2008: The Prophecy

It's been a kind of crazy 2007.

The last thing I joined the police for was to write a blog, or a book, and it's the last thing I'll carry on being a police officer for. There may be a lot of people who join the police for various reasons, including a power trip, fast promotion, the sex, "to be a detective". Whilst I would certainly hope for three of those four, I don't think there's any point joining the police if you don't, first and foremost, want to be a uniformed frontline copper. Whatever the frustrations, the bureaucracy and the politics, deep down you have to believe in it or you wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Strangely, I wrote this at 2am.

It's true that a lot of what I spend my day doing is trivial. A lot is spent being told off for not meeting meaningless targets, and being given exactly zero incentive to meet them the next day. A lot of my time is spent wending my way through a tangle of force policies and charging standards to do right by whatever pile of crap is sitting on the desk in front of me. But under it all, there is good work to be done. And there's also a lot of fun to be had at the career criminal's expense.

Here are my predictions for 2008 and, at the end, a couple of questions for my faithful readers.

In 2008:

• I expect my team to gain two police officers and lose three.
• I expect to waste in excess of 5000 minutes reading work emails I didn’t need.
• I predict more laws making it illegal to do things that are already illegal, but worded differently.
• There will be thirty or forty tabloid news stories about people who got arrested for trivial things, and another thirty or forty stories about times when the police did nothing.
• I predict promises to send people to prison for things that previously weren’t crimes, and more promises to stop sending people to prison for things that have always been crimes.
• The Prime Minister will say he values us.
• I will chase my tail faster and faster trying to keep up with what my job expects of me, and to blog more and more about how ludicrous it all is.
• I expect never to lose my sense of humour.
• I expect to be sitting here next year saying all the same things, only people will have stopped calling it news.
  

And for my readers to answer:

• Is policing still "the best job in the world"?
• Promotion - the way forward or the worst decision I'll ever make?
• Sequel: good idea or money-grabbing power trip?

Happy New Year.

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