Our Own Worst Enemy

Occasionally a brainstormer at a police headquarters somewhere comes up with a wacky scheme to reduce crime. Gadget describes the campaign, waged by numerous forces over time, to stick notices on cars with valuables on display, just so the thieves know which ones to break into.

As a front-line police officer I spend most of my time trying to respond to schemes like this. I find myself treading a path of compromise between what I'm being told to do and what my commonsense is protesting. But that's always assuming that I'm told about the scheme in the first place. I often fall foul of senior managers by failing to adhere to a new policy that I know nothing about.

For those of you new to the crazy world of British policing, a Crime Reduction scheme is usually brought into being by the following simple process:

• A Superintendent somewhere identifies a crime wave consisting of two or three similar offences in a month.
• He or she delegates the problem of solving the wave to an ambitious Chief Inspector.
• Rather than pointing out that the crime wave does not exist, the C/I instigates a new operation, naming it after a word that no one understands like Adoxography.
• Resources are diverted to Op Adoxography, front-line PCs are invited to work overtime on rest days, someone devises a ten-page document describing the aims and actions of the operation. These differ in no way from day-to-day policing except for the occasional extra annoyance to members of the public trying to get home/to work/to the pub.
• A front-line sergeant is put in charge of the operation, and uses all the resources to attend the outstanding domestics, robberies and distraction burglaries that normally get left for a few days until all the evidence has rotted away.
• All arrests, charges, tickets and cautions resulting from the officers on the operation get flagged as down to Op Adoxography.
• Meanwhile the officers involved remain blissfully unaware that they were ever involved in an operation to start with, and fail to fill out their overtime forms correctly resulting in delayed payment.
• The Chief Inspector hails the op a stupendous success.
• The Superintendent gets promoted.
• Back on the streets, crime waves that aren't very interesting, or can't be allocated an unusual word, continue unabated.
  

This really is my life. Occasionally there really is a crime wave that really can be solved by an influx of officers devoted to its cause. More often, there is just crime. If we had these kind of resources everywhere, every day, maybe there wouldn't even be that.

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'Diary of an On-Call Girl' is available in some bookstores and online.