PC Bloggs - a Twenty-first Century Police Officer

The Elusive Bobby on the Beat

2012-01-26T19:28:00.002Z

Why is it you never hear MPs extolling the virtues of "doctors on the wards" or "firemen in their engines"? It is accepted that as well as being seen quickly when you turn up at hospital, and having water sprayed on your house as soon as it catches fire, other factors come into play. For example it's helpful if the doctors that treat you are trained in the latest equipment and medical knowledge, are awake enough to perform your surgery, and can be on standby for the life-threatening emergency that might walk in behind you. And for the fire crews to arrive with working hoses, well-oiled teamwork and an experienced chief.

But it's easy for a politician to harp on about bobbies on the beat, because of programmes over the years like Dixon of Dock Green and The Bill, that frequently show officers stumbling across live crimes every five minutes they are on the street. And the Tories have been scoring political points off the idea for the last fifteen years.

David Davis, in 2007, laid into the then Labour Government for the fact that only 14% of officers' time was being spent "on the beat". And now Nick Herbert (Policing Minister) is using the same argument to belittle Chief Constable Tony Melville's announcement that his Gloucestershire force is "on a cliff edge".

Still fits into his old stabbie... good man.

(Although that jacket looks suspiciously clean.)

Only last week the Chair of Greater Manchester's Police Federation wrote about being "stretched beyond capacity" and being "barely able to function".

Now a Chief Constable is saying the same things. When a Chief goes on record and sounds the death knell of his own career, you should be afraid. The residents of Cheltenham and Stroud will be quaking in their beds tonight. That isn't undermining public confidence, it's telling the truth.

Police Minister Nick Herbert has trotted out the old excuse that it must be the Chief's fault if the money he has isn't going far enough. Will Tony Melville invite the Home Office in to do better? Just what exactly would Nick Herbert cut, if he was given the same budget?

Well, Theresa May says that policing is about cutting crime, "no more, no less". So the first thing to go would be our response to missing persons and those self-harming or threatening suicide. No longer will we deal with traffic collisions or close roads while firemen evacuate buildings. We'll stop sectioning people barking at their own reflection on street corners, and ignore the request from Social Services to check on three vulnerable children because the mother's threatened to knock them out if they go round again. We won't help scared victims collect their personal belongings so they can leave their violent partner, nor make those night-time visits on behalf of a doctor or coroner, with our hats in our hands.

And that's just the stuff that doesn't relate to crime. I can't wait for Nick Herbert to get his big red pen on Gloucestershire's criminal justice departments, to see him announce just which tape summariser, file admin support worker and witness liaison officer can be done away with, and who is going to get convictions at court without them.

But more importantly than any of the above, will he cut those back office staff whose role is simply to massage crime figures and generate slews of pie charts, reports and policies? Will he make good on his own rhetoric, and extinguish paperwork relating to risk aversion and the fear of litigation?

My guess, is that were Nick Herbert in any Chief Constable's position, in any force in the country, not only would he find himself unable to do any of the above, he wouldn't have the guts to do what Tony Melville has done, and put his neck on the block to make it public.

When will the next member of ACPO follow suit? And who will be first to join PC Nick Manning in front of a disciplinary panel for it?

How many Chiefs feel unable, or unwilling, to speak up?

It's all very well to harp on about the sacrosanct front-line, but before Chiefs can make the cuts in the right places, there has to be fundamental change to the infrastructure holding it all up: the Criminal Justice System, Health and Safety, and the law itself. There's no point in telling someone to run their car with eco-fuel, if none of the filling stations around them provide it.

Of course, most Chief Constables aren't talking about any of this. They're just piling more and more work onto fewer and fewer people, and blaming their own staff if they can't bear the load. Come on, ACPO, let's hear a few more of you clamouring for a better deal.

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

The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-time

2012-01-20T17:48:00.001Z

The revelation of celebrity hacking at the News of the World has opened a plethora of worm-cans, one of which has ultimately lead to a report by Elizabeth Filkin warning against the 'cosy' relationship between the press and the police.

As both a police officer and a type of journalist - albeit an unregulated, unedited type - this latest move is of interest, and suggests an imminent tightening of the net in regards to police blogging. But the general public view is unclear. There's a juxtaposition going on: the same people who bemoan the lack of information given by the police are also asking for us not to have close relationships with journalists. The same voices crying out against hacker-gate are also calling for more freedom of the press.

So are we supposed to be giving information to journalists or not?

If you were to ask Blandshire Constabulary's media officer, the answer would be about as clear as mud. What's more she'd have to write to the Chief Constable's Management Team before using the word 'mud', and to ensure the font size was not discriminating against anyone. In the world of Twenty-First Century policing, we're very confused about the media.

And, as can be seen in the case of the blogger Nightjack, the media are very confused about us. When The Times set out to 'out' Nightjack, on the spurious grounds that 'he might not have been a police officer (but was)', they seemed confused between the concepts of a corrupt police officer, a vigilante member of the public, and an anonymous source. As a whistle-blower into the inner workings of the police, he should have been the latter. As an independent journalist requiring no editor, or payment, they went for him the former. And interestingly enough, this article suggests they actually outed him by way of computer hacking.

Perhaps all of the above is an indication that relations between the police and the media are a complete mess, and that we do need some form of guide-lines. But if the result is a greater breakdown in communications, not only will it further harm the public image of the police, but it may actually damage our ability to handle a massive investigation such as the Soham murders, or a Madeleine McCann on British soil. When it comes to the crunch and a child is missing presumed-about-to-be-murdered, a strong pre-existing relationship with the media is vital to ensure the right information is released or withheld.

The above is an extreme example, but there are day-to-day concerns too, and Elizabeth Filkin's report talks largely about senior officers, rather than the likes of me. No doubt the reaction of Blandshire Constabulary, to my regular conversations with journalists and editors, would be one of horror. But why should good media relations be the remit only of the highly-ranked? Is a senior officer's lunch with a journalist any more or less corrupt than the neighbourhood bobby's coffee with a councillor? Or my phone-call with Radio Five Live? If the police is to truly connect with the media, and the public, we need to start giving more information, from a wider range of sources. The era of Twitter is not that of the carefully-worded press release, but the off-the-cuff witticism. Done without prejudicing any investigation or trial, naturally...

Of course, there is one problem with the vision of openness and transparency, and it's a problem that means such a vision will never be realised. If you embrace the concept of total transparency, it means you actually have to be carrying out your role with integrity and principle. Perhaps PC Nick Manning can raise this when he faces Professional Standards for his Tweets on Dorset's staffing levels. Is it his Tweeting that has undermined public confidence in his force, or is it his force's severe under-resourcing? Or as I will respond in my pre-prepared statement: 'If you don't want it blogged about, don't do it.'

Perhaps, one day, Blandshire Constabulary will have its own blog, that actually tells you the truth about Twenty-First Century Policing. Until that day, some of us will have to have beer with journalists. Or cappuccino, in my case.

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

The Truth About Police Pay

2012-01-14T15:38:00.003Z

When I joined the police in the Twenty-First Century, any request for someone to work overtime was met with a barrage of "Me me!" Rest day working was pounced on and you couldn't fight bank holiday volunteers off with a stick.

Christmas 2011, on a variety of bank holidays, I had cause to phone a number of officers asking them to come in early, or stay late, for double time. An hour at a PC's wage might be worth anything up to £30. Was I batting away eager money-grabbing officers left, right and centre? Was I heck. I found not one single volunteer for a couple of hours' overtime, and out of the fifteen officers I phoned to come in early, five answered their phones and only three were available.

When we get to Christmas 2012, and the latest pay recommendations are imposed, those three will be one, if we're lucky. If someone is the other side of the country, has had a drink, or isn't well, they can't be made to come into work. Which makes you wonder just what Chief Officers were envisaging when they signed their names to the infamous "forty-nine recommendations" letter that in 2010 signalled the decline of police pay and conditions.

I predict the following moves by Blandshire Constabulary to counter the demotivation and apathy that will accompany the slashing of our pay and perks:

They will investigate those officers who say they are away or ill when asked to work on a rest day.
They will start to discipline officers who refuse to work overtime or rest days.
They will put in place an involuntary overtime system.

The response will be a gradual challenge by individuals or groups, about whether you can force people to work and place restrictions on their personal lives, in the Twenty-First Century. The governments of today will see those changes they appear to desire, in the form of:

Police officers will become like any other employee. They will not be able to be forced to work, and will not put themselves out to do so.
With no privileges, prestige or perks, or any possibility of self-advancement, new recruits will fall into two categories: those with no real prospects of a promising career, and those desiring to get ahead at all costs. The concept of the vocational police officer, who has dreamed of wearing the uniform since childhood, will be gone.

Perhaps I'm being melodramatic. But the police force of this country has been unique, in that university graduates, squaddies, plumbers, lawyers and doctors can all announce their change to the role of police officer without any shame. It is a career that enables upward mobility, and embraces philanthropists.

The future is uncertain, but it will take giant steps to recover what we are losing.

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

Headline Famine

2012-01-06T19:24:00.001Z

The first week in January generally brings a lull in the madness that has been Blandmore for the last few weeks. This year, it seems, there is also a lull in news.

At least, that's the only explanation I can find for the ludicrous headline: "Police called to killer's house" which has been used to head a number of articles today about the fact that police had visited Michael Atherton's house "four times in just two years".

Whoever signed off on the use of the word "just" in this sentence should be brought before the Press Complaints Commission. For starters, the two years in question were 2002-2004. Secondly, four times in two years is not an inordinately high number - at least, not by the standards of families that have the type of domestics resulting in police attendance. There is a couple in Blandmore who have police attendance twice a month, usually because she's refusing to let him pick up the dog for his weekly access visit, or because he's sent her a text saying she's a 'hoare'. He might kill her one day, but so might I.

There is a relevant piece of information in today's news: that Atherton in 2008 threatened to shoot himself. In Blandmore, in 2012, if he did that, his shotguns would be removed. However, if he saw a doctor and showed that he had made the remark in an intoxicated state, and was not suicidal or crazy (which I would guess Atherton was not when sober), the guns might be returned. This is because we do not live in the world of Minority Report, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for crimes you are yet to commit.

By contrast, unlike the media, and no doubt the IPCC, the government, and a slew of people with two slews of opinions, the Bidve family has been conducting itself with the utmost dignity, following the fatal shooting of their son.

Said Mr Bidve: "The only person we blame is the person who was responsible for taking Anuj away from us in this senseless act of violence on Boxing Day morning."

If more victims and families took this approach, the law in this country would be a lot simpler.

That said, a blogger will be the first to admit that the police always have room for improvement. It might be interesting to compare the 2012 investigation and trial of "Psycho Stapleton", for the Anuj Bidve shooting, with the utterly botched investigation into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, that has finally reached some sort of resolution. Whatever your view on institutional racism and the lorry-load of bureaucracy the phrase has brought about, the Stephen Lawrence murder has fine-tuned our approach to scene management, exhibit-handling, and identification matters. I don't know what part these played in the Bidve investigation, but I imagine the approach was thoroughly professional.

Whatever the outcome, the headlines today show that in the years I've been writing this blog, two things have not changed:

Murder is always tragic.
The culture of blame is alive and well.

It is 2012, and this Twenty-First Century Police Officer is still wringing her hands.

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

Christmas Isn't

2011-12-25T22:54:00.000Z

Christmas isn't Christmas for the boys and girls in blue. But not for the reasons you might think.

For the police, Christmas isn't the stream of violent domestics. It isn't the fight in town, the drink-driver on the High Street. It isn't the stabbing on the Porle and the family it tears apart.

Christmas isn't leaving while the rest of the family are arriving. Or dragging myself out of bed for turkey and presents. Or passing on the champagne and port.

Christmas is a box of Roses in every department. It's an empty inbox. It's having no crime reports put in your name. It's not seeing anyone with more than two pips.

Christmas is the A&E nurses in Santa hats, it's the fairy lights on the custody desk, the mince pies in briefing.

It's finding the missing grandfather and taking him home. It's going nowhere without blue lights on. It's saying, "Thank you, I will," or "As it's Christmas..."

Christmas might not be the same for me as for the rest of my friends and family. But I get to be a real police officer for a day, which means it isn't all bad.

Happy Christmas to all my readers.

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

Newsflash: Criminals are Anti-Police

2011-12-05T07:14:00.003Z

Thank goodness The Guardian is here to point out that rioting burglars don't like the police.

Having identified that over 75% of those convicted as a result of the riots had a prior criminal record, why is this latest study being hailed as a discovery of national significance? The Guardian need only look to its own study for the answer to why their cross-section of rioters harbour such a hatred of the police:

"Two-thirds of those interviewed said they had been cautioned by police or convicted of an offence in the past."

And yet it is supposed to be a sign of institutionalised thuggery and racism that these recidivist criminals dislike the people who try to bring them to justice.

Next, we'll be reading breaking news that there lives a robed man in Vatican City who is a member of the Catholic religion, and that animals of the ursine persuasion occasionally deposit faecal matter in areas with a high density of trees.

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

The Man in the Black Suit

2011-12-01T23:43:00.001Z

Somewhere in Blandmore right now, a man is sleeping. He sleeps well, he does not dream.

Before the man went to bed, he hand-washed and waxed his van, and parked it carefully on the driveway at work. He drove home, he ate a square meal of meat and vegetables, brushed his teeth and shaved. He checked his hair, and cut away any stray locks. He polished his leather shoes, then carefully pressed a black suit, and hung it from his wardrobe door. He closed his eyes.

At some point tonight, or tomorrow night, an alarm will sound. The man will rise and silence it. He will step into the shower and carefully soap and scrub himself. He will dry every inch of skin with a clean towel. He will slide his arms and legs into his black suit, and do up his black tie. The man will check himself in a mirror, from every angle.

Outside the door of his workplace, waits another man in another black suit. They collect the keys, they climb into their pristine van, they produce a map and drive to a location.

Inside, could be desolation. There could be hysteria, disbelief, anger or remorse. There might be silence and loneliness. Whichever awaits, the man in the black suit is the same.

Blood, vomit, bloated flesh and rotted skin, are all one to the man in the black suit. His handshake never falters; his words are soothing and low. I am sorry to meet you under such circumstances. My condolences on your loss. Perhaps you would prefer to wait over here, madam. We'll take it from here, sir, don't worry about a thing.

Tha man in the black suit can cope with narrow stairwells and soiled carpets. He can navigate a decade of phone bills, a generation of ornaments. He has strength and pride and compassion.

No one asks the man's name. No one remembers his face, nor wonders what he thinks, where he lives, whom he loves. He is just a man, in a suit, who answers the phone when you call. He will come to witness your darkest hour and fill it with quietness and dignity.

Thank you, to the men in the black suits, who undertake the duty of which no one speaks.

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

A Reasonable Response

2011-11-24T14:14:00.002Z

Inspector Gadget's got a good post up about response times, and a video of one of our regular customers. The video could be from any supermarket up and down the country. Well, apart from M&S. M&S shoplifters are not just any shoplifters.

In Blandshire, we've invented a brand new classification that has an open-ended response time, so anything we're not likely to be able to attend soon, gets reclassified as "non-urgent".

Other methods we use to meet targets for attending and closing jobs:

Arrest requests from other forces get printed out and left on the desk in Blandmore's main report writing room, then the log closed. If a sergeant forgets to write it up on the board, the arrest may never get done, and the force never updated that it will never be done. There's no sensible place to log arrest attempts and there's a small chance that if it isn't rubbed out when the arrest has been made, the person could be arrested again. But on the plus side, the job gets closed within 5 minutes of arriving.
Jobs that can be dealt with by way of appointment get logged in a separate diary and closed. If the appointment is never dealt with, due to redeployment, victim forgetting, or outside circumstances, it can be days before it is re-booked because there isn't a "live" job on the computer any more.
Crimes that are not "priority crimes" (these are crimes with a much more important target than the response time target) do not even go onto the computer. They find their way through various departments and offices, before being allocated to whichever sergeant happens to be on duty that day. If and when the sergeant notices the crime has been allocated, they will allocate an officer to deal with it. It can be 2-3 weeks before the victim is contacted, and that's for cases with named suspects and outstanding property to find. It's a helpless feeling when you ring up the victim to say, "I know, I wish I'd come straight round but your report was in the ether". Other examples of "slow-time" crime reports can include shopliftings where the offender was still outside for 20min consuming the goods he had just stolen, but the job went "slow-time" because he had left the store - meaning it never went onto the Incident Control System to dispatch a unit.

On the plus side, Mother Theresa has abolished all targets for the police, so no one can do anything if we ignore the above system and use commonsense to resource jobs.

The truth about systems like these is that it is not just about targets, although they do figure. If every crime requiring a physical presence and investigation appeared as a "live" job, response teams would simply drown under the weight of them. Yesterday in Blandmore we had in excess of 40 jobs requiring attendance by 10 officers at one stage, and that's WITH a system that diverts a lot of jobs elsewhere. Under the above system, a lot of investigations are closed that were solvable, and a lot of victims lost interest who would have provided evidence. While we run around attending reports of racism and domestics where we are not wanted.

As with everything, it's all an excuse to make less officers do more, without any lessening of quality.

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

Fictional Grannies and Guardian Readers

2011-11-22T14:26:00.008Z

My article in The Guardian online today has caused some consternation. You can read the debate in the comments, so I'm not going to go into it here, apart from to say that the grannies are not intended to be fictional!

As an undercover police writer, you suffer from two contradictory presumptions by non-police readers:

Half of them think you are touting the party line, and condemn you in the same breath as the police establishment you are trying to satirise.

The other half think you are a whistle-blower and must therefore hate your colleagues and be on a mission to expose their corruption.

What I really try to write about is good people trying to do a good job, strangled by a detrimental culture of target-chasing and risk aversion. I am not speaking for front-line officers, but I speak as one of them.

Personally, I try not to get hung up on which judge has made what ruling, unless it is on a point of law that materially changes how I can legally do my job. I have learned over the years that it is possible to police sensitively, morally and bravely, but the more you do so, the greater chance there is that you will make a mistake. Hopefully, the mistake will simply lead to someone being acquitted for a trivial offence. If you're unlucky, it might lead to an innocent person's death. Because the stakes are so high, I harbour no resentment towards colleagues who err on the side of caution, who follow force policy in blinkers, obligingly fulfill targets and avoid risky decisions at all costs. They are still good coppers with their hearts in the right place, but some of us have a different opinion of risk, or have more to lose.

Most of us are somewhere on middle ground, making a risky decision one day and playing it safe the next, according to how much we know and what we think is right. When people ask me what is the hardest thing about my job, I think about that balance, and how close I come to getting it wrong, day in, day out.

If you haven't worked in a job like that, it's hard to grasp how that feels.

Corruption is a strong word.

For those of you who have commented on the CIF article expecting a response - I don't have an account. If you want a more detailed response as to what I meant by the article, feel free to email me. It really wasn't anything sinister and I'm sorry for how it's being interpreted! My commenter at 15:29 has it about right.

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

The Real Enemy

2011-11-19T22:01:00.000Z

The secret workings of the Police Arbitration Tribunal continue behind a rosewood panelled door somewhere in London.

Meanwhile, in another part of London, a 32-year-old man has been taken into custody for trying to kill four police officers who were trying to arrest him. Two have been seriously wounded.

One story pretty much sums up the other. For as long as I've been blogging, police officers have been chasing the elusive figure of the Health and Safety-conscious, Home Office-approved, Twenty-First Century Police Officer. Pulled in different directions by the government and the press, our senior managers and the public, we've struggled to pin down our true identity. The truth staring us in the face - a truth we've always known - is that we will never win the chase. Just as we seem to be getting there, our prey turns dirty, and stabs us in our faces and in our stomachs.

You don't have to be a police officer to sign Sergeant Nigel Tompsett's e-Petition on fair treatment for the police.

Nor do you have to be to pray for the officers lying in hospital tonight.

However you say it, however much Theresa May wants you to believe it, being a police officer is not like any other public sector job.

It is not Arbitration going on behind those sheets.

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

"Hello Pot, It's Kettle - You're Black!" *

2011-11-07T18:44:00.004Z

I am staggered to read today that more than half of crime is detected out of court. Since the introduction of what affectionately became known as "Triple S-J", or "Simple, Speedy, Summary Justice" in 2006, the Home Office has been shoving the police bodily towards out-of-court disposals for a wider and wider array of offences. It is therefore pretty disgraceful that we're only managing to dispose of 50% of offences that way. By "we", in this case I mean West Mercia Constabulary, the latest "victim" of a Freedom of Information request by an anonymous magistrate.

What is perhaps more staggering is the fact that this has been reported as news. The phenomenon is no newer than it was in 2010, or 2009.

The Magistrates Association is now up in arms, because the year on year rise in cautions and warnings is seen as the police "acting judge, juror and executioner" all in one. (A more appropriate comparison might be to say that it's the police acting junior clark, rookie solicitor and probation officer all in one.)

Magistrates hate the idea of offences being dealt with out of court, as does a large proportion of the public. The HMIC reported this year that a third of out-of-court disposals were found to be inappropriate - ie the offence was too severe or the offender not eligible to be warned/cautioned.

Yet the police continue to give out cautions like Halloween chocolate, the moment a whiff of an admission is detected. In fact, it's the first question most solicitors ask when they arrive at the police station: "Is the custody sergeant considering a caution for my client?"

For a hardened wife-beater, car thief or fraudster, a caution is neither here nor there. It has no effect on their lawless, unemployed life, and does absolutely nothing to repay the victim of their crime. But in actual fact, cautions are not generally administered to this type of criminal. The majority of repeat offenders DO go before the court, and to what end?

Magistrates fail to recognise that the majority of recidivist criminals who pass through police stations every day are unaffected whether they go to court or not. Their diaries are peppered with bail dates, court appearances, probation appointments and baby-mother due dates, none of which they plan to turn up to anyway. If they do make it behind the doors of the local Mags' Court, they will stroll out laughing a couple of hours later and flick the V sign at the victim who came to see them convicted. Cautions are never handed out to these felons, and nor is any other kind of justice.

Cautions are reserved for those people who, far from deserving to be shoved before the court, probably don't deserve to be arrested in the first place. Just occasionally, a first time wife-beater or drunken squaddie will be cautioned in what is probably an appropriate response to their first offence, expression of remorse, and lack of support from the victim. But most cautions stem from jobs where officers turned up with their hands tied by local positive intervention strategies and senior management pressure in certain crime categories. They're given out to ten-year-olds for antics in the park, neighbours for muttered swear-words, students for alcohol-induced stumbles that they would have paid for anyway. If you're a teacher or doctor, a criminal caution is a kiss of death. You will never work with children again, in fact you'll be lucky if you can even babysit your next door neighbour's kids, or your own.

So the song and dance that Magistrates make about the world of out-of-court disposals is misdirected. Instead of asking whether the police should have placed these people before the courts, they should be asking whether these people should be anywhere near the Criminal Justice System at all.

I suggest that Magistrates concentrate on those who DO make it before their bench, and ask themselves why they keep coming back, if IN-court disposals are so effective.

SOON: this anonymous police officer plans to place Freedom of Information requests with her (or somebody's) local Magistrates' Court. Any ideas anyone?

* For those of you offended by this caption, and who brand it a racist epithet, you may be interested to know that race crimes are considered an absolute priority in Blandmore at the moment. A caution would not be issued for a racially aggravated offence, but if it were, I would lose my job immediately. If that's not Simple, Speedy and Summary, I don't know what is.

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

Fair Weather

2011-10-30T01:06:00.001+01:00

It is official: police in Blandmore are doing A Superb Job. At least, so I was informed last week by the woman who gives out the parking permits. Not especially surprised to discover that Belinda is now the person I most need to impress with my team's crime reduction and detection skills, I further read the happy news that all crime has dropped since this time last year. It appears this is being entirely credited to the hard work and diligence of Blandmore's erstwhile bobbies - in and out of uniform.

It turns out, the message is not actually from Belinda, but has come via her from the Area Commander. As well as possessing the sole key to the drawer containing the combination safe containing the pass-key to open the encrypted laptop that gives out electronic fob access to the car park, Belinda is also the only person allowed to send out all-user emails. Which means that our superintendent - a man with over twenty years' dedicated public service behind him - has to get her permission to send his workforce an email.

It's not that Belinda would ever refuse the request. But even she has days off. Still, I'm not complaining: it's thanks to HQ's latest crackdown on misuse of the email system that we feds down here on response can go a whole weekend without hearing a peep out of anyone above the rank of inspector.

The only other task awaiting me when this latest chirpy message fell into my inbox was to begin the mammoth task of trawling through Blandmore's fourteen missing person reports. I therefore took the time to read the Boss's email in its entirety.

It turns out, the detectives on Operation Softly Softly Catchee Thiefee, in an astonishing display of accuracy, have actually caught several thiefs this week. It also appears that two or three response bobbies have attended domestics and not only managed to identify the offenders via their names, dates of births and family photographs, but have startlingly also arrested them immediately when they were found hiding in their own homes. All this has led the Super to conclude that it is entirely the brave work of front-line heroes, working of course under his guidance and strict adherence to force policy, that has resulted in a gargantuan drop in crime over the same period last year.

Personally, I'm attributing it to the fact that last week, last year, was half-term. This year, it was a week later.

I'm not diminishing the fine work of the Op SSCT lot, nor the brilliant murder-aversion skills of us response bods. But to suggest that any of us have more than a fleeting influence over which week, which year, the baddies will choose to strike, is akin to claiming that the weather is decided in Monday morning's management meeting.

From my time in Blandshire Constabulary, I've seen good men and women fall and rise, all based entirely on the weather. If and when I ever decide to start scrabbling for the next rung on the ladder, all I can really do is buy an umbrella, and hope.

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

Unappealing Justice

2011-10-18T19:37:00.003+01:00

The papers almost proudly announce today how 7 out of 10 defendants failed to get a reduction to their sentences for offences relating to the August riots. Although The Guardian manages to sling in a few quotes from Human Rights lobbyists, the tone in the general media suggests support for the tough sentences. Tough, that is, by British standards.

Nowhere in the article does it express astonishment that as high as 30% of the cases before the appeal court resulted in the halving of sentences given out. I have no doubt that the statistic for cases unconnected with rioting is far higher.

Meanwhile, the case of Dale Farm toils on. Back in September, dozens of police officers were paid overtime all over the country to travel to Essex and await the go-ahead for the forced eviction of the Dale Farm travellers. Only for a last minute appeal to be awarded and splashed all over the headlines. A week or so later, dozens more officers travelled back, and forth, and back, and forth again, as the seemingly unending legal battle unfolded. Now we are told that the Council will actually begin the eviction, how many more police hours will be wasted when yet another final hour document is submitted for the court's consideration?

"Ooh, isn't this legal system SUCH fun?"

"To be sure."

Most police officers are well aware that injustices occur in court, usually Magistrates'. And usually the injustice is the acquittal of a guilty party. When the opposite occurs, it is obviously vital for there to be some form of appeal system, to combat the days when the trial judge or jury got up on the wrong side of the bed.

But nowadays we are seeing more and more a neverending showdown as defendants and prosecutors parade before higher and higher levels of court until they get a decision they are happy with.

The most depressing part of the whole system is that the actual victims of crime have no right to appeal any decision whatsoever. If you have sat and watched your rapist, or your relative's murderer, walk free from court, knowing without a doubt of their guilt due to evidence that was disallowed, or not believed, you cannot even tell the press you still think they're guilty without the risk of being sued for libel.

I experienced the impotence of victim-hood some years ago, when my witness care officer phoned me up in a panic one day asking why I wasn't in court to give evidence against the man who assaulted me during an arrest the year before.

My reply: "Er, because I fly back from the Canary Islands tonight, and the case is tomorrow."

"I thought so - we warned you for the wrong date. The case is now, and it's about to be thrown out."

When I got back, I wrote to the Crown Prosecution Service asking for an explanation as to how this mistake had happened when every other witness had been warned correctly, and why the case had been thrown out when I had not avoided court deliberately - especially gutting given that on two previous occasions the defendant had failed to show up because he simply "forgot" and had been given not one but two further chances. I suggested perhaps the CPS could have appealed the decision to abandon the charge of assault police.

I did receive a reply letter, four months later. I put it in the bin without reading it, but I can guarantee that the words "public interest" and "unlikely to succeed" were present.

After the best part of a decade in contact with the Criminal Justice System, I am now hardened to such experiences. But your average victim is not. They are merely distant spectators of a most unappealing sport, in which they have no idea of the winner even after the whistle has been blown.

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

Smoke and Mirrors

2011-10-14T20:20:00.000+01:00

Murmurings have been afoot that Tom Winsor made up some parts of his famous report.

Will this affect the ongoing negotiations over police pay? I'm not holding my breath.

Nor am I holding my breath to see whether the current government, or the next one, actually does anything to materially affect police bureaucracy, or the target culture that we are told no longer exists.

But at least the recent stories about Winsor are signs that the Fed is finally tackling politicians by their own rules, where facts are irrelevant and tabloid headlines are everything. Now if only they'd actually play the same cards to expose senior officers' hypocrisy in the way they are massaging crime figures, ring-fencing bureaucratic roles while pushing through front-line redundancies, and imposing structural change for purely political reasons.

Once again, breath I am not holding.

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

Top Down Management

2011-10-02T07:01:00.000+01:00

Following on from yesterday's Ali Dizaei news, I have been pondering the poor officers who became embroiled in the original incident where their Commander arrested a man with whom he had an ongoing dispute. In the face of a further internal tribunal and re-trial, they must be wishing they had not been on duty that day.

It's bad enough when the Area Commander decides to venture out of his office in Blandmore to attend the report writing room, let alone if he were to wander out of the station and start making arrests. In fact, our Area Commander did threaten some time ago to materialise on the streets of Blandmore, but luckily last month's Performance Group Analysis Meeting has kept him indoors ever since.

That said, I would be entertained to see my superintendent attending a bog standard Blandmore domestic. I wonder how he would cope with the following daily experiences of response officers on my team:

A ten page risk assessment to fill in.
An hour on hold to the civilian call centre to generate the crime report.
Having no transit available to transport the violent prisoner.
No space in the nearest custody due to the "cell alert" system going down.
The next closest custody suite hurling abuse on his arrival (they don't like Blandmore prisoners).
Having to mount a seven hour cell watch on the prisoner following attempts to strangle himself with his trousers, T-shirt and boxers.
Returning to take victim statements to find the victim has moved up north permanently.
Domestic Abuse Unit having no resources to have any involvement whatsoever in the job.
Three hours on the phone to the Crown Prosecution Service to be told the case is to be dropped and the prisoner released.
Having to take the prisoner home because it might abuse his human rights to release him without a jacket.
Coming back to work the next day to find an email from his boss, asking why the case has not resulted in an immediate conviction at Crown Court.
Finding a further email from the Domestic Abuse Unit, detailing how they would have done things differently, if only they'd had resources to help.

... Back in the real world, I'm lucky if I can even locate the superintendent to sign off on an urgent authorisation. The chances of him experiencing any actual policing some time soon are remote.

Which is all anyone really needs to know about the reasons for the state of policing today.

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

Look into my Dizaeis....

2011-09-30T11:41:00.001+01:00

The embarrassing saga of sacked, reinstated, sacked, reinstated Met Commander goes on.

Yet Ali Dizaei is not in the clear on the charges of corruption for which he was sent to prison in February. He faces a re-trial, because despite the main witness in that case being proved to be a benefit fraudster, it's still possible a jury may convict Mr Dizaei based on other evidence.

How this will all pan out is still a mystery. We should probably expect to see Ali Dizaei retiring honourable from the Met, receiving a knighthood, before taking over from Lord Stevens as the face-man for Labour's latest independent police review.

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

All Hail the Independent Review

2011-09-29T00:39:00.002+01:00

You know the Opposition has run out of ideas when the only policy they can put forwards is an independent review of the police.

It is not exactly clear what Labour hopes to achieve by this review, nor what it will actually be reviewing, but it does align closely with Police Federation calls for a Royal Commission that was dismissed by the Government earlier this year. And, true to form, the head of the Federation has immediately backed the idea.

Perhaps Paul McKeever should point out that Labour has had twelve years of Government in which to hold this supposedly independent review. And that instead they simply spent over a decade imposing more and more bureaucratic police targets and restrictions, whilst contributing to a culture of mistrust and resentment of the police.

Perhaps Paul McKeever should point out that it is the height of hypocrisy for Labour, of all people, to declare that the Prime Minister "should be backing, not sacking the police", after twelve years of total disdain shown by their party towards uniformed officers. And to hark back to "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", when their government's sentencing policies have led to the kind of scenes in Tottenham and other areas in August, where 75% of those caught had prior criminal convictions.

As a front-line officer who has been assaulted twice in the last 3 months out on the streets of Blandmore, and who has gone through three cans of PAVA spray this year alone, I am not reassured or excited by the prospect of a review - royal or otherwise.

The truth is that the London riots have done more to help the cause of the front-line officer than any government minister ever will. As someone who joined up to lock up people who perpetrate that sort of violence, that's a pretty sad indictment.

PS In case you're wondering about the long absence, I was catching up on my work emails following a few days off. The advantage of being off for more than one week is that you can safely delete anything over 10 days old, knowing that the emails that have come the next week will have reversed whatever instructions the original ones contained.

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

Visibility, Schmisibility

2011-09-05T08:34:00.004+01:00

Sorry for the absence. I've been on holiday. Luckily, I took my uniform with me, and a lot of British tourists at the resort were highly reassured to see me sunbathing in half-blues.

The totally utterly independent think tank The Policy Exchange has come up with a number of genius suggestions this week that by amazing coincidence and vindication of the Government, coincide exactly with what ministers have been saying:

Apparently, a lot of uniformed police are doing back office roles and money could be saved by giving these jobs to civilians. The Policy Exchange does not suggest how many of them might be on restricted duties and therefore needing stints away from the front-line. Nor does The Policy Exchange talk about how many civilians are currently doing front-line roles such as PCSOs, designated investigators, and statement-takers. Engaging civilian staff has nothing to do with protecting the front-line.

The next suggestion: police should wear uniform on the way to work. This would equate to 1200 extra police officers "on the streets". I must say, there is certainly nothing more reassuring than looking over as you wait in traffic for your daily commute, and seeing that the person waiting next to you is a uniformed police officer.

The Government, as usual, has "welcomed" The Policy Exchange's report, which is another way of saying it was already due to be absorbed into the next police reform paper and they quickly needed an independent body to back them up.

Whichever high-flying Conservative Oxbridge graduate at The Policy Exchange came up with this genius idea, and actually thought it was doable, I'd like to meet him/her. They'd get on like a house on fire with my Area Commander.

On another note - what does The Policy Exchange think we wear to work currently? I personally like to travel in dressed in a full red latex gimp suit, just so I'm totally unable to respond should I happen across a crime whilst queueing on the slip-road of my town's bypass.

"Help officer, I've had my bike stolen!"

"Don't look at us, we're just waiting to get into the club on a night out."

You couldn't make it up. Except that somebody did.

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

2011-08-18T14:25:00.003+01:00

Inciting a riot that never happened: four years.

Attacking someone in a gang attack with a metal ratchet, leaving broken bones: £500 fine.

Which sentence would make YOU think twice before committing the same offence?

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

Dropped. Penny. No?

2011-08-11T21:32:00.003+01:00

April 2011: "Kettling" ruled unlawful.

May 2011: PC Simon Harwood charged with manslaughter over the death of Ian Tomlinson.

August 2011: Nationwide surprise that the police were loath to use full-on confrontational riot tactics in dealing with mass public disorder.

Perhaps something good will come of all this after all, but it's a shame so many people had to lose their homes and their livelihoods to demonstrate to the country just what the police are facing.

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

London's Not So Burning

2011-08-10T12:53:00.000+01:00

The famous lone woman takes on the crowds:

Clapham Junction: onlookers cheer as police make an arrest surrounded by hostile crowds:

And applaud spontaneously (er, I presume), as police drive by in the morning:

Riot Clean-up:

Hundreds of arrests have been made around the UK. A few youths tried to riot in Blandmore, but ran away when they realised no one had noticed.

Let's watch the courts closely and see what kind of sentences get meted out for those charged.

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

Fetch the Engines

2011-08-09T07:35:00.002+01:00

Last week, the powers that be were feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

This week, they're discovering why the police and police bloggers have been banging on about our weak Justice system and feral youth.

They're discovering how poorly resourced the police really are.

Am I in London? No, I'm sitting here in Blandmore, wondering just what the rest of us are going to do if we need a public order serial here. Just how we'll deal with the next nutter holed up in his house threatening us with knives.

Is there a way to bring this to an end? Yes, with baton charges, water cannons and rest day working.

And to prevent it happening again? To lock up everyone convicted for serious periods of time, regardless of how many baby-mothers they'll leave behind. Apart from sending out a message to the other rioters, it will also solve many areas' burglary, robbery and violence problems overnight.

Unfortunately, most will not be charged, as the CPS folds under their stories of "I was just walking home", "I tried to stop him". Most will be back out the same day, and back out on the streets.

It's what we've been trying to tell you for ten years.

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

Young People Are Angry

2011-08-07T13:54:00.004+01:00

The aftermath of a fundamentalist terrorist attack.

Young people being angry.

You can understand anger at the police when an unarmed man is accidentally shot by an officer wearing too-big gloves in a raid based on malicious intelligence. Incidents like that are embarrassing to say the least. Yet the residents of Forest Gate did not see the need to rush onto the streets and set fire to their own local shops.

Mark Duggan, who was shot on Thursday, came within a whisker of shooting dead a police officer before he was "gunned down" - as the papers describe it. The Daily Mail, Independent and Guardian have been quick to quote friends who called the gunman "a good daddy" and "not a trouble-maker".

Now local dismay at Duggan's death has been hijacked by arsonists and rioters, who have created scenes similar to those seen on London's streets after the July Bombings. Yet the usual apologists are already out bemoaning police action to every BBC camera crew they can find. If the killing of an armed attempted murderer justifies widescale looting and petrol bombing, and the hospitalisation of eight police officers, you wonder how the family of Jean-Charles de Menezes - a genuinely innocent victim of botched police work - restrained themselves from blowing up Parliament.

Young people may well be angry. The police are now angry. Boris is fuming. 2000 officers are due to be cut from the Met, and if Blandshire Constabulary has used up its year's overtime budget in four months, I dread to think how London's two forces are faring.

The tide is turning against law and order in the Capital, and those responsible for stopping it it are facing total decimation of their role, working conditions and pay. It's not a happy time for the people of Great Britain.

On the plus side, I'm soon due to receive £5 a month for a year from a guy who assaulted me two years ago.

Updates:

Community organisers say "the police are absolutely culpable" for the rioting because no senior officer came to speak to them between 5-9pm on a Saturday/Sunday night. Trust me, nobody can get a senior officer to speak to them on a Saturday/Sunday night. Maybe next weekend when I'm trying to get hold of the Duty Super, I'll throw a flaming missile through the window of his office.

The Guardian quotes a source saying Duggan's handgun was found in a sock, and the police officer was shot by friendly fire. If true, this is a disaster. If not, now no one will ever believe the truth. If people think we on the front-line enjoy this kind of misinformation and confusion, think again: most of us would prefer our senior managers released far more information to the press to prevent rumours/unjustified IPCC statements.

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

You must never go down to the end of the town

2011-08-02T20:19:00.004+01:00

Without wishing to sound irresponsible, and without the vaguest intention of undermining public confidence, town centres in Britain are scary places. Whilst you can be robbed, burgled, raped or beaten just about anywhere, it's a lot more likely in an area with a buzzing night-time economy.

Going further, certain offences occur almost exclusively in town, for example:

Commercial armed robbery (eg banks/jewellery shops)
Bottling (if you don't know this term, it's what it sounds like)
Shoplifting

A good number of rapes can also be traced back to town centres - both date and stranger, not so much the domestic/child abuse type. Not only is it then possible to wind back the tapes to view CCTV of the offenders for use in identifying them, but the CCTV operators tend to work 24/7 and spend the day and night scanning the town for crimes in action. This means if you are mugged, your car broken into, your shop robbed, or you are followed by a stranger, there is a high chance that the cameras have captured you and/or the suspects at some stage in the proceedings.

All of which is why the public should feel somewhat uncomfortable to hear that towns all over the country are turning off their CCTV cameras to save money. Publicised cases include Penrith, eleven towns in Cornwall, and are looming in the Forest of Dean and Devizes.

But this week it happened in a town just over the border from Blandmore, and the news doesn't appear in any local paper or online. Just like that, with no warning, CCTV cameras are off.

How many other councils have cut the funding for this vital crime-fighting tool, without any publicity, debate or warning? And who will pick up the shortfall, when it is decided that we really can't do without Big Brother after all?

One guess.

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

Now You HMIC Me, Now You Don't

2011-07-31T22:08:00.003+01:00

I've previously ranted about the dastardly function of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on this blog. I mean, I've previously posted in eloquent and nuanced tones about HMIC.

The tentacles of this behind-the-scenes, performance-monitoring body are far-reaching. Indeed, I can link HMIC reports to direct changes made, or about to be made, on the front line of Blandshire that have materially impacted my ability to do my job (for the worse, in case that's not clear). Some such changes are:

Extra entries on custody records.
New shift patterns.
Extra bureaucratic procedures when attending incidents of anti-social behaviour.
Having to buy prisoners brand new trainers out of the force's budget.
Having to make hour-long round trips to collect prisoners' medication, and pay for it.
Whole teams or squads being formed to target particular crimes.

Most of these HMIC reports have been generated without a member of HMIC ever actually visiting a police station in Blandshire, nor speaking to any officers. Most of the changes implemented have not been explicitly required by HMIC, nor has the senior officer implementing them visited police stations or spoken to any officers, before introducing them. It's like an episode of Undercover Boss, but without the bit where the boss goes undercover.

But now, and perhaps for the first time in my memory, HMIC has released a report favourable to those of us at the sharp end. It estimates that 3000 police jobs will go in London alone, and hundreds more in other forces.

Are Police Chiefs clamouring to jump on the back of this report, the way they have clamoured and jumped when HMIC has suggested time-consuming and bureaucratic changes to the functions of the front-line? On the contrary, the silence has been deafening. And is it any wonder, when the lone voice in the wilderness, CC Peter Fahy, was denounced as irresponsible. Mr Fahy won't be getting the Met call-up any time soon.

The far-from-clear message seems to be: sometimes HMIC is right, and implementing its suggestions can be useful evidence for Chief Constables to accrue in pursuance of their futures. But sometimes, HMIC is wrong, and speaking out for its conclusions is downright hazardous to one's career.

So the next time my Chief uses an HMIC report to inflict maximum pain on the front line, the thought might occur to me to ask where the plaudits were when that self-same body told the public that Blandshire Constabulary was in dire straits.

Then again, I suppose pointing out anything that could cause the front line to lose confidence in their leader would just be plain irresponsible.

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

No time for finger-pointing

2011-07-23T09:51:00.001+01:00

It's taken all of a day for news commentators to launch criticism of the Norwegian police for taking over an hour to reach Utoeya to apprehend a gunman who has shot dead over 80 people - mostly children aged 14-18.

Apparently the gunman, dressed as a policeman, gathered many of the 600 youths together to talk to them about the Oslo bombing, before opening fire. A 32-year-old man has now been charged with both attacks.

Reporters are blaming "a lack of preparedness" in Norway, for such an attack.

The truth is, if such an episode occurred on the Isle of Wight, just hours after a major bomb explosion in London, our response may be no quicker. As seen in the reports after the Cumbrian massacre by Derrick Bird, armed response officers are not available at a click of a finger, in the kind of numbers needed to successfully shut down an "active shooter" armed with automatic weapons.

We too would require commando teams to approach in boats or helicopters, more than anything because it would not be clear that such carnage was being caused by only one shooter. As the 520 surviving children texted their families with stories of being hidden behind a rock hearing the gunman breathing above them as he fired on their friends in the water, Norway's 999 system must have gone into meltdown. It probably took up to half an hour to understand what was happening, and another 20 minutes travelling time to reach the obscure location. Another half hour could easily be spent debating tactics - there's no point sending in officers one at a time to add to the death toll.

"Active Shooter" training is being delivered to police supervisors across the UK in the wake of events in Cumbria. Nothing being taught would have made the slightest difference to the Utoeya massacre. Or to any one-man massacre.

All in all, there can be no "preparedness" for an event like this. There can only be realisation and tragedy.

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

Hacker-Gate

2011-07-19T18:48:00.001+01:00

If you're a sucker for conspiracy theories and media intrigue, the phone-hacking scandal has it all:

Police corruption and bribery. (Alleged.)
Utterly scurrilous journalists.
A tragically innocent victim.
An unexpected death.
Celebrity names.
Senior police resignations.

Dipping my toe into the daily news between intensely busy summer shifts in Blandmore, I find myself wondering really where this storm blew up from. At its heart is the bald fact that as far as I am aware not one newsworthy story emerged as a result of any one of the hundreds of phones that the News of the World allegedly hacked into. Unless you count the one about Prince William's sore knee.

Moreover, the word 'hacking' seems to be used in its loosest form here. We are not talking about a twenty stone nerd, holed up in a soundproof basement with a state-of-the-art CCTV and booby-trap security system, with seventeen monitors and USB ports for every gizmo in existence. We are not talking about a malodorous genius, plumbing the depths of technical wizardry and breaking age-old ciphers to unlock virtual fortresses. We are talking about phoning up someone's voicemail and typing '1234' in the hope they haven't changed their pin number.

Whilst doing this to the phone of a 14-year-old murdered schoolgirl is sickening, doing it to a celebrity, a royal, or a senior government or police figure is no more intrusive than any number of modern journalistic tactics used to try and get tabloid scoops. You also have to wonder, if you are a celebrity, a royal, or a senior government or police figure, why on earth you have not changed the pin number on your voicemail anyway? If an unscrupulous private investigator or reporter can gain access to potentially sensitive personal information about these figures, so could a terrorist.

Either way, those embroiled in the scandal are falling over each other to extricate themselves before media intrigue turns into criminal proceedings. Or, perhaps, before whatever message it is that the News of the World listened to on their voicemail, is made public.

It won't work. I have a feeling that Hacker-gate will not go away until some suitably famous scalps are nailed to prison walls. I wait, breath bated, for the book that will inevitably come out afterwards.

In the midst of it all, the tragic death of one of the men who started it all. Being a whistle-blower is not always a happy lot.

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

Run, Wimmin, Run

2011-07-11T18:03:00.002+01:00

Warning: This post contains feminist views.

Inspector Diane Bamber has received wide-spread mockery for her potential pay-out after failing the riot shield run - a 500m very slow "dash" in full riot gear. As usual, it's been labelled a crazy example of political correctness gone too far. As someone who passed the old "bleep test" easily at 8.1 and was appalled when it was reduced to 5.4 to allow unfit women into the job, I have a different view of the shield run.

Riot shields are 5ft6 tall. The average British woman is 5ft4, the average man is 5ft9 (possibly 1-2 inches taller for police officers). Therefore for most women, the shield is about the same height as them, which means to run without tripping over it, you have to loft it away from your body and off the ground, and cannot tuck the handles into your waist. This magnifies its weight considerably the shorter officer.

Also, in a real riot situation, it is unlikely you will ever have to run in a slow jog for 500m. More likely, you will be dashing quickly in lines, or running backwards, or standing for hours in rows. Being just over 5ft6, I struggle on the shield run (though have never failed it), but found the actual training exercises easy - still in full kit and with the shields. Conversely, enormous blokes who pounded out the shield run with great ease were exhausted after ten minutes of drills up and down the training site.

In truth I think that a far greater standard of fitness is needed for riot work than just a 2min45 jog, but that the height of the shields does make it proportionately harder for women. The answer is not to make the test easier, nor to worry about upsetting the poor delicate characters who have not prepared for it properly. The answer is to make the test relate to the job at hand, and to prove its worth in the standard of trainee turned out by the system. That way no man or woman can have cause to complain if they are not fit enough.

All of the above said, personally, if I were a female inspector with many years experience, I'd be more humiliated by taking out a lawsuit about my own lack of fitness, than by being sent home from a training day.

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

Mad McCombe McMad

2011-06-30T18:35:00.002+01:00

When Liberty is on the same side of the argument as the police, you know the judge has got it wrong.

The after-shocks of the McCombe Madness are continuing in Blandshire. Every day further instructions are being emailed forth to try and explain what action we should now take in relation to the hundreds of people on police bail pending further investigation. Now it appears that emergency legislation will be introduced before there is time to appeal Justice McCombe's lunatic decision on bail. Which only goes to show that my advice to my officers has been sound: bail everyone for at least six weeks because within that time the decision will have been overturned and we can carry on as normal.

This story has been covered in the mainstream media, but it's unlikely that the wider public really understand the problem unless they take the time to read up on the law. If a High Court judge, conversant in criminal law and the workings of the police, has no idea how an investigation works, how can the public?

But regardless of that, if you asked any right-thinking passer-by whether the 24-hour detention limit should apply only to the time actually spent detained, most of them would think it was a given.

Mr Justice McCombe, alone in a room on a bright May morning, felt differently. And as a result of one man's moment of madness, police forces in England and Wales have been plunged into chaos. If that isn't an argument to look closely at the Criminal Justice System, I don't know what is.

"Today, I plan to spend the morning making mincemeat of twenty-seven years of policing. Then I might have a cup of tea."

Of course, there's one man in the middle of this storm who has not been named and shamed as far as I can find, who actually set the whole thing in motion: the clerk of the Manchester Magistrates Court that heard the case in the first place. Somebody take that man outside and shake him.

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Clear? Then Read It Again

2011-06-28T14:04:00.000+01:00

If anyone wants a summary of how screwed up the Criminal Justice System is in this country, go to three different neighbouring police forces and ask them how they plan to implement the recent High Court ruling by Justice McCoombe, the story to be found here.

Without boring my non-police readers, from time to time an important legal precedent is set in a High Court or above, and it becomes binding on all future cases. In this case, the judge has overturned an interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act that has been in place since 1984 with no quibbles. The decision could potentially transform the way the police have to deal with suspects who need to be bailed for further enquiries.

That in itself is one issue, and there's an informative debate on the repercussions on Inspector Gadget's blog.

What I find far more fascinating is that Blandshire has taken a totally different stance to other forces around it, and to Gadget's Ruralshire. While Ruralshire has decided to wait and see what an appeal or emergency legislation might bring, Blandshire's legal department have told us to immediately implement the change, even though they don't quite understand what the change is or how it should be actioned.

If the thought of police forces next door to each other taking such a radically different approach is mind-boggling, I booked a prisoner in last night and the custody sergeant on the back desk hadn't yet logged into his email, and was unaware of any change at all. Whereas the one at the front was already actioning it.

This inability to swiftly act on vital legal information is not new. When our powers of arrest were totally overhauled in 2005, most of us were lucky if we got the link to the online training package, let alone any face-to-face input on our new powers.

To make matters worse, senior officers in Blandshire aren't even consistent in what they think the new precedent applies to: whilst the case in question clearly relates to those who are detained under a warrant of further detention issued by a court, our legal department has decided it applies to all prisoners.

Not only that, but the decision was actually made on 19th May 2011, but it's only this week that we're talking about it. Members of the shift were most perturbed, on reporting for duty, to find that the PACE clock of people they bailed a couple of weeks ago has now run out, and it is now questionable whether they can be detained when they answer bail, whether for reinterview, charge, or re-bail.

Happy days if you are one of the numerous criminals whose general approach to custody in any case is to cooperate in no way with any aspect of the Criminal Justice process: you will now be rewarded by being released from your bail. Unless you are arrested in Ruralshire, in which case you can look forwards to putting in your claim for compensation if the decision is upheld on appeal.

Our force strap-line may have to change from "Blandshire Constabulary - Keeping Communities Safe Whilst Observing Human Rights and Health and Safety", to "Blandshire Constabulary - We're a Bit Confused".

Watch this space.

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

The Real Victim

2011-06-19T11:28:00.001+01:00

Mr "Loophole" Nick Freeman did not say that women who dress provocatively deserve to be raped. This is, of course, how he has been quoted, after saying that racy garments somehow victimise men.

The fact that Nick Freeman feels victimised by women in skimpy apparel tells you more about Mr Freeman than it does about women, or men. It tells you nothing whatsoever about rape.

What it does tell you is that you can't win. Feminist commentators have erupted in fury at the suggestion that it might be a woman's fault if a man thinks she wants sex when she doesn't. But would they be any happier about the honest take on rape: that many of the victims I have dealt with are so unappealing that you wonder why anyone would even want to have consensual sex with them if it were on offer?

This doesn't include those attacked out running, walking the dog, in their own home, etc. But it does cover a massive proportion of rape victims, who may suffer with learning difficulties, alcoholism, low self-esteem, repetitive domestic violence and the like. These women are not dressed provocatively, and their circumstances lead to a demeanour that the majority of right-thinking men are not attracted to. I am not saying that these women bring rape on them in some way. But it's a fact that predatory men will seek out vulnerable women, and the resulting abuse is not something that most of society ever have to worry about.

Of course there are cases of "date rape", where the girl may well be dressed to the nines, leading to suspicion that she wanted to attract a bloke. Whether she wanted the bloke she ended up attracting is another matter. And in actual cases, the issue of consent rarely comes down to clothing nowadays: despite repeated articles suggesting it, juries are not usually convinced by an argument that sexy clothing plus going home with someone equals consent. Of course they are contributing factors to the overall story, but are separate from the very thorny issue of the act itself. A case this week is a prime example, where the girl went to a hotel room and possibly into a bed with her attacker, but he was still found guilty of rape by a jury.

Cases like this one rarely make it to court - not because they don't happen, but because they lack the kind of evidence required to make a decision either way. And yet date rapes often involve the more "useable" profile of victim, who when sober is a student, or in employment, and has a network of friends and family supporting them. What hope is there for the more common profile: the inarticulate, substance-abusing or mentally ill wreck, who has been abandoned by friends, family and society, and is at the whim of whichever violent predator she stumbles across next?

By all means, be outraged by Loophole Nick's injudicious comments. But don't think it scratches the surface of the issues the police face in trying to bring rapists to justice.

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

Shock: they were known to the police.

2011-06-10T08:09:00.001+01:00

Whatever happened to the lawsuit threatened against Greater Manchester Police and the Crown Proseuction Service, following the tragic murder of Sabina Akhtar in 2008?

For those who don't remember, Sabina was stabbed to death days after the CPS decided to drop a case against her husband - it is unclear what offence was being considered but it followed a catalogue of violence and threats. Despite the CPS apology, the charity Refuge has gone awfully quiet after their public denunciation of the police and prosecution service.

Believe it or not, it is highly unusual for someone to suddenly awake one day and decide to murder their partner. Most humans possess the ability to weather divorce, financial hardship, infidelity and loss of custody without becoming hammer-wielding maniacs. When a murder occurs, therefore, there are really only two explanations:

The perpetrator was afflicted with a mental malady so sudden and overwhelming that s/he genuinely and truly was not in control of his/her actions. In rare cases, this could be a one off, more normally the person is incurably ill and ends up here afterwards.
The killer is a violent bastard who has always functioned with the belief that his/her partner/family either remains with him and under his control, or dies. The murder is either the result of a routine beating gone wrong, or a reaction to the victim leaving.

In the case of no.2 above, which describes the majority of domestic murders, people are still surprised/shocked to hear that the couple Were Known To The Police already. The concept that a violent and cruel thug might have come to police attention before the day he accidentally/deliberately took his violence to the next level appears hard to grasp.

As a police officer regularly attending reports of domestic violence, and now even more regularly signing off reports by officers who have attended them, confirming that I agree with their actions, the burden is heavy. I suppose I must have good instincts: none of the hundreds of domestic incidents I have written off as "low" risk have resulted in a murder. Or would it be more accurate to say that of the hundreds of thousands of domestic incidents occurring nationwide, the proportion resulting in murder is microscopic? And that none of the domestic incidents I have written off have resulted in a murder - Yet.

I hope that Refuge has decided against its lawsuit for Sabina Akhtar. Those who batter their other halves will not be quaking in their boots at the thought of a Health and Safety tribunal against their local force. Domestic violence will not be stopped by extending the risk assessment by another two pages, nor by disciplining officers who were unaware that in two years' time the woman screaming at them to get out of her house is going to end up dead.

Instead, victims' memories would be better served by Refuge's continuing campaign to offer safe haven to those who flee abuse, working with the police to develop better and more efficient ways of prosecuting when victims do cooperate, and educating the wider public to take some responsibility for what is going on around them, in their streets, in their homes.

Perhaps Refuge could use the money set aside to sue GMP, to visit the neighbours of Christine Chambers in Essex and ask them: if they knew, as was shouted at the police outside her door, that Christine and her toddler were going to meet such a gruesome end, what exactly did THEY do to try and prevent it?

I don't like the term Big Society. But if were're going to use it, let's do so properly.

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

The Four Blog Readers

2011-06-08T17:33:00.001+01:00

Good afternoon, you are through to PC Bloggs' blog. I'm sorry she can't be available right now, please select from one of the following options.

If you would like to hold a constructive debate about current political hot topics, including crime and criminal justice, press here.

If you would like to know the inside scoop on just how corrupt the police senior management is, press here.

If you would like to make sweeping statements about how useless the police are, and how many times you have been burgled, please press here.

If you are suffering from police harassment, have never done anything wrong and find that the police always take your ex's side, please try here.

If your enquiry relates to something else, please call back later: PC Bloggs will be back soon.

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

Everything that can be counted

2011-05-28T14:26:00.002+01:00

If I were a government minister whose job it was to set the culture and tone of a fundamental public service like the police, I'd like to think that when I announced something, the leaders of that public service listened.

I'd like to think that if I told them to scrap a worthless gimmick, ditch time-consuming performance indicators, and abandon bureaucracy, I'd feel pretty humiliated if I found out that every Chief Constable in the United Kingdom had totally ignored what I asked. I might actually prefer not to know, so that I could go on blithely proclaiming new measures to be similarly ignored in favour of sticking to the old performance and blame culture.

Fortunately, Our Lady of Police has a better grip on ACPO than that. Luckily, she's able to stand up to the throngs of self-serving chief officers mindlessly pushing through their vision for a new police force with themselves squarely at the centre of it.

Which is why, in Blandshire Constabulary, we no longer have targets for crime detection or reduction - as long as each area does better than the area next door, nothing will be measured at all. We are daily introducing extensive policy documents to get rid of bureaucratic processes foisted on us by the last government. And every other week I receive a three-line email telling me to stop doing things that I had eight hours' training and daily emails telling me how to do for the last two years.

I'd like to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with Theresa May. Specifically, I'd have just one question for her: It just so happens that we're not detecting too many assaults right now, whereas burglary we're way up on last year. Funnily enough, this morning I had to ring up three burglary victims and tell them I had no officers to send them because all my staff were dealing with petty assaults and squabbles between family members and schoolchildren.

My question to the Home Secretary: Coincidence?

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

One Rule For Them

2011-05-27T20:31:00.000+01:00

Believe it or not, the Director of Public Prosecutions did not read my post about the double standards and disproportionate use of public resources when it suits those in power. And so PC Simon Harwood faces charged for manslaughter.

In Blandmore, if the custody sergeant is overheard in conversation using the word 'caution' in the hearing of the solicitor for someone arrested for theft, assault or criminal damage, and later on that person is charged with one such offence, the case will be binned by our Criminal Justice Inspector as an "abuse of process". The detainee was led to believe he would be cautioned, therefore you cannot later charge. If the guy who beat his partner senseless on a Friday night is released without charge on Saturday because she doesn't support a prosecution, he cannot be rearrested or prosecuted without new evidence or information coming to light: again, abuse of process.

PC Simon Harwood was told in the national media that he would face no charges over Ian Tomlinson's death. Whilst it was concluded he DID assault Mr Tomlinson, the prosecutor felt that the chain of cause and effect was not made out, and that a common assault charge was out of time under statute. The only new evidence that has come to light since is that a lot of people aren't very happy with this decision. So now, just two years and two months after the original incident, PC Harwood will face trial. In another year or so.

If that's a basis for justice in any country, it's time to take a long, hard look at the system.

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

The Myth Perpetuates

2011-05-20T16:02:00.004+01:00

For some reason otherwise intelligent and sensible people turn into ranting lunatics as soon as the word Rape is mentioned. Politicians start blithering, feminists start burning things, and police officers make fools of themselves.

Here are some phrases I have never heard on walking into CID:

"You know, most burglaries are a load of rubbish. They just never happened at all."
"Real street robbery is so rare - most of the time the victims just regretted walking down that dark alley."
"What a waste of time investigating any stabbing, they always withdraw their complaints in the morning."

I live in the real world, and blog about it. 90% of the people who use up 90% of the police's time are benefit-claiming, unemployed, binge-drinking, drug-using or simply criminal. Tax-paying, law-abiding, hard-working folk have very little contact with us, and when they do they often apologise for bothering us with their problems.

Every day, false reports of burglary, robbery and assault are made, and withdrawn. Motives range from insurance claims to domestic revenge, to drunken confusion or mental vulnerability. Even taking all this into account, the best estimates are that 3-4% of reported crime is attributable to false allegation. There will be another few percent that are suspected false but cannot be proven either way. The police spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with this tiny percentage of false claims because the type of people who make them are the type of people we spend most of our time dealing with anyway.

We all know this. And yet, for some reason, seasoned detectives and brand new probationers alike seem to think that rape is somehow different. That "real" rape is so rare, and hidden, that you cannot expect to come across a proper example throughout your career.

There's also a lot of hysteria on the feminist side of the debate. Phrases such as "rape is rape", "any woman can be raped", etc, are particularly unhelpful. The refusal to acknowledge that most rape victims fall into certain categories (mentally ill, alcoholic, repeat victim) means that those categories are not educated and protected the way they should be. It also means that the police take the flak when prosecutions fail, when the fact is that no case could possibly succeed when relying on the evidence of someone who is inarticulate, incoherent, incredible, or just plain unlikeable. It doesn't mean they have lied, and indeed if you're going to rape someone they're a good choice, for all of the above reasons. But to expect convictions in those cases is unreasonable.

Likewise the oft-quoted 5-6% conviction rate for rape is utterly misleading and unhelpful. It includes every rape reported, which definition covers third party reports where the victim never wanted to involve the police at all. It includes women who wake up drunk in a state of undress and call the police because they fear they may have been raped but aren't sure. It includes the mentally ill, who report rape but aren't entirely sure what rape actually is. There is no malice in these reports*, but only the occasional one reflects an actual rape and they will never result in convictions - nor should they - and they should not be held against the police or anyone else. *(Yes, it also includes false allegations that cannot be disproved.)

Where can this debate go next? Is it, as Inspector Gadget suggests, simply the fact that the media is not ready or able to have an intelligent conversation about it? Can anything constructive come of it, when as soon as you dissent with the majority view, you are written off as hysterical? Can the debate even take place, when the majority view is itself taboo?

All I know is, rape is real. More common than murder, rarer than assault. And controversial at its core: from the debate surrounding it, right down to the act itself.

On the plus side, here are some myths that are, categorically, untrue:

The police treat underage sex as rape. In fact, reports of underage sex where both parties are under 18 will normally not even be crimed. If they are, it will be "sexual activity with a child" (or words to that effect) and a prosecution will depend on the age difference, the vulnerability of the parties, and the views of the victim.
The police will not prosecute false accusations of rape for fear of putting off genuine victims.Where evidence exists that proves the allegation to be false, the police do prosecute. They will not, however, prosecute women who report rape just because they withdraw the complaint, are inconsistent, or because the investigating officer has a personal opinion that it's a load of bollocks.
If you report rape, you'll be called a liar. Despite all of the above, police forces are professional in dealing with rape and will investigate every report. Yes, some officers may have their doubts, and may discuss it with their colleagues. But all the enquiries that need to be done will be done, and attitudes are improving all the time. If your rape can be proved by realistic means, it probably will be.

Next time: proof that there are indeed rapes and RAPES - the incomparable case of Bristol rapist Ross Parsons.

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

Shh - it's the R Word

2011-05-19T07:36:00.006+01:00

Kenneth Clarke has become the latest politician to say something stupid about rape and is now experiencing the wrath of feminists everywhere. As a massive proponent of improvements to rape investigation and prosecution, I am not so sure this is a sensible bandwagon - apart from for Ed Milliband, who probably needs to jump on any wagon passing at the moment.

Every crime in British statute has a list of "aggravating" and "mitigating" factors used by the judge for passing sentence. This is because while law is black and white, real life is accepted to be scales of grey. To suggest that rape is any different is nonsensical, not to mention unhelpful to judges.

Aggravating factors might be:

Group offence (gang rape).
High level of violence or threats.
Child present/nearby.
Element of trespass/burglary.
False imprisonment/repeated rapes.

Most rapes don't contain the above, hence why they are aggravating factors rather than just a common feture of the crime. It's hard to think of any mitigating factors for rape, as with murder, but the limited mental capacity of the offender could perhaps be one.

So it is commonsense to suggest that rape is like other crimes, and varies in its degree. Where feminist activists get into difficulties is in trying to put across that even those rapes that appear less violent/savage on the surface, can have just as profound an impact on the victim. In the same way, a "minor" street robbery or burglary can traumatise a victim significantly, whilst someone who has been stabbed or beaten up might shake it off. As a criminal, you are dicing with the mental health of your victim whatever crime you inflict on them, and the results are unpredictable. How you take this into account when sentencing is tricky.

Kenneth Clarke is an intelligent man, and I think he understands the above. However, I fear he has fallen into the date rape trap. Just because a rape happens after the offender identifies his victim from among his drinking party, or within the nightclub, and sets in course a series of events that will result in him getting to have sex - with or without consent - does not make it a less serious example of rape. It may in fact make him a predatory offender, repeating his crime week after week with no one ever reporting it due to what they see as their own "guilt" in allowing it to happen. Equally, it may be a guy who went home with a girl fully expecting consensual sex, who makes an ill-judged and repellant decision to force her when she changes her mind. Both are date rapes, but perhaps the premeditation and recidivist nature of the first offender merits a greater sentence.

As well as misunderstanding the nature of date rape, I think that Mr Clarke has also made the mistake that many judges in both rape and violence cases make: that along with the sentence, they are passing a judgment on whether the offence has actually occurred. I recently sat in on an ABH trial where two defendants were found guilty, and the judge summed up saying, "I am willing to accept there was an element of self-defence, and that you may have thought he had a knife." At which my jaw dropped, because this was the main feature of the defence and by finding the defendants guilty, clearly the jury had not been convinced. Yet it seemed the judge had license to override that and sentence the men as if they were innocent.

I see this in rape cases too, where having been found or pleaded guilty, the defence put forwards mitigation that "she gave confusing signals" or "they were drunk", and this is then used by the judge to reduce the sentence when those excuses have already been discounted by the jury. In Kenneth Clarke's mind, date rapes are harder to prove and often have conflicting evidence. He is muddling up the seriousness of a genuine case of rape, date or otherwise, with examples where rape cannot be proved.

We all know that Kenneth Clarke thinks prison is a waste of money. And that he would (and will) happily see violent and predatory offenders for numerous crimes walk free from court with nothing but the terrifying prospect of "probation" hanging over them. No doubt he feels the same way about rapists.

But it is legitimate to state that rape, like all crime, comes in many forms, and that sentencing should reflect that. To shut down the debate, and claim otherwise, does not advance the cause of justice.

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

Rape Crisis is a charity that provides support and information for rape victims, and assistance to Rape Crisis Centres across the UK. A proportion of proceeds from my book are donated to it.

None of Our Business

2011-05-15T20:48:00.002+01:00

Breaking News - 18th May: "Wife says she took penalty points for husband."

Is it just me, or is anyone else unimpressed at the ex-Mrs Huhne's announcement that she will testify in court that she did not commit the speeding offence in 2003? She may well have done so, she may well have taped the minister making some kind of admission to it. But if so, then he did not put pressure on a parliamentary aide, or abuse his position in some way, but approached his wife - who probably knew if would be her driving him around if he were banned - and they both agreed to the deception. In which case, I expect to hear any day now of Vicky Pryce's arrest for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, as a co-suspect with her ex-husband. As the officer taking her statement of confession, that would give me the greatest satisfaction as she signed on the dotted line.

I'm no fan of Chris Huhne. In fact, I wouldn't know him if he came into Blandmore Police Station to report that his car had been stolen and someone else had been speeding in it without paying the congestion charge.

But I must say I am squarely on Mr Huhne's side when I read that Essex Police are considering investigating a claim that he asked someone else to take a speeding fine for him in 2003. It appears that a "complaint" by a Labour MP has prompted this, despite the fact that Chris Huhne was banned from driving in 2003 as a result of "totting up", and therefore any such attempt by him to avoid said ban can be concluded a wholesome failure.

The last couple of weeks have seen a few police investigations dredged up from the slurry to be pored over under public scrutiny. The Met are now going to try and find Madeleine McCann, and the CPS is considering - yet again - whether to prosecute PC Simon Harwood.

It's not that I want MPs to get away with perverting the course of justice, nor any officer to evade his comeuppance if he has abused his authority. And anyone who doesn't want to find Maddie must have a heart of stone. But I do question whether the police or Criminal Justice System should really function on the basis that if someone makes enough song and dance about something, it should immediately take centre stage and suck in a load of resources.

To my knowledge, David Cameron has not asked the police to launch a massive review into the disappearance of ten-year-old Iasmine Rostas, who went missing from her home in Barking in 2009. She is just one of dozens of children who have never been found and are suspected to have come to harm. Very few of them are blond, blue-eyed and the offspring of doctors, but they are all vulnerable young kids who have met uncertain fates. Why should poor Madeleine be any different? (Unless you count the political coup that would be achieved should she be found as a result.)

It is also a tenet of British justice that the system should be, above all, fair to those it seeks to try. I have seen case after case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service because of factors such as:

The suspect was kept on bail for an extended period, because of police indecision or slow forensic examinations.
It was intimated to the suspect that he was eligible for a caution, but following admissions he was charged.
The case had been discontinued previously.

In many of these cases the suspect is almost certainly guilty, but the police must be held to account for slow or unfair processes: in other words, it's not right to mess people around. Yet PC Simon Harwood still remains unclear about whether he will be prosecuted, despite the most public of decisions by the CPS that the case had been dropped. In the world of ordinary people, and that of career criminals, once that decision is made the only thing that can reverse it is fresh evidence that was not available before nor known about.

On occasion, vigorous campaigning by activists can bring to light an injustice or controversy that rightly deserves scrutiny. Vigorous campaigning by jilted spouses or- dare I say it- grief-stricken relatives- is no basis for a police investigation. Let alone a random complaint by an MP trying to oust a political rival.

The police and CJS in this country could not be subjected to more scrutiny. They should trust in that scrutiny and stick to their guns when their processes are challenged. With the greatest of respect, Essex Police need to tell MP Simon Danczuk, "Thanks for taking an interest, now sod off."

In fact, if that phrase was used more often, up and down the country, when MPs and local Councillors decide to intervene in investigations that have nothing to do with them, we might achieve 20% budget cuts without any other action at all.

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

I am not a crook. Unless you count gross misconduct. You do? Oh.

2011-05-10T20:17:00.004+01:00

The Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police has had a final warning for trying to give his relatives a leg-up into the job. After denying any wrongdoing for the best part of a year, Grahame Maxwell has suddenly realised that cheating his force's own phone system by making an outgoing call to get his cousin/child/auntie an application form was in fact immoral and therefore a discredit to his force.

The cause of this eleventh hour epiphany? Dare I suggest that the "cough" came when he was promised a final warning rather than the sack. Along with the admission was a statement that "a very difficult week led to errors in judgment". Good thing he isn't in an important job then, where he might have to make life and death decisions under pressure.

Maxwell and Briggs: Where did it all go wrong?

Perhaps when they wandered off the set of Dixon of Dock Green.

The situation of having a Chief Constable who has admitted to flagrant nepotism and spent six months trying to crawl out of the hole he'd dug himself is unusual, to say the least. I wonder if the two members of police staff who were fired for similarly bypassing the recruitment process, will appeal against the different treatment they got to that meted out at the top.

A baffled Mr Maxwell: "But I joined up to help people... no one told me I wasn't supposed to help my own family get a job."

Of course, the papers have missed the real scandal in all of this: that North Yorkshire Police aim to recruit the best candidates for their force by a race to the phones in a first-come first-served application form bonanza.

Then again, at least they still have application forms. I believe Blandshire's planning to recruit next year's batch by throwing rugs over people's heads on the street and dragging them into a transit. If you fight your way free without uttering any racist epithets, you're in.

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

Picture the Scene

2011-05-09T18:57:00.003+01:00

Last night at work we received a call from a member of the public saying that two helicopters had flown over a neighbouring property and one of them had crashed nearby and then blown up. Then twenty-four blokes abseiled onto the roof of the address and a few shots were heard inside.

In the control room, the tactical inspector asked for background checks on the caller, in particular any record of them on the mental health database. Then intelligence checks on the address, only the caller wasn't sure exactly which house was targeted only that it had a big high wall around it and the family kept themselves to themselves.

After ten minutes, the inspector decided to get some Armed Response Vehicles into the area, but had them hold off a few miles away waiting for instructions. When the second and third calls came in, reporting loud noises in the air and gunfire, the ARVs were told to wait while a local unit did a drive-by in a marked car to try and confirm the account. From half a mile away, the neighbourhood beat officer reported seeing smoke and a military helicopter hovering over a property not far from the local army training school.

The ARVs were stood down and the control room got on the phone to the training school - no, they had no exercises running. Next they phoned the army itself - no, they weren't aware of any drills or operations taking place in that area of Blandshire. Finally the call went in to the SAS, who said they'd get back to us. Half an hour had now passed.

Some local units put on a wide containment around the area, waiting for instructions. After a further fifteen minutes they reported seeing one helicopter lift off and fly away. It didn't appear to be a British chopper either.

The SAS scrambled their own helicopters and fast response teams, getting them in the air within twenty minutes. But they still arrived nearly two hours after the action from the nearest army base with that kind of emergency call-out capability. At which point they were miffed to find people with gunshot wounds and the extended family of an internationally-renowned terrorist.

OK, this didn't happen in Blandshire. But it's my best projection of how we might respond if it did. And that's assuming anyone would dial 999 at all - I think most Britons would assume this kind of operation was ratified by the government.

Pakistan got its military teams to the site near Abbottabad within the hour, just missing the US Seals flying off with Osama bin Laden's body. Pakistan is much bigger than Britain.

The options:

Pakistan has action-ready SWAT teams all over the country, to deploy to such an incident at a moment's notice.
The US phoned up as the mission started - though that would still make it a quick response.
Pakistan knew of and approved the operation, but can't admit it for fear of civil unrest. The charade being played out now in the media is just that, and it's the price America agreed to pay for getting OBL.

Thoughts? Comments? I know where my money is.

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

Ding Dong

2011-05-04T19:57:00.007+01:00

Usama was buried at sea, for fear of his grave becoming a shrine. The drop zone was just off the coast of Fukushima.

There are those who believe he secretly survived, and that this photograph was faked by the White House.

Believe it or not, Blandmore is a hotbed of terrorist activity. Only the other day, a Chinese man was found taking photographs of Very Important House - the home of a celebrity unlucky enough to live within our police area. Within minutes of the report coming in, the Metropolitan Police had appeared from nowhere. It was the DPG, or RPG, or RGB, or something. Whatever they were, they turned up in a plain car, armed to the teeth, and knew about the incident before we did - probably via the CCTV they have installed on every country lane in Britain.

Being a serious terrorist incident, I was immediately dispatched to the scene to act as Bronze Commander. I don't think it's showing off to say that I did a superb job taking control. Indeed not one car hit the back of the unmarked DOG vehicle while I directed traffic so the Met could bundle the fanatic inside. Not one car actually passed our location at all, which only goes to show how effective my virtual cordon was.

At the time all this was going on, the only real threat posed to the residents of Blandmore was that of a royal stalker blowing himself up in front of The Crown public house. Now that bin Laden is dead, I can only imagine the carnage being dreamt up on the other side of the world, designed to wreak havoc in our town.

In fact, it has become quite difficult to go about our daily work without stumbling across a potential terrorist plot. Only this morning I saw a Muslim gentleman, pausing for a moment to lean on a litter bin with the hand not holding his walking stick. No doubt checking out suitable targets for his improvised explosives. At least, I am pretty sure he was Muslim: he had a beard. Or some sort of skin condition.

It is now imperative that the government release more funds to assist us in fighting terrorism on our streets. We also need to order some more of those red notices describing the risk level as Critical. Yes, it's that bad.

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

God Save the Bank Holiday

2011-04-29T07:26:00.001+01:00

Only the hardest-hearted of us would begrudge anyone their wedding. And in spite of the over-£20 million bill for Wills and Kate's do today, it isn't the royal couple's fault that so many nutters might be out to destroy their day. Any couple getting married who faced the same level of risk as they, would have the right to expect that level of security.

Nor is it theirs, or David Cameron's fault that protesters could choose to make the issue political, that extremists might see it as an opportune moment to strike, or that people will take to the streets in their thousands and no doubt raise crime and disorder levels nationwide. Well unless you count Cameron's anti-establishment if-you-want-a- street-party-you-can- have-your-street-party speech.

What IS David Cameron's fault is that the 5000 officers required for the wedding security alone will be being paid double, as will every other police officer on duty everywhere else in the country. The bill for making 29th April a bank holiday is estimated at £5 billion, about the same amount owed by Britain in PFI deals set up in the Blair/Brown days. In what universe should bosses have to pay people bank holiday rates for turning up to work in Yorkshire, or Cornwall, because someone's getting married in London?

In the weeks after police officers have been threatened with the removal of their compensations for anti-social working, for Cameron to put this burden, not just onto the Met police who have to staff the occasion, but every other police force, and employer, is outrageous. A Prime Minister's role in such situations is not to announce a transparent gimmick to garner support and good feeling, but to represent the country's interests by perhaps suggesting to William and Kate that their wedding might take place on one of the four bank holidays occurring anyway around this time.

In the light of Winsor and Hutton, this latest faux pas shows the Coalition Government's proposed reforms to the police have nothing to do with saving money. Instead they intend to continue the drive by the last government and the European Court, to gradually erode the offices of public sector workers to prop up the sovereignty of Parliament.

Once constables have no privileges, no perks, and no special status - whether in their pay and conditions or sworn office - the ability to think for themselves and disobey unlawful orders will be a thing of the past. The great British bobby is on its way out.

Melodramatic? Check out ACPO's simpering response to the catastrophic Neyroud report.

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

Unsteady Eady

2011-04-22T21:53:00.003+01:00

Is it just me, or are the recent rulings by Mr Justice Eady somewhat at juxtaposition to a certain ruling by the same judge in 2009?

The reasoning behind Eady's refusal to allow an injunction preventing the publication of police blogger Nightjack's identity was (paraphrased): "He might not have been a real police officer, so we had a right to know and if he was breaching the disciplinary code he should be stopped." Which he was so we didn't and he wasn't and shouldn't have been.

In the recent cases of hyper-injunctions protecting celebrities from "naming and shaming", however, Mr Justice Eady appears to take a different view. Apparently publishing stories about celebrities and their sexual misdemeanours might upset their families, and therefore in this case the media is the bad guy.

The cases aren't the same: on the one hand you have a police officer serving his country, getting on with his job, whilst at the same time doing a wider public service by exposing hypocrisy and waste in the system. Both of which could have been effectively stopped by Eady's ruling. On the other hand, you have someone prancing around on television pretending to be something they're not, while the victims of their antics are forbidden from talking about it. Any commonsense member of the public could make a fair distinction between the two, surely.

Conveniently, both of Eady's rulings would appear to protect certain people in certain situations. For example, should a High Court judge happen to start a scandalous affair in private whilst publicly contributing to an inefficient, wasteful and hypocritical legal system, he could both seek a hyper-injunction to protect himself in both arenas, whilst refusing one for any person seeking to expose him.

Interesting. Oh, er, and purely hypothetical, of course.

Still... anyone at the News of the World got the number for Mr Justice Eady's answerphone?

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

Sending up the Balloon

2011-04-17T20:47:00.004+01:00

As a front-line sergeant, you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. Yes, technically it's the inspector who picks up the phone to the Duty Superintendent with the words, "Er, sorry to wake you, sir, but..."

But the sergeant has already phoned the inspector, and given him/her no choice but to make the call. Learning when to call the inspector is what being a sergeant is all about. In fact, it's what being a police officer is all about. It's the words:

"I'm not entirely happy about this missing woman, gov."
"Boss, I know we've had twelve other disgruntled boyfriends text their other halfs tonight telling them that they've got a can of petrol and a lighter and are on their way round, but this one means it."
"I don't think we've heard the last from them tonight. Can we get a few extra bodies from the late turn to work some overtime?"

Believe it or not, none of the above phrases can be taught during a diversity seminar. Nor are they found on the six-page domestic risk assessment form that gets filled in several times a shift. They aren't contained within the threats-to-life policy, and there's no board question to which they are the answer.

When I started Acting, my inspector had less than a little faith in me. If I called concerned about a missing teenager, he/she was "just out on the razz with some friends". If it was a domestic where he was on his way back to get her, they were "just tiffing". If I turned up for work to find just three souls in the briefing room waiting for me, and made a fuss to the senior management about staffing levels, I was "showing my inexperience".

"Oh, bloody hell, Bloggsy, not again!"

Looking back, perhaps my governor had a point, some of the time. But if I've known one thing from the moment I started this job, it's that it's better to send up the balloon and be wrong, than the other way around.

Because with the balloon, you get dogs, helicopters, PCSOs, mobile phone triangulation and Scenes of Crime call-out. You get DSs and DIs, Underwater Search Team and transits from the west of the force. Those are things that don't do you much good an hour after the event, when you realise that the suitcase the missing girl packed to run away with actually contains her dead body.

"Man down."

Of course, you might also get an email saying that perhaps APS Bloggs should check under the child's bed before dialling the number for the CRA. Or if she could look at the CCTV for where the supposed madman with the gun was seen, she might notice that the gun bounced when it was dropped. I've been responsible for my share of fervent, unnecessary panics, but I haven't had an email like that for a while.

Now, I'm no longer "Acting" Sergeant, and when I send up the balloon, people tend to take note, and send me what I need.

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

From Neyroud to Zero

2011-04-07T15:21:00.003+01:00

If the Neyroud Report has passed you by, cast your eye over it here. Peter Neyroud thinks that police officers should qualify via a foundation degree, paid for by themselves whilst serving as Special Constables, before joining the "profession" of constable, which by the way would include an annual fee for the privilege of being allowed to practice.

Word is that David Cameron rather likes this idea, and is pushing for it to be adopted, although right now it's just a rather expensive report concluding that a rather expensive total re-hash of the police is just what we need in these beleaguered times.

I haven't had time to read the recommendations, and probably never will. I'm too busy trying to resource Blandmore, gee up my team of morale-busted, world-weary PCs, and work out whether I really will be better off next year, as Tom Winsor would have me believe, or worse off, as my A-Level in Maths insists.

Like many other forces, Blandshire Constabulary has decided that now is a good time to totally renovate its structure, and is hanging the changes on the banner of budget cuts, when the truth is they were dreamt up some years ago when a new Chief Constable took over. In actual fact we had quite a cost-effective structure until Monday, with most of the wastage seemingly originating at HQ. Now HQ has expanded its bureaucracy, and on area money is being hurled in all directions as superintendents play tug-of-war with the best sergeants, inspectors and panda cars, all wanting them for their own brand new empires.

The only thing reassuring me is that I am not alone. Officers in West Midlands (above link), Kent, Surrey, Thames Valley, Gadget's force, and quite possibly every other force in the UK that I don't have time to Google, are all talking about the same thing. Restructures that don't save a penny, performance culture persisting, deckchairs being rearranged, and all the time the squeeze on the front-line continues.

There's a contradiction here with my last post. There just isn't the appetite to actually cut the things we could do without, and so it lands on the front-line and on the public.

When you look at the Neyroud Report, and you realise it was written by an ex-Chief Constable, who was once a PC, and a sergeant, and an inspector, it makes you wonder: if he doesn't understand the fundamental office of Constable, what hope has the Home Secretary?

NB If you're one of the people sitting at home thinking, maybe it would be better if the police force WAS staffed by professional types, consider whether you'd want to hire a doctor, lawyer or architect to deal with any of the following situations.

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

The Front, Middle and Back Line

2011-03-30T21:07:00.003+01:00

At last, media outlets are printing that one-fifth budget cuts "might" affect the front-line. For some reason it took Sir Dennis O'Connor (Chief Inspector of Constabulary) to say it before anyone took it seriously, perhaps because he isn't normally heard backing the lowly street bobby.

"Do you know why I've stopped you, madam?"

What outrages those of us who can describe exactly how budget cuts are affecting the front line is the eerie silence from most of our Chief Constables. Which is the biggest indicator of all that the Home Office has systematically taken control of the nation's police forces and an environment has sprung up in which it is impossible for dissenters to make their views known. In Blair's Britain, if you spoke about issues that you couldn't solve, you were an incompetent - after all, no one else was whinging about the problem. And now, under the new Coalition government, any Chief Constable who moans that the cuts will affect how his/her force delivers policing is clearly still spending too much on bureaucracy and performance measures. This mantra is trotted out regardless of whether or not it is the case.

Sir Dennis also raises the issue of what is the front line? He even suggests, shock horror, that those back-room roles that enable police officers to work on the front line should be considered vital themselves. This might even mean custody sergeants, gaolers, case file builders, etc. It's almost as if the concept of a front line is that it's actually the SMALLEST part of a police force, just the visible tip, and that in fact an effective back office means that a force can run with a very tiny proportion visible to the public.

For example, if a police officer can arrest a shoplifter and hand them straight over to someone to book them into custody, process and charge them, while someone else seizes CCTV and takes statements, that police officer can go straight back to the next shoplifting. Meaning that 3-4 other officers are needed back at the station to enable him to use his time the most efficiently on the front line.

"That is correct: you were going too fast, over a stop line, and you weren't wearing your seatbelt."

"Shouldn't you be out catching burglars and rapists?"

This debate has to continue: it has been a sacred cow that the front line must be untouchable. Is it possible- gasp- that it has all been political smoke and mirrors? And that maybe, to run an effective police force, what is actually needed is to preserve the front, middle and back line?

Time to think again, Theresa, or shall we just push on regardless? Let me guess...

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

The Problem with the Public

2011-03-28T12:50:00.001+01:00

It's often perceived there's an Us and Them attitude by the police towards the public. It's partly true: in the sense that any close-knit group defines itself by those who are not in it, whether it be accountants, scientists, soldiers, or the police. This is exacerbated by the fact that the police's job is very often to meddle in other people's lives, and accommodate two views that will never coincide.

Labour came up with the idea of Neighbourhood Policing, whereby the community could set priorities for their local police teams. Now the Home Office is backing elected police chiefs, and attacking those who criticise the plan as "elitist" - a title members of this Government can fully appreciate. The idea is to promote the view that the public will have "a say" in what their police force does.

There are two problems with this concept:

There is no sign that the Government plans to withdraw the vast array of measures and statistics used to grade police forces, nor provide legislative backing for forces to bin lengthy and expensive risk management systems.
The public do not have the time or inclination to comprehend a vast amount of what the police actually does, but if they stopped doing it, there would be an outcry.

Here are some examples of things the police chief or local community is unlikely to ask their force to prioritise, either because they don't want us to do it or because they don't know that we are doing it:

Searching for 14-yr-olds whose parents can't be bothered to look for them.
Ensuring paralytically drunk teenagers who've spent their taxi money on booze get home safely.
Picking up vulnerable old or ill people from the street, spending hours ensuring they receive medical treatment, taxiing them between different institutes who can't or won't take care of them, and then searching for them again when whichever institute finally accepts them phones to say they've walked out the door.
Bringing to justice armed hitmen who target drug dealers who have reneged on debts.
Counselling and intervening in broken relationships.
Setting up teams to monitor high risk dangerous offenders, gathering intelligence, visiting them regularly and gaining court orders or filing reports to probation when their behaviour becomes worrying.
Allocating dozens of detectives to visit thousands of addresses until every last person in each house is spoken to, to investigate serious crime.
Keeping custody suites secure and safe, ensuring prisoners are treated correctly and dealt with expeditiously.
Compiling rock-solid evidence files for court.
Transporting prisoners to and from hospital, court and other forces, as well as back home again, using caged vehicles, a mass of diesel, and at least two officers a time.
Training officers about discrimination and Health and Safety.

We do the above either because it has to be done and no one else will do it, or because we are liable to prosecution or civil suit if we don't. No police officer ever got prosecuted because he didn't prioritise dog-fouling or speeding in his local street, and yet from next year elected officials will be able to fire Chief Constables if they don't do exactly that - if that's what the public request.

Without a massive overhaul of Health and Safety, civil litigation, the European Court, and a number of other public services, the accountability of police forces will be wholly unaffected by the election of police chiefs. All that will happen is that uniformed officers and hard-working detectives will be trying to do the same work with less time, money and resources.

It's a bit like plugging a hole in a boat when the whole thing is underwater anyway.

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

On Your Head

2011-03-14T17:32:00.000Z

NB*

The story of two Northants bobbies who "refused" to attend a stabbing should be a cautionary tale. Before condeming the PCs concerned, it's worth mentioning some salient points:

There's no information about how much detail was in the call. It was initially shouting and screaming, then a mention of stabbing. At what point were they asked to attend?
In Blandmore, there is at least one "stabbing" a week, sometimes several over a weekend. About 10% actually involve a knife, and 1% serious injury or death.
There is a duty sergeant and inspector, plus control room sergeant and inspector, who should be making resourcing decisions and challenging any officers who they believe should be using their time differently.
Everything is more important than prostitution, in terms of immediate unfolding crime. If officers redeployed from an operation to cover all of these incidents, they'd never identify any repeat offenders or deal with them, and local residents do appreciate these operations.

All of that said, I am in disbelief that any sworn officer would rather spend his or her time trailing prostitutes around than going to a stabbing. Er, well, almost in disbelief. The point at which my goodwill evaporates entirely is where I read that a single-crewed colleague had to disarm the suspect AND deal with a dead body. Did those officers still not redeploy? The article isn't clear.

The pairs' defence was that their inspector would not have liked them to abandon the operation they were on. In front of the IPCC, and in the pages of tabloid newspapers, that sounds like a flimsy excuse. However, it is not uncommon for Operation Orders and emails sent out by both DIs and neighbourhood inspectors in Blandmore to include one of the following phrases:

Officers will not be redeployed from this operation without direct authority from the inspector/superintendent.
Any officer redeploying from the operation will be in my office the next day to explain why.
Response inspectors are under no circumstances to redeploy officers from this commitment for emergency commitments.

I for one am glad this case has hit the news. It provides protection for my officers, committed on hi-vis foot patrol for this or that CID investigation, or on one of the DI's performance-enhancing assault/robbery/burglary drives, to pull themselves away from that if something more important comes along. It is now plain, in black and white, the IPCC (not to mention the public, and the grateful duty resourcing sergeant) expects officers to attend emergency incidents happening nearby. If that sounds absurdly obvious, that is the stage we are at.

In fact, in the above scenario, had they attended and found a minor wounding requiring a few stitches, their inspector or DI probably WOULD have been irritated to lose his staff to another job. He/she'd probably even send out one of the above phrases in email form, to make sure it didn't happen again. If anything similar had been said in this case, whoever said it was careful enough not to put it in writing and has consequently been able to deny it. If that sounds cynical, consider the fact that I have a special folder where I save emails that my senior managers might later regret sending. In a culture where performance is based on numbers and promotion on write-ups of operations like these, real live policing is more an inconvenience than our purpose.

I'm not defending the disciplined officers. Nothing was preventing them popping down to secure the place for paramedics, and then returning to their operation - had it turned out to be minor - once local units were on scene.

But it's worth considering the context in which their laziness arose, and the decade of performance culture that has allowed it to breed. Either way, I'll be storing the newspaper cutting in a back drawer, and pulling it out every time I need to drag officers away from vital operations to attend the next violent domestic.

If nothing else, it's proof of the fact that those at the top can say and do whatever they want: at the end of the day, the decisions of a front-line police officer are the officer's, and the officer's alone.

* Before anyone writes in, these aren't the bobbies in question.

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

Comment is Free, Popularity Priceless

2011-03-10T16:46:00.005Z

The problem with writing for The Guardian is that I have to brace myself to read 200 comments about "poor police" and "those ketttling thugs". These comments appear regardless of the subject matter and bias of the article. Indeed, I could write a piece entitled "Why I hate The Police, by a Police Officer", and I would expect to see the same remarks.

We're all feeling a bit like this.

On the plus side, a near-decade of policing in the UK has inured me to the bulk of wildly-aimed criticism. The frustration is that the purpose of being a police blogger, and writing the odd article, is that I too am unhappy about the direction the police has been taken in the last fifteen years. I too wish to expose folly and malpractice. It just so happens that I also support the rank and file. The two concepts are not contradictory.

Unfortunately, many of my colleagues still think there is sympathy waiting out there for the police. That might be naive, but it's as it should be. My young officers may be cruelly shocked by their reception sometimes, but I never sit in briefing and tell them to hate the public.

Images like these are hard to take for some people.

We still police by consent in this country. It might not seem like it, if your weekend hobbies include throwing fire extinguishers off inner-city rooftops, but it's a fact. The only way that rank and file officers will overcome performance culture and internal back-stabbing is by keeping the public on side. I can't do that by writing for The Guardian, but I can day in, day out, at work.

Update: for those who asked, my fee for the Guardian article was donated to the Police Roll of Honour Trust.
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'Diary of an On-Call Girl' is available in some bookstores and online.

The Bloggs Review

2011-03-09T15:42:00.000Z

If the Winsor Review is implemented in full, I will be less well off to the tune of about £1200 after tax, which when allowing for inflation of 5%, is significant, but not devastating. However, the real issue that police officers have with the approach to reform is the attitude that it is acceptable to cut perks without giving anything in return. Here are some ways that reform could both give as well as take away:

If rest day working with less than five days notice is reduced to time-and-a-half (from double time), regulation could be changed so that officers can refuse to come in with less than five days' notice for anything less than a national emergency. Having the rule about double time has forced forces and the court system to plan ahead, which is the main benefit for officers.
Bank holiday pay could be similarly adjusted, but forces failing to plan their bank holiday staffing six months in advance should have to pay a higher rate. Christmas and New Year staffing should be organised the January before, with volunteers requested before enforced working is implemented. This would penalise those forces that constantly shuffle staff around at short notice and fail to remember when national holidays are until a few days before.
My next suggestion was going to be about replacing Special Priority Payments with bonuses for those who genuinely work antisocial hours and are exposed to daily confrontation and unpleasantness, but Tom Winsor's already thought of that.
Housing/living allowances could be means-tested (although it could be more expensive to means-test than just to pay everyone).
Inspectors - who don't get overtime - should have strict rules on the number of extended shifts and cover shifts they have to work, and forces should be made to implement these fairly across all inspectors rather than weighting the hours to those on response.

The above wouldn't please everyone, but it would seem fair to the public. Here are some more ideas that could also be implemented, that might change ACPO's view on the "antiquated" overtime rules:

All superintendents and above should have to work a shift in custody every month and a shift as duty inspector.
All superintendents and above should have to attend a domestic every three months and do all the relevant paperwork.
All superintendents and above should have to phone CPS Direct once a year for a charging decision.

The problem with police officers jumping up and down about pay is that the Federation have consistently failed to jump up and down about bureaucracy and injustice, and the public are unlikely to have much sympathy. Why should you care what the officer is being paid who turns up to arrest your twelve-year-old for a schoolyard scrap? Or gives you a penalty ticket for chasing yobs out of your back garden?

Young front-line officers are still being pressured by management to police in a way that massages crime figures and props up the PDRs of senior ranks. Our performance measures have not changed, regardless of what the Home Secretary may claim. Until the police put up sterner resistence to that, no one's going to jump on our pay and conditions bandwagon.

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

Are we at war?

2011-03-07T11:47:00.000Z

Since the announcement of the Winsor Review of police pay and conditions, there had been a steady release of stories undermining public support for the police (at least, what is left of it).

This week we see the Taxpayers' Alliance in Wales criticising the police for one in ten officers being on some form of restricted duties. You can also read today about police officers "pocketing" £3.8billion in overtime over the last ten years. The terminology tells you just how unbiassed the media are in reporting police-related stories. Then again, it wouldn't be much of a headline if it it read "Police officers have been paid for necessary hours worked in the last ten years".

The timing of this latest study should trigger reflection. The figures have come from The Policy Exchange, a supposedly independent, charity-funded think tank. Its previous directors have gone onto become Conservative MPs, Tory advisors, Parliamentary aides, etc. Is it any surprise that they choose to release this particular piece of analysis right now, when Home Secretary Theresa May is garnering support for her reform of police pay and conditions?

As for the data itself, why are people surprised that the overtime bill has been so high? Police bloggers have been talking about the ever-thinner blue line for the last decade. When front-line resources are short, your only option to cover all outstanding emergencies is to pay overtime. Indeed Blandshire Constabulary has gone through periods when over 50% of my team was on a daily basis being made up of officers working rest days or extended shifts, because we just didn't have enough staff to police my town. If that doesn't scare the bejesus out of any member of the public, it should.

The simple answer is that there's one way to cut down on overtime and that's to employ more police officers. Cameron can bleat about back-office cuts as much as he wants, and he was absolutely right eighteen months ago.

But the back office is being stripped bare. Yes, many totally unnecessary roles are finally being binned. But also going is much of the support system that has been propping up the front-line for the last decade. In a couple of years, when the cuts take effect, overtime will once again be the only way we can actually survive.

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

Top Down Betrayal

2011-03-03T11:35:00.002Z

To add to yesterday's post on pay, the point here is nothing to do with sympathy for the front-line, giving officers "what we're owed", or any other such propaganda. It comes down to basic hard facts:

The thin blue line is dependent on overtime, expenses and bonus payments simply to cover emergencies.
Without healthy enough compensation for working conditions, people will stop doing the work. Not overnight, but over a decade. Which is the reason the bonuses and pay rises were introduced to start with.

After this decade, one of three things will have happened or be about to:

The British police as we know it will no longer exist: we will no longer deal with mental health patients, lost children, the lonely and dying. It will be a civilianised force, the bulk of whom will have inflexible powers that allow them to do one job and one job alone, with a few "soldiers" who can put in doors and use force.
Officers will be reverting to the every-man-for-himself days of the 70s, because it isn't worth their while to abide by the regulations.
Service to victims of crime and crime stats at an all-time low, the government will have to shell out a fortune as they did in the 80s, to keep people in the police and encourage them to join.

For front-line police officers, I think the most distressing part of the current political climate is the betrayal by our senior management. We can understand and accept the epithets spouted by the Home Office - of course the government wants to save money, of course politicians think they understand the problems facing policing, that's only natural. We all knew that our Special Priority Payments would not last, and anyone who didn't was naive.

But then we read about the fundamental role of constable being diminished and undermined, and hear not a peep out of our chief officers. We hear about our compensations being eroded, and no one is defending us - even if they lose, you expect your bosses to fight your corner.

Money-saving measures by our CCMTs (Chief Constable Management Teams) take no account of the welfare of their officers. We see shift patterns introduced that suit everyone except those working them. Officers are pulled between stations to save money. Inspectors are given more and more line management responsibility with no extra motivation or compensation, and are still expected to implement massive increases in performance.

And suddenly our senior managers have forgotten that they too started out at the sharp end, having to stay on to guard a scene in the pouring rain when it's their kid's birthday tea, having their leave cancelled because a foreign royal decides to visit their town, being hauled over the coals for every little mistake and subjected to intense scrutiny for every lapse in judgment. We're not asking for that to end, we're asking for our own managers to take it into account and support us. Instead, they're asking for our pay and conditions to be cut, to make their lives easier, and in fact are already implementing nonsensical changes that protect themselves at the expense of their troops.

My Chief might want to remember: without an army, you aren't chief of anything.

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Cut Pay, Cut Regulation

2011-03-02T15:19:00.000Z

"Police officers must accept cuts to their pay to avoid losing thousands of frontline jobs, Home Secretary Theresa May said today."

What this actually means is that NEW police officers must accept cuts to their pay, if they want to become police officers. Current officers do not need to do any such thing, as quite frankly it isn't the place of a front-line police officer to express any interest whatsoever in how many jobs are lost. There will not be police officer redundancies on the front-line, the cuts will come through natural wastage and lack of recruitment. Where the cuts will have effect is in the quality of recruit, as less applicants are attracted by the pension and pay.

No doubt police chiefs are happy to jump on Theresa May's bandwagon to save their jobs, as they fight to agree how much money can be saved by cutting overtime and bonus payments for things like bank holiday work or jobs with more responsibility. But the generous overtime and bonuses some officers get is in direct compensation for two fundamental regulations that we adhere to:

We can be prosecuted criminally for neglect of duty.
We must work the days and hours we are told to, according to operational need.

Blandshire Constabulary could not function without overtime: most of my colleagues do not particularly want the money at the moment, they'd rather go home on time. But the need for overtime to cover essential police tasks is daily.

Few of us who live in Britain would disagree with another fundamental principle: that people should not be forced to work without pay, and the more inconvenient/difficult/distressing the work, the more they should be compensated.

It seems there is a choice looming: cut our pay, and cut the regulation forcing us to work against our will, in conditions that most of us would not choose. Alternatively, leave us alone, and we'll bust a gut to do our job, and take home a healthy pocketful of cash in return. If the Home Office goes with the former, I'd like to get a peek at the duty roster in London for July and August 2012.

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

Shoplifters of the World

2011-02-16T19:32:00.000Z

I just watched The One Show complaining about shops using civil recovery to claim costs back from shoplifters. According to Sheila Hancock, this is "outrageous" and "the police's job". She thinks this because Sheila Hancock hasn't the first clue about the reality of shoplifting and what it involves for the police.

Most shoplifters arrested in Blandmore have at least a dozen convictions, and some have literally hundreds. They are mostly on heroin or crack, and steal to fund the habit because it's a risk-free choice of crime, with two possible outcomes:

(A) They get away with it, sell the booty and get their heroin/crack.

(B) They get caught, get arrested, get free food for the night, as much diazepam and methodone as the police doctor can prescribe, go to court in the morning and try again later that day.

It is truly a no-lose scenario. Moreover, a shoplifting is not always the most straightforward crime. Usually it is only witnessed on CCTV, and there are gaps in continuity of the evidence. It takes time to build the case and may need referral to the Crown Prosecution Service to charge. Several shoplifters are detained every day in one 24hr Blandmore supermarket, and they are very often "high maintenance" in custody, requiring increased monitoring for withdrawal or self-harm tendencies. They need officers to go to pharmacies or their homes to collect prescriptions, just to keep them alive whilst in the police's care. They get remanded due to their prolific offending, and languish in the traps all weekend consuming tax-payer's money at a staggering hourly rate.

All this, and the likely outcome in court is a drug rehabilitation course to ensure they are prescribed enough free methodone that they don't need to steal for a while, a fine they can't pay, and community work they will claim they are too ill to do.

There must come a point where you simply have so many convictions that you are to be considered a one-person crime wave, and draconian action should be used to quell your offending. Options might include:

Six months in a special drug free prison.
Withdrawal of all benefits.
GPS tagging to identify you every time you offend, and bar you from certain premises that have simply had enough of you.

In the absence of any hope of even a watered down version of the above, what choice do stores have but to try and claim some compensation back from the few shoplifters they catch who do actually have the means to pay?

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

The Invisible Scourge

2011-02-11T22:17:00.000Z

Government pledge, May 2010: "Any cabinet minister … who comes to me and says 'Here are my plans' and they involve frontline reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again.

Labour, February 2011: "...over 10,000 police officers are being cut in the next few years alone."

Government response: "There is no simple link between police numbers and their impact; what matters is how the police are deployed."

The government's position is a bit like saying, "We've thrown away all the eggs, flour, butter and sugar, but I want that Victoria Sponge on the table in time for tea!"

If we believe that David Cameron meant his words back in May 2010, it means that he thinks that 20% of what the police have been doing can be cut. Funnily enough, I actually agree with him. The truth is we haven't been making Victoria Sponge simply with eggs, flour, butter and sugar. We've been making it with all of those things plus salt and pepper, marmalade and ham. I for one would be happy to go back to the classic recipe.

As a frontline sergeant at least 30% of my day is spent on one of the following mind-boggling tasks:

Checking my officers have filled out a variety of forms correctly, in order that the force will not be sued if someone one of them spoke to that day is found dead.
Reading through pages of incidents and crime reports that were read through by someone else the day before, and making the same decisions that they did, because day on day none of us have any resources to actually deal with the jobs.
Acquainting myself with every crime that my team are currently dealing with involving one of the force priorities (robbery, burglary, assault, etc), in time for the 9am morning meeting, so that I can justify why we haven't dealt with it differently. It's worth mentioning that while I'm doing this, the superintendent is also reading through them all so he can come into the meeting armed. Because he reads them all, so does his PA, and the three detective inspectors or sergeants of various departments who have to come to the meeting just in case the superintendent decides one of them should deal with a job instead.

The other 70% of my day is spent trying to ensure that my team is policing as effectively as they can. If I could do that 100% of the day, there probably wouldn't be a need for so many people to check and review the work my team has done over the last 24 hours, because we'd be doing it properly to start with.

Problem solved: the 20% budget cuts coming our way can be directed towards cutting all that crap.

Unfortunately, the reason I spend 30% of my day in the above manner is because of the any number of targets that my force may fail on if I stop doing it: crime detection, crime reduction, custody process, victim satisfaction. In fact, all of the things you'll find measured here, at Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

HMIC is not the only body behind the scenes holding the reins of Blandshire Constabulary, but along with the Police Authority and the European Court of Human Rights, it is the biggest barrier to implementing meaningful budget cuts without impacting on frontline staff. As Police Authorities are going, and we're stuck (for now) with the ECHR, why isn't anyone doing anything about HMIC? This is a body that hands out advice to forces on how they should be providing spare knickers for prisoners, and how they should be paying £35,000 to sergeants to phone people up and ask them if they got given a little green book when they reported their crime.

Cameron can blame Chief Constables (and local Councils) all he wants for the inevitable service reduction, but until his government tackles the malevolent force responsible for police bureaucracy, there is only one place for his budget cuts and that's down here on the frontline.

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

Minority Rules

2011-02-05T11:24:00.001Z

If you asked most people what democracy means, they'd probably say something along the lines of free elections. What "free elections" actually means is that the majority voice will govern the country. He who shouts the loudest, etc.

The Daily Mail is today outraged at Surrey Police's rolling road block that allowed Katie Price to get home unimpeded. A lot of people will no doubt read the story and be equally outraged. On Breakfast television today a commentator speculated that the police must have been "star-struck" and that was the reason for the "waste of resources". On the face of it, any decent tax-paying citizen would quite rightly be appalled.

How does the road block for Katie Price compare, however, to some of the following uses of resources recently by Blandshire Constabulary and other forces:

Four PCSOs doing high vis patrols for a week due to "kids gathering" outside a local shop.
A marked car being left outside an address for four days because the female occupant has been receiving nasty texts from her ex-partner.
A witness for a drugs trial being housed at public expense in a hotel for the duration of the trial, and being given a uniformed escort to court each day.
One social worker being given the protection of four armed officers, two traffic cars, four local officers including a sergeant, in order to go to an address and tell a mother her child was going to be taken into foster care.
A six week operation involving more than thirty officers, undercover surveillance, search warrants and high-tech equipment, all to find out which white van driver has been approaching schoolgirls and offering them a lift.
Two years spent bringing to justice the six or seven thugs who subjected one family to a reign of racist harassment, at a cost nearing hundreds of thousands to the tax payer.

All of the above are important to some degree. All of the above involve a staggering expense and use of police resources on the needs of the few. But how does that differ to the use of two dozen different medical staff to respond to a car crash victim with a badly broken leg, or six fire engines stuffed with firemen for one small house fire where no one is even trapped?

A true democracy is not about the view of the majority, but representation of the public- ALL of the public. If that means Katie Price, perhaps at risk of being terrorised in her car by the dangerous driving of photographers, then the use of one single traffic patrol to ensure her safe passage home is a pretty efficient way of resolving the issue. Who knows what information or intelligence led to Surrey's decision - after all, they don't escort her home with a rolling road block every day.

There are many occasions on which police officer waste their time chasing trivial offences to satisfy bean counters in their Headquarters. Or jump through hoops to cover their backs against litigation or disciplinary action. But the weighting of resources towards the minority in our society at greatest risk of harm is not poor judgment, it's our job.

Having said that, maybe Miss Price phoned up the Area Commander, and maybe he just wanted her autograph.

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

Alexander's Ragtime

2011-02-02T19:56:00.003Z

Blandshire Constabulary is slowly unveiling its plans for the new tax year. Half a dozen Chief Superintendents and Superintendents will lose their jobs, even more Chief Inspectors, and the prospects for promotion to Inspector are bleak for 2-3 years. Of course, all those who lose their jobs in the restructure will get new jobs, in the same rank and on the same pay, within the new improved Constabulary. But we're all assured that despite this, a lot of money will be saved. Honest.

Here are some of the main ways that money will/might be saved in the new era:

Implementing a one-size-fits-all shift pattern across Blandshire's regions: response and neighbourhood teams will work the same hours whether they work in rural North Blandshire, or the heart of Blandmore town with its humming night-time economy. Much less paperwork for the duty planner, you see.
Making inspectors responsible for twice as many teams, and ensuring they never work alongside the staff they are managing. Sickness and complaints should plummet, because no one will know who to report them to.
Combining all kinds of local services and delivering them "from" Headquarters. The staff allocated to the departments won't change, nor will their pay or conditions, or the remit of the work they do. But it will save loads nonetheless.
Freezing recruitment until staffing levels have fallen to dangerous levels, like they did 2-3 years ago. It saves a fortune, which can be spent on the massive overtime bill for the staff you've still got.
Stop spending money on absolutely everything: if officers have to fill in a budget request to their second line managers to order a new biro, they'll probably start buying them with their own money. This policy can then be extended to headlight bulbs, replacement uniform, food for police dogs and perhaps, one day, police cars.

Of course, residents of Blandshire should not panic that front-line services will be reduced. Even as we speak members of the Chief Constable's Management Team are working hard overhauling policies that are fine how they are, introducing new tiers of risk assessments in areas that are already risk-assessed to death, and holding training days for hundreds of officers as advised by our valued partner agencies.

Come 1st April, the deckchairs will levitate and slowly come to rest in new positions. And the Titanic will soldier on towards that iceberg, those of us down in third class oblivious to everything other than our impending doom.

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

The Real Whodunnit

2011-01-20T16:46:00.002Z

You've probably noticed the eerie silence from police bloggers on the topic of Joanna Yeates' murder. It's not because we don't have an opinion on the investigation, the media handling of the murder, nor that we don't have our own theories on whodunnit and how and why.

It's because when it comes to murder, you're into a whole different ball-game of policing. If I attend a nasty assault where someone's been hit with a baseball bat and is unconscious in hospital with concussion and a brain bleed, that's serious stuff. I'll be expected to provide an officer to secure the scene, another to travel with the victim and seize his clothing, another to arrest the offender and seize HIS clothing. CID detectives may do some of this, and will probably poke around the scene and do house-to-house enquiries. They may look at CCTV, or take statements from witness, but more likely they'll ask uniformed response to do it.

If the unfortunate in the above example catches the bat a millimetre higher or lower on his skull, however, and life-changing turns to life-threatening, and then to fatal, the scenario changes. Major Crime will now oversee the investigation as they make their way from bed, or from the next county over.

I'll now need 3-4 officers to secure an enormous scene, moreover, they'll need to be wearing hats. I'll need at least 2 officers to arrest every person who's had the vaguest trace of contact with the victim, or anyone who doesn't give a good account of themselves. If arrest attempts are to take place at addresses, we might need armed support, with roads policing standing by in high-speed cars in case of escapees. If contact is made with a suspect, the same armed units and roads policing cannot then attend the next arrest attempt, as the defence will allege cross-contamination of DNA evidence. So this might mean 4-6 officers per suspect. The same vehicles cannot be used twice either, including ones that have transported officers contacting the victim, or witnesses.

Real murders are solved like this.

The suspects will need to have their hands taped up in bags, their phones seized, as well as blood samples, photographs of them dressed, then full clothing seizures, swabs from every part of them exposed to the air, hair combings, the lot. In the example of a street fight, we could be talking 12 uniformed officers and 5 specialist support units absorbed into the job, before you start counting the detectives who turn up to do house-to-house and statement-taking. On a normal night in Blandmore, that is more than likely my entire shift. There's an SIO (Senior Investigating Officer) somewhere changing out of his pyjamas in the far south of the force, asking for this and that and the other to be done, and he doesn't care much for the response "Er, we've run out of officers" or "But now there's an armed robbery happening at the Co-op and I need to send someone there". So my inspector will have to find the troops, whether it means we call on the towns either side of us, or start waking people up.

They are rarely solved like this.

This is a murder for which the suspects are pretty obvious, for which the witnesses are waiting to be spoken to, and where we know what has happened. The difficulties spiral when the suspect is unknown, there are 5-6 or more scenes of interest, and the media are crawling all over it stamping their feet for immediate results.

So there isn't much for a police blogger to say about the events in Bristol, other than that I believe over 90% of murders are solved eventually. You can be sure that whatever resources are needed to investigate it will be found, somewhere. And whatever secret deals ACPO are pursuing to curb overtime and unnecessary expenditure will fall by the wayside.

Unfortunately, the Real Whodunnits take more to solve than a moustached Belgian with a good gut instinct and an assembly of middle class suspects in a sitting room. Although perhaps we could look into that as way to save money...

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

What was he thinking? Probably about himself.

2011-01-07T14:37:00.001Z

Det Ch Supt Jonathan Hesketh got a special mention in The Daily Telegraph today after sending out a PSD version of the 12 Days of Christmas.

Most officers are fairly wary of the Professional Standards Department at the best of times. Despite knowing it is largely staffed by cops who were PCs once themselves, we all suspect that the superintendents there get a secret kick out of bringing one of us down. In truth, for the most part, PSD tends to protect police officers against spurious complaints, and acts as a helpful filter for those complaints that are never going anywhere because they are based on misunderstandings of the law: the "wrongful arrest" complaint being a good example*.

Well thanks to Det Ch Supt Hesketh, officers in West Midlands now know with what casual scorn their disciplinary matters are met by the head of their PSD. I am sure his 'carol' was supposed to act as a cautionary tale to officers that they could have disciplinary findings against them for any number of things. In fact it appears to have gone down about as well as the head of Major Crime sending out a song filled with all the serious crimes W.Mids failed to prevent, ending, 'a rape victim suspended in a pear tree'.

Anyone who has the full text of the offending poem, please email it. Whilst being sure not to breach your force's strict rules on confidentiality, of course. I wouldn't want anyone being called up in front of a certain Det Ch Superintendent...

* Please note, I'm not saying Chris Jefferies did it, or didn't do it, or might not would have should have could have not done it not, only that his arrest was probably lawful.

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

Brought to Justice

2011-01-02T17:25:00.001Z

Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, whose name sounds like a character from a Restoration comedy, tells us that the rioters in HMP Ford "must be brought to justice". Presumeably he means they must be sent back to prison to continue drinking and rioting.

I once dealt with an absconder from another open prison, who we arrested on the streets of Blandmore following a fortuitous person check by a PCSO. The paperwork faxed through from Leyhill contained the following phrases: "The prison is surrounded by a low three foot wall that can be easily jumped" and "the prisoners know they are not allowed to jump the wall". This useful information enabled us to interview and charge the absconder, who was shipped off to a higher security prison pending his removal back to Leyhill once he was due to be released soon again.

The above link informs us that Leyhill is home to 532 prisoners, 110 of whom are "lifers". The only thing that a life sentence is given out for in this country is murder, or attempted murder if the offender has a LOT of violent previous. Which means that 110 would-be killers are wandering around the grounds of Leyhill Prison with just a rulebook standing between them and society. I've been a police officer for a while now, but I honestly had no idea that this many prisoners were kept in what could more accurately be described as a hotel with rules. If you look at HMP Ford's rulebook, it sounds more like a private boarding school than a prison.

The fact is that there is no such thing as Justice any more. The most you can hope for if you are brutally raped, or a family member murdered, is that the culprit will be held out of reach of society until he/she's forgotten whatever urges prompted him/her to attack. You will have to accept that the perpetrator is probably wearing his own clothes, watching TV, going to the gym and getting access to all the contraband he wants. If he ends up in Leyhill or Ford as he nears the end of his determinate sentence period, you could even go and wave at him (or shoot him) over the three foot wall.

Believe it or not, I am a fan of rehabilitation. But the point about prison is that the person has received a custodial sentence because voluntary rehabilitation has not worked. It probably has not worked 20 or 30 times. We are dealing with people who have never heard the word "no", who never accept they have lost, who always manage to wriggle out of the wrong they have done and have no empathy with others, nor any scruples.

The only option is therefore to either accept they are not fit to live in society, or inflict a prison regime that acts as both deterrent and encouragement to truly reform. Incentives should be linked to gaining qualifications and learning to turn up for work reliably. Punishments should be uncompromising and with no right of appeal. They need to be lined up and told "no" again and again until they listen. And if they don't listen, they don't get released.

I'm not authoritarian. I have great empathy for the kids I deal with aged 11-14, on the brink of criminality, and I know the dreadful home lives they have experienced. But the truth is that all effective discipline and guidance has been taken out of the Criminal Justice System. We have no means of deterrent or control. Crime has won. It's time to take back the streets.

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

A Very Blandmore New Year

2011-01-01T10:51:00.000Z

To a police officer, the festive season tis the season to be alcoholic and violent. In the past fortnight my shift have dealt with repeated robberies, domestics and deaths - both natural and un.

Does this depress us, and turn us into a bunch of compassionless, hardened cynics? Well, in actual fact most of the young officers on my shift love this time of year. Every day another senior manager brings in a tub of Roses or Quality Street before scuttling off home to spend the holidays with their families. Every day the briefing room table is littered with sausage rolls and doughnuts. Every day inexperienced PCs get to deal with serious crime far beyond their remit, with half the number of detectives and specialists on duty to help. Stressful? They love it.

On a late or night shift on a regular Christmas Day/Boxing Day, there are no Priorities of the Day, no race hate crime targets, no Antisocial Behaviour Nominals. There are just policemen and women, doing the job they joined up to do, with the added bonus of a kitbag full of chocolate and pastry treats.

Not so in 2010. I was astonished to discover that the Senior Management Team had this year arranged daily management meetings on every one of the bank holidays. One day we had a priority of attending a report of a minor robbery where the victim had not been contactable for four days and did not even know the police had been informed. Another day it was a minor injury assault between a brother and sister who had lost their father on Boxing Day and who had withdrawn any complaint. I, er, omitted to pass on these top priorities to my shift. So forgetful...

It isn't as if we haven't got plenty of genuine serious crime to be getting on with. Which is hard enough when we have one Scenes of Crime officer per county, who is booking off at 4pm and won't stay on late for anything less than a Joanna Yeates-style murder. Not to mention the on-call DI who hasn't slept in three days, and the two CID detectives who don't have families, who have offered to work every bank holiday to cover for their colleagues.

"Snowed under" aren't the words to describe the festive season on Blandmore's front-line - however apposite a pun. "Clinging on for dear life" might be more appropriate. The only thing softening the blows, bringing in rows of volunteers to cover last minute absences and calamities, keeping the town's head above water until 4th January, is the double pay police officers get for working bank holidays.

If Sir Hugh Orde and the Association of Chief Police Officers have their way, there won't be many hands up in 2011 when the inspector puts out the call, "I need two PCs to pick up a prisoner from Scotland", "Four officers for a scene watch", "A sergeant and six to go to Bigtown for a high risk missing child". Names will be picked from hats and resignations will follow.

Here's to 2011: to more domestics, more robberies, more real police work and fair compensation for giving up a normal family life to do it well.

A very Happy New Year to my colleagues and all my readers. This blogger isn't quite done yet.

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

Perspective

2010-12-16T22:28:00.001Z

John Onyenaychi has stabbed a police officer and a PCSO in London. Like another would-be cop killer, Kes Nattriss, Onyenaychi had been released early from prison and gone onto breach his parole. Like Kes Nattriss, he was due to be returned to prison when he found himself bumping into the officers engaged on another matter. Like Kes Nattriss, he was recognised by the officers, and he then slashed the PC across the throat when he tried to arrest him. Like Kes Nattriss, he will probably now serve the sort of sentence he should have served to start with.

The Conservatives 2010 manifesto promised to ‘rebuild confidence in the criminal justice system so that people know it is on the side of victims and working for law-abiding people not criminals'. But under the Coalition's latest plans, new sentencing guidelines promote fewer prison sentences for violent offences and greater use of the sort of community orders that the likes of Nattriss and Onyenaychi will not blink at before breaching. More and more convicted recidivist robbers and thugs will be released early, and parole restrictions or community orders won't stop them reoffending because they've had to commit two dozen offences to even get sent to prison to start with.

Why isn't the Met Commissioner jumping up and down, pointing the finger at the criminal justice system and demanding to know how he can be expected to protect the public when his officers are spending days, weeks and months locking up the same people for the same crimes, time and again.

And finally spare a thought for the stabbed PCSO, who went hands-on to arrest this man armed to the teeth with a pen and a book of penalty tickets.

Is there any perspective from which this state of affairs is not utterly, totally and completely barmy?

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

Hateful Hate Crime

2010-11-30T17:17:00.000Z

Sorry for the absence, it's been intensely busy at work followed by my internet going down. I can't tell you why it's been busy, or you'd know where I worked, but suffice it to say I've rarely known a more morbid and depressing series of events to strike Blandmore in one month. And we don't even have a proper university in the town.

I was thrilled and excited to see today that hate crime figures for England and Wales have been published. These statistics demonstrate without a doubt that some people who commit crime are actually hostile towards their victims. This most shocking and appalling state of affairs must be addressed.

Unofficially, there are two kinds of hate crime: one that is motivated by hostility based on race/religion/gender/etc, and one that someone THINKS is motivated by those things. Both are identified as hate crimes in our statistics, but only the first kind are "racially/religiously/homophically aggravated" under the legal definition. This means that a lot of hate crimes sit on our books where there is no proof that any kind of -ism was involved at all. This only matters if you are measured and judged on your detection rate for hate-related crime. Moreover, many of the crimes that are in fact aggravated by these things will have elements that are easy to prove in relation to the crime, but impossible to prove in relation to the motivation. If a person is charged for the non-aggravated version, the police cannot claim to have solved that crime.

These statistics are not, of course, related to any kind of performance target, because targets have been abolished. But they do relate to victim satisfaction, and we all agree we are allowed to measure that, and that it doesn't count as a target even if the figures are published in green, amber and red. Funnily enough, last year it seems that victims of hate crime were really devastated by their crimes and felt vulnerable to be targeted in that way. This year, they're not too bothered, and it appears that victims across the board feel just as aggrieved as everyone else.

Either way, I know that the residents of Blandmore are delighted at the latest transparency in police figures, and are confident that this is a step towards stemming the dreadful tide of serious and violent crime threatening to overwhelm the county's police.*

* Which is not to suggest that Blandshire Constabulary can't cope. Of course we can, coping just involves a lot of overtime payments, which if ACPO has its way will be a thing of the past.

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

The Teeny Weeny Itsy Bitsy Blue Line

2010-11-15T20:18:00.003Z

David Cameron: "The budget cuts will not affect front line services."

PC Bloggs: "I've yet to hear a convincing argument of how these cuts are NOT going to affect front-line services. Anyone?"

Today Greater Manchester Police has taken a deep breath and admitted that front line posts will go in the latest round of cuts. Any force that does not follow suit is lying. The government will no doubt claim that forces are free to decide how to enact the cuts themselves, and it is therefore GMP's choice to cut front line numbers. In fact, from next year, it will be the people of GMP's choice. Big Society in action.

Blandshire Constabulary itself has frozen recruitment and will not be replacing retiring officers over the next couple of years. Which means we're bracing ourselves for a repeat of a couple of years ago when shifts were daily being brought up to strength by officers on overtime and rest day working. Except that overtime is likely to be limited too. Indeed, if ACPO get its way and sells front line police down the river for the sake of its bottom line, no one will be willing to work on rest days or do overtime, and someone will successfully take their Chief to the European Court of Human Rights for their right to say no to unreasonable work demands.

Meanwhile, down at the sharp end, officers are attending jobs like this, and daily making decisions whereby their own and others lives hang in the balance.

Sir Hugh Orde made a good point last month (after putting down his pen from signing the secret document regarding reform to police pay and conditions). He said, "We are going to have to ask some really hard questions with the public: what is it that you want the police to stop doing?"

But it's not the public we should be asking, it's Whitehall, and we should not stop asking until we have an answer that adds up.

NB If you announce that you have axed police performance targets, please inform the body responsible for measuring the police against them.

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

Back to Front Justice

2010-11-07T13:04:00.000Z

Judge John Rogers has today been added to my legendary Hall of Fame for warped justices.

I frequently post on my blog about the treatment of rape victims by the legal system, and meet generally with two extreme camps: those who think most women are liars and those who think many, if not all men, are rapists (the majority of readers are, of course, somewhere in between).

I will be interested to know what my two camps feel about the case of a woman jailed for perverting the course of justice - not for making up a rape allegation, but for lying when she said the rapes DIDN'T happen. The implicit assumption within Judge John Rogers' eight month jail sentence for the woman is that she WAS a genuine victim of rape and was therefore a dirty liar for retracting her allegations.

Nobody can argue that it wasn't inconvenient for this woman to chop and change her account. Nobody can believe that police officers and prosecutors in this case weren't wringing their hands when she changed her story for the third time, nor that thousands of pounds weren't wasted in the rape case that fell apart. But the perversity of a sentence that accepts their status as victim while the perpetrator of crimes against them has walked free should not be under-estimated. This is not someone who falsely retracted a statement allowing SOMEONE ELSE's murderer or attacker to walk free, but someone whose only victim of their befuddled evidence was herself - oh, and the man that Judge John Rogers accepts to be a rapist.

When recidivist, premeditated burglars, thugs and gangsters are daily walking free with suspended sentences and community orders, just what on earth was Judge Rogers thinking? More to the point, just what substances had the police and CPS consumed the week they decided it was a good idea to prosecute a repeat victim of rape for not wanting to go through with the prosecution of her attacker?

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

This Time Last Year

2010-10-30T20:25:00.006+01:00

Crime reduction is measured on the number of the same crimes on the same day the previous year. This is because certain times of the year are peak for certain offences in certain areas, eg Halloween = Criminal Damage, New Year = Affray/fights, Summer = burglary, etc.

The brilliance of this system of measurement is that those seeking promotion to the lofty heights of Chief Inspector and above can use random fluctuations in weather or local events to claim grand successes in their operations to reduce crime.

For example, last year October 31st was a Saturday, this year it's a Sunday. Blandmore's Inspector In Charge of Being In Charge has drummed up some resources and an Op Order targeting antisocial behaviour on and around Halloween. What's the betting that occurrences of late night teen drinking and criminal damage are right down this year, given that the big event is on a school night? Likewise should it pour with torrential rain on Bonfire Night, what are the chances that levels of arson and fireworks in the street are a fraction of those last year? Let alone massive factors such as the economy, or the holding/cancellation of local events that attract disorder and crime.

These minor factors should never get in the way of a good write-up, however, and I expect to see several inspectors gaining that happy extra pip as a result of fortuitous winds and FTSE indices.

Of course, it works the other way too. Due to the budget restraints, there may be half the staff to resource these operations, just like nightclubs will have half the doormen and the Council no bank holiday contingency for taxi marshalls or road closures in problem areas. So this year, we may be declaring an unusually high number of proactive operations as total failures and cancelling them forever regardless of their merits.

Welcome to Twenty-First Century Policing.

The problems faced by police officers on Halloween:

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

Brave Old World

2010-10-24T21:01:00.003+01:00

"A good leader at Aldgate would have assumed authority and ordered his crews in to help injured passengers on a bombed Tube train."
So says David Gilbertson, ex Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard.*

The delay in rescue efforts by emergency services on July 7th 2005 has been roundly labelled as Health and Safety culture gone mad by the media this week. The assumption is that because fire crews and ambulances were standing by waiting orders to proceed with rescue, instead of racing headlong into the tube tunnels, they should feel wracked with guilt and are personally responsible for any deaths that happened while they waited.

As a front-line police sergeant, reading these articles makes me profoundly angry. We are not talking about a situation where a simple and obvious act by one person could save a life. We are talking about a treacherous and difficult rescue, with extreme hazards to emergency workers, and a situation totally beyond the experience of any of them. I have no doubt that the units on scene were frustrated and impatient to get on with the rescue, regardless of the risk of secondary devices or any hazards. I know for a fact that young officers on my team are not Health and Safety conscious, and are impetuous and risk-taking far more often than they are cautious - see me quoted in the Daily Telegraph here.

The truth is you don't save a drowning person from a river by diving in without thinking. You wait for backup, get emergency kit ready on the shore, and then make the decision to dive when you are in the best possible position to save the person, otherwise everyone who turns up to help will be in the same half-cocked position that you were when you first arrived on scene, and the river will soon be jammed with the writhing of would-be rescuers.

In the situation where you have no equipment and no backup (such that of as PC Elizabeth Kenworthy), each individual must make a decision about how far they are willing to risk themselves. I know that for the majority of my team, there is no hesitation and they will go all the way - sometimes simply to arrest a car thief, let alone for a dying man. My job, like an anxious parent, is to berate them roundly for the peril they put themselves in, whilst secretly proud inside that my kid done good.

To suggest that firefighters in London on July 7th should feel "guilty" for their failings is to totally misunderstand the position they were in, and what their job actually involves. Do we want an emergency service that is no better than a heroic passer-by, or do we want one equipped to help and with a strategy in place to do it well? A paramedic with no defibrillator or oxygen bag is not a paramedic: he is a good Samaritan. It's easy to rush blindly towards danger with flailing arms; it's harder to take a deep breath, walk slowly up and look it in the eye.

There are innumerable situations where I am happy to hold the public sector up to scrutiny over risk-aversion, but the day of the London Bombings is not one of them.

* Note on David Gilbertson. As well as decrying the lack of "Blitz spirit" in officers nowadays, the ex-Commander (and HMIC inspector) regularly expounds his view that officers view themselves "as combatants in the war on terror", "at war" with the public, and speaks of the days of "policing by consent", when officers went out without stab vests and batons. Apart from the innate contradictions in these views (either we are at war, or we're not: we can't just invoke the Blitz when we feel like it), he appears to yearn for a bygone age of policing. I meet a lot of Commanders like Mr Gilbertson, who come into briefings and tell my young officers about the days they used to face down the world armed only with a short stick, and berate us for our cowardice wanting to be double-crewed and wear body armour. The thing is, Mr Gilbertson may well come from a braver age of policing, but he also comes from an age when girls made the tea, you used to travel free on the bus, queue-jump almost anywhere, and middle-aged white males spent their evenings in Masonic lodges lapping up the cheap beer in police bars. The age of police privilege is past, and with it the age of mindless bravery. I don't say which is better, but it is a new world now.

(Added 19:49 25/10/10)

A final point to consider: the debate is not about whether we should risk our lives for the public or not, but whether it is automatically doing our job better if we risk our lives. Not whether the emergency services were afraid to rush into the tunnels, but whether waiting to plan a rescue strategy was more sensible and stood a better chance of saving life. What folly to race in en masse and miss half the dying people because you don't have the right breathing/vision equipment. When the emergency services first deployed, they did not know what kind of incident they were dealing with.

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

The Targeted Lie

2010-10-18T08:25:00.005+01:00

According to Nick Herbert MP, the police's targets have been abolished. Someone should tell HMIC. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary is the body that visits and holds failing police forces to account. It functions almost solely by monitoring data and statistics, basing its reports on the results of polls and then producing recommendations.

As a Chief Constable, failure to follow recommendations by HMIC can have significant results: in extreme cases HMIC can refer a poorly-performing force to the Home Secretary, and Home Office intervention in running the force can follow. If you think this is ever allowed to happen, think again. So HMIC's assessment of a force is crucial.

Here you can find HMIC's "report cards" (their overall findings about each force). A quick scan through shows that, like it or not, HMIC is monitoring detection rates - that is, the force's ability to "solve" a crime by charging, cautioning or reporting someone for it. Here are some phrases that appear:

"Results for solving violence with injury and vehicle crimes are deteriorating" (Dorset)
"reducing such offences together with improving the number of offences detected and improving the confidence people have in GMP to deal with crime and ASB, are priorities for the force" (Greater Manchester)
"Leicestershire solves less violent crime than peer forces and the detection rate for violence and car crimes deteriorated last year... more needs to be done to bring crime rates in line with similar areas" (Er, Leicestershire)

I could go on. But what is significant is that each of these criticisms about detection rates is coupled with a line or two describing what the force has done to tackle it. In most cases, a re-structure, or a new system has been brought in. And so Chief Constables preempt HMIC's conclusions and thereby preempt any action they might take. Regardless of whether or not the Chief was actually doing a bad job before, or if the poor crime statistics were the result of data-handling, outside influences (eg the economy in that area) etc. HMIC makes it clear that each force is to be compared to others "similar", drawing over-arching conclusions about what the "correct" crime and detection rates should be for that force.

Nick Herbert MP and David Cameron PM can expound until they are blue from head to tippy-toe that they have abolished targets and pledges. But HMIC still assesses forces based on these things, and requires them to produce statistics about it. In light of that, what Chief Constable dare not have a target for reducing crime areas that are above the average for their "type" of force? What Chief dare not endorse "best practice" as defined by HMIC?

Until HMIC's stranglehold on the police is released, all the Government's words are just that, words. Do not expect to see a tidal shift in the way we police Britain any time soon.

NB: As a side-note, what an incredibly good website HMIC has. Some talent's being wasted somewhere.

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

Assault is Our Number One Priority

2010-10-15T01:20:00.001+01:00

Blandshire Constabulary's priorities are hard to keep up with. If you visit our website from one month to the next, you may be confused as to whether we are Together, Driving Car Crime Down (notice clever pun on drive/car), or if we are in fact Working As One Against Antisocial Behaviour (no clever pun this time - budget cuts in the media department).

This month, we are Number One Focus on Assault. No pun, not even proper English.

If you think these ever-changing priorities have little to do with the job of a front-line response officer in Blandmore, you'd be utterly wrong. Our working lives are entirely governed by the force's priorities. Teams and squads emerge in their name, inspectors are promoted off the back of them, emails are sent and spreadsheets drawn up. Every action from every morning meeting, every audit by every civilian scrutineer, starts and ends with the priority of the month.

Right now, my officers Must Investigate Assault Thoroughly. This means scribing lengthy statements, taking swabs and seizing clothing, promptly arresting any named offender and on no account bailing them before the full twenty-four hours of their PACE clock has been well and truly used up, whether or not there are realistically enquiries going on that justify it. At the end of all this, the CPS will be consulted and in about 30% of cases, a charge or caution for assault may materialise. This astonishingly low percentage - astonishing when you take into account that most assault victims know the name of the assailant - is largely due to the fact that having phoned the police and named their attacker, most assault victims want nothing further to do with the investigation.

A good proportion of cases are of course domestic violence, and in those cases the prosecutions are pushed forwards just in case one or other party kills the other next time. But an equally large number of cases involve squabbling schoolchildren, immature neighbours and drunken scuffles. No matter how many swabs we take, or how much we spend on DNA analysis of hoodies and tracksuit trousers, regardless of reams of CCTV we have viewed or statements taken from passing witnesses, if the victim does not want a prosecution it is highly unlikely that one will occur. Call me an old-fashioned relic, but I say, quite rightly. If you don't give a damn that someone's lamped you whilst bickering over the yellow line outside your house, why should I?

Now Lord Justice Leveson has announced that assault charges will rarely result in prison sentences. Which is the same thing as saying that assault will not be punished at all - when you consider that alternative sentences now more and more consist of writing letters of apology and attending a couple of meetings further iterating how apologetic you are. Oh and the fact that breaching these alternative orders will not result in prison either.

We in the police service are not surprised at this news. Indeed, we are only surprised that Lord Justice Leveson thinks that anyone is sent to prison for assault at the moment. And we are cynical about the claim that the announcement has nothing to do with budget cuts.

None of the above has affected Blandshire Constabulary's website, or the emails coming out daily pushing Assault down our throats. Because the drive to investigate and detect more assaults has nothing to do with suffering victims or bringing people to justice, it is based in its entirety on the fact that our current detection rates for assault are worse than some other forces.

In a few months, the laws of fluctuating crime rates will determine that assaults fall back in line with the rest of England and Wales. At that point, you may well find Blandshire Constabulary Locking Down Burglary or Saying No to Sex Crime.

Which is why no force priority will stop me spending the time I want on the investigations I choose, where the victims are deserving and the offenders scum. The day they turn that into a strap-line, I'll close this blog.

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

Overtime: Just Say No

2010-10-06T07:00:00.002+01:00

As a police officer, you get double money to work at short notice on a rest day, time-and-a-half for a bit more notice, and time-and-a-third for "normal" overtime. In many forces, you still get a Special Priority Payment for being a 24/7 response officer, or a custody officer, or various other roles that have unpleasant working hours or conditions. This can be withheld if your sickness level is too high.

The result of these payments is a queue of people with their hands up to bail the force out on days when the minimum resourcing levels have backfired. A list of people who struggle in when they are genuinely sick to keep their Bradford score down. A glut of people volunteering for every operation and to stay on late (pre-planned) to cover for the sickness of other officers on other teams. There's good money to be had, therefore someone can always be found for the task. Police officers might be thick but we're not stupid.

Theresa May's pay review will consider getting rid of "double time", cutting the notice required of shift changes from three months, possibly addressing overtime altogether (a move to salary-based pay a possibility???). In return for these changes, which could cut several thousand off some officers' paychecks, yippididoodah: the right to strike.

Unfortunately, in the face of a sub-inflation pay rise for the next few years (effectively a pay cut), the loss of our SPPs - which is now accepted force wide in Blandshire as inevitable - and further cuts to pay and working conditions, the right to strike simply won't cut it.

At the moment, a Chief Officer can order a police officer to come to work if they are operationally required. Most forces have a policy of starting with officers due at work later that day, then ones on rest days, then ones on leave, which means it is rare to get called into work when you were on holiday unless something explodes. But it does happen, and you have to obey. A Chief Officer can also change an officer's shift pattern without permission, including creating a 65hr working week, can alter any shift with 14 days notice to cover absences/sickness, can post an officer to any part of the force within 20 miles (as the crow flies) of their home, and can move an officer to any department with no consultation whatsoever. A refusal to come into work when ordered, or to work the extra shifts, may result in disciplinary proceedings with the possibility of fines, demotion, etc.

We put up with all of the above because we are well paid when we are inconvenienced. The combination of the extreme squeeze on resources anticipated by most forces, coupled with the removal of our perks, will not be pretty. I predict a spate of mobile phone battery outages, plenty of off-duty drinking, and last minute trips abroad on days off, to areas without transport links.

When people describe policing as an unpleasant job, they are usually referring to the blood and gore, the violence and hatred, the possibility of death on duty. These things set the job apart from others. Our inability to refuse certain duties or overtime is, however, a far greater burden. If you stop compensating people for this, you stop recognising its significance.

Police officers don't want this to change. We want to work in an unpleasant, burdensome job, we are proud of it. We don't want the right to strike: we want to work and be paid for it.

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

Extreme Terminology

2010-09-30T12:17:00.001+01:00

I was horrified to discover yesterday in briefing that a mob of crazed doctors are on the loose in the United Kingdom targeting any public or government location. We have been reminded to be vigilant for signs of doctor-related activity and report it if we come across literature in people's houses suggesting that they might be sympathetic to doctors.

This extremist cult is more prevalent than I had realised. No sooner had I been given this information I came across signs of doctors everywhere. Even at a house search on Blandmore's Porle estate I tripped over a half-concealed stethoscope whilst looking for stolen mobile phones.

It is probably fortunate that, before I submitted the intelligence report, I glanced at an entry on the force intranet. It turns out DRs are in fact Dissident Republicans, and nothing to do with the medical fraternity whatsoever.

However I have now become more perturbed at the possibility of a catastrophic homicide to be committed by VETs.

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

Go I

2010-09-24T07:21:00.004+01:00

Listening to Pamela Somerville, a dreadful mistake led to her wrongful arrest. On arrival in custody she was then shouted at and abused, for absolutely no reason, before being horrifically assaulted causing possible sight problems in one eye.

As a police sergeant in this country, I found the story unsettling and the CCTV unpleasant. (and incomplete) There won't be an officer in the country who does not suspect there was more to this than has been reported. More unpalatable yet were the words of Assistant Chief Constable Patrick Geenty who was quick to brand Sgt Andrews "a disgrace" and then spent a few minutes lauding how "proud" he was of the officer who reported the incident - I'm sure she was grateful for his public support. Will he stand by his words if Sgt Andrews wins his appeal?

I will no doubt get roundly abused for suggesting that I support Mark Andrews in this case. But if you believe the Daily Mail, you have to believe that Ms Somerville was arrested for no reason, without being told why, was told to "shut up" when she wasn't saying anything, was taken forcibly to her cell for no reason, pushed back in when she perfectly reasonably tried to leave, and was left lying on the floor in an act of malice.

Perhaps Ms Somerville was paralytic in a vehicle, unable to provide a breath sample, would not cooperate with booking-in procedures or breathalyser, and refused to go to her cell. Perhaps the sergeant was unaware of the injury until spotted on CCTV, or a gaoler checked the prisoner's welfare shortly afterwards. In custody, it is acceptable to use a certain amount of force simply to keep the suite running safely and efficiently. Sometimes that means using force on people who are not themselves being violent, just uncooperative.

What is not acceptable is:

For the sergeant to have to come around the desk to take hold of someone, because the arresting officers are not controlling their prisoner.
For the sergeant to be left taking a prisoner to a cell on his own, while everyone else looks on.
For not one gaoler or officer to assist the sergeant in restraining the person properly to shut them into the cell.

Sergeant Andrews went about it all wrong. He should have persisted in dealing with Ms Somerville no matter how uncooperative, because any breach in booking-in or breathalyser procedure will result in losing the case. He should have removed Ms Somerville before he got to the point of having to shout over her. He should have asked officers to restrain the prisoner and take her to the cell. He should have overseen a proper cell exit, if she was indeed trying to walk back out of the cell. By no means was it acceptable to drag her in the manner shown down the corridor and push her into the cell without supporting her. By no means was it acceptable for an officer to watch this happen without stepping in to help carry out the procedure in a proper manner, to prevent the injury that occurred.

Of course this incident needed investigating, and at the very least disciplinary proceedings needed to come out of it because force was not used in the proper way. But perhaps the conclusion is that Sgt Andrews was not confident enough in the role of custody sergeant, to deal with an incident like this in the correct way. He felt in the position of having to deal with it alone, with catastrophic consequences. Perhaps he is not a criminal, or a thug, but a flawed supervisor, who reacted badly when circumstances conspired.

Does that make him "a disgrace", or should that word rightly be directed elsewhere?

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