of thefts of metal recently."
• "Intelligence required on Michaela Jordan [local drug-dealer]. Please hang out outside her house and record her every move, but if asked say it was a spontaneous sighting."
  
• "Dale Thompkins has just been released from prison. Should there be any knifepoint robberies of any kind, just arrest him and CID will be delighted to deal with the paperwork in the morning."
  
• "CID would like to remind all shifts that they are currently understaffed to deal with robberies and response officers may have to investigate these themselves."

These bulletins are essential to modern police work, as without them we might forget to investigate crime altogether.

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* Mop = Member of Public