I can remember when I was first working as a response officer and a flat tyre was nothing more than an inconvenience, having to change the tyre myself was  necessary and the only way to continue driving, after all is that not why we have a spare tyre in the first place?

A detective colleague of mine  recently got a flat in his unmarked car so he called the control room on airwave to request the AA to attend and change his flat tyre, he correctly assumed changing the tyre himself was not going to be an option since the death of common sense, some time ago. The response was “that will cost about £90 and is not cost effective”, call the force garage and arrange for them to fix it”.

He did this and waited until 2 mechanics eventually turned up with a low loader and took his car away to replace the failed tyre because the wheel nuts have to be torqued appropriately with a torque wrench at the workshop. Some 4 hours later his car was returned to him by the same two mechanics, one to drive the car back and the other to drive his colleague back to the workshop.

4 hours time wasted for a DC equals about £90.

4 hours for two mechanics must be about £110

Fuel from the workshops and back about £10

Minimum cost £200.

Just another prime example of how our namby pamby wishy washy organisation manages its resources.

In my force we seem to have a large team of people, mainly civilians who’s primary role is to gather statistics and punch data into a computer. They produce information informing the SMT (senior management Team)  about how poor or how well we are doing in certain areas, I don’t really know who these people are! they are just names at the end of an email or in a PowerPoint presentation.

I am told things like we are the worst performing station for carrying out things like stop searches and that we need to do more to get inline with other stations across the force and the rest of England and Wales.

We are told that we are one of the worst for detecting a certain type for crime, maybe theft from motor vehicles or violence against the person and that we MUST improve in this area!

We are constantly reminded of what percentage of a crime group we have managed to detect over the past 12 months compared with the previous 12 months!

As a uniformed frontline police officer do I need to know how we are performing compared to another force of another part of my own force?

Does it make a difference to how I police the streets on a daily basis?

Just suppose as a direct result of the figures compiled by the bean counters I manage to carry our 50% more stop and searches of people during my shift, does that mean everything is ok because now we are no longer at the bottom of the stop search table?

What it probably means is that due to pressure put on officers on the street I have managed to somehow find grounds to search someone who probably didn’t need to be searched, even if it could be justified. The point I make is that the bean counters are having a direct affect on what I am doing and how I am policing.

Policing on the street is something that should not be interfered with or influenced by a statistic! It’s something that officers experience and what we used to call a ‘coppers nose’ should dictate who gets stopped and searched. Just stopping someone because you know they tick the boxes and there are grounds to make the search is wrong. Officers should NOT feel they have to search someone just to appease the managers figures. 

The police service is still being driven by performance figures and the requirement to make detections!! Cheap detections are still the order of the day, its all about quantity and NOT quality and it’s only going to get worse as far as I can see.

The last two books had me in stitches of laughter throughout so I cant wait to get stuck in!! My advice is get your copy ASAP and enjoy the idea of Policing that would have the criminals shaking in their shoes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7757229.stm

Don’t let the Home Secretary ‘blind you’ by talking nonsense. On one hand she makes grand claims regarding ‘stop and account’ and how she is reducing the burden of paperwork on operational policing by removing this burden in a trial 10 forces – oh don’t rush there are 43 forces you know. Lets not forget that this is the same Government of which this would be minister belongs that introduced ‘Stop and Account’ in the first place. As is usual with ‘Nu Labour’ this was contrary to the fears of the service (or as I preferred to call it in it’s heyday ‘Force’). Why did they introduce this process initially? It was to appease some unproved belief that the police were somehow institutionally racist. Do me a favor; nobody other than the author of that ‘famous report’ even knows what that term means.

The fears about the introduction of this ‘paper form’ were well founded. Stop and search encounters reduced and knife crime increased. A coincidence? – I don’t believe in coincidences. Now I am sure that if I was a ‘spin doctor’ I could produce some correlation between the two but I think even common sense must say that the two may be related. We now have a situation whereby individuals feel they can carry weapons with abandon without fear of being bothered by the police. The loony liberals have taken over the asylum and seem more intent on worrying about how policing is done than the actual criminal acts that we are trying to prevent.

Read on however… There is clearly not a problem with stop and search but headlines portray ‘Stop and Search Complaints Increase’. Is this headline deliberately chosen to somehow justify the Governments ‘concerns’ about police constables using the powers bestowed upon them by the Crown and the forms introduction. I think so to, so I looked closely at these figures, 955,000 stop and searches in 2006/2007 – a good ‘turn out’ despite Government Interference, maybe it would be higher if we weren’t filling in lots of forms. The interesting thing is that of the stop and search ‘grievances’ only 169 needed to be investigated and 88% of these were shown to be unfounded. Why then are we producing a mass of paperwork that is clearly unnecessary whose only purpose is to keep a few bean counters employed. Answers on a postcard please, Good old ‘Liberty’ think the figure is low because the ‘young and vulnerable’ lack the confidence to complain – wrong , come out with me on a Friday and Saturday and I will show you how ‘timid’ this group of people really is.

I digress but I could not let the stop and search issue pass after today’s ‘report’, and it is related to the topic that I wanted to blog about, that old favorite, unnecessary paperwork and stop and account was a good start. It’s only purpose after all is to provide statistics. I was really ‘heartened’ by the claims that the burden of paperwork was being reduced when I first heard it and thought Jacqui actually had a brainwave, but alas as you can see from the above, hollow words.

There is no real commitment to reducing paperwork, and I know this because the dreaded spectre of activity sampling rears its head again this year – what an absolute waste of police time, effort, resources and tax payer’s money. Two weeks of recording my every move, every fifteen minutes of the day. It’s been blogged about ad-infinitum but the only effect there seems to have been is that a smaller number of staff are being sampled, not insignificantly small, and too many in an operational role whose core task is to protect you – the public. The anger I felt when this ‘tosh’ arrived in my work tray prompted me to blog again as we seem to be making no progress in returning policing to the police.

If you only take one message from this post, then that should be ‘don’t believe anything that this Government tells you about reducing paperwork’. For each form taken away two seem to take their place. It’s about time ACPO actually earned their rather inflated salaries and stopped sitting on the fence and supported the front line staff by actually saying no in the dying months of this Government

Please watch each others back out there, all the time!!

The government only think we are worth 1.9% so don’t expect them to give a shit about us!!

Stay safe!!!

WHAT A MUPPET

Paul Routledge of the Daily Mirror has quite obviously had a bad experience or found himself on the wrong side of the law, because this article he wrote for today’s issue of the Mirror has absolutely nothing intelligent about it what so ever. Almost as if it was written by a juvenile delinquent who is trying to throw some mud and make it stick.

He bleats on about how the protest in London was an illegal strike by the Police!! Please Mr Routledge take your head out of your ass and grow up!! Unlike tabloid journalists we have standards, integrity and a degree of professionalism!!

Don’t try to say how 950 officers attending from Manchester constabulary can throw doubt on the fact that the Police are understaffed, people are entitled to have time off work!! remember we have to work 7 days a week and will have rest days on a week day.

And for your labelling the Police as impertinent, surely that is the pot calling the kettle black!!!

Incase the Mirror delete the post. Here it is.

I’ve had enough of police whining
Paul Routledge 25/01/2008

Wednesday was Burglars’ Holiday, courtesy of the massed ranks of police officers who took the day off to invade Westminster.

More than 20,000 coppers wearing silly white baseball caps deserted the thick blue line to protest about being given a pay rise.

I wonder who was protecting us while they exercised their unlawful right to hold a one-day strike in the capital. Their law-abiding mates, I suppose.

This work stoppage must have been illegal because it can’t be true that every one of the 25,000 protesters took a legitimate day off.

And they are forbidden by statute to strike. The Manchester force alone sent 950 officers to London. Yet police chiefs are always moaning they are undermanned.

The opposite is plainly true. I suppose the protesters will make up any lost dosh in overtime. The average copper makes £2,900 a year that way, at an annual cost to the nation of £440million.

That’s on top of their salaries, which go up by around a thousand quid every year, on top of the 2.5 per cent rise that upset them so much. There comes a point when we have to say “enough is enough”, and they should calm down and accept they cannot have everything they want.

That point has now been reached. Most workers would envy the policeman’s salary, his fat, index-linked pension, his early retirement and his generous sick pay and his immunity from prosecution when he shoots dead a mildly inebriated Scotsman for the crime of carrying a chair leg in a public place.

The same police who demand the right to lock up people for 42 days without charge, and possibly without even saying what they are supposed to have done. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, the politician who says cops can’t have their cash, is still willing to believe police chiefs need SIX WEEKS to interview suspects.

This business of unelected police bosses telling the elected government what its policies should be has to stop. And the place to stop it is the House of Commons, where MPs are being asked – no, told – to back new detention laws.

Aside from the merits of the case, it’s good for governments to be defeated occasionally. Taking ministers down a peg or two does wonders for their egos. But this time it would be sound policy too.

Tony Blair tried to keep suspects detained for 90 days, and had to settle for 28. MPs should keep it at that – if only to put the impertinent police in their place.

There were quite a few of us!

We wanted certain people to take notice!

Thanks to the Met for watching over things, they did a great job!!

Even if there were a few who were jumping on our bandwagon!

We have sent our message to the Government loud and clear!

This is not the end, only the beginning!!

Watch this space for more!!

Amazingly the culprit was sentenced for manslaughter only 2 years prior to this for taking part in kicking a man to death in a similar incident and was somehow on the streets again.

When will scum like this be dealt with exactly how the people of this country want them to be dealt with? quite frankly we are pissed off with the system! it doesn’t fu#*ing work. Prison is better than most of these peoples own homes so they are more than happy to be sent there.  Maybe we should sub contract our prison service to somewhere like China.

UPDATE!

I now have some images of the terrible injuries sustained in this dreadful assault.

A killer released early from prison went on to launch an horrific attack on a woman just three miles from where Garry Newlove was kicked to death by a gang of teenage thugs.

Nicholas Hague, 22, left his victim Susan Collins, 60, on a life support machine after he kicked her to the ground and repeatedly stamped on her face when she refused to give him a cigarette.

She needed surgery to remove a blood clot from between her skull and her brain and is now blind in one eye. Four metal plates were used to help reconstruct her face.

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Hague had consumed several litres of cider and had two pints in a pub before the attack in May last year in Warrington, Cheshire. In a police interview, he called his victim “an old cow”.

He was previously jailed for 18 months in September 2005 after admitting the manslaughter of former airline worker Gary Kneen, 31, who was kicked to death in November 2004. Another man was convicted of Mr Kneen’s murder.

Hague, who was found guilty of helping with the attack, was released shortly after being sentenced because of the amount of time he had spent on remand.

Yesterday, Mrs Collins criticised the decision to release him.

“Hague should not have been allowed out of jail early, he should have stayed in and done all the time. He is violent and he will always be violent,” she said.

The mother of one had complained to police several times in the run up to the attack that she was being tormented by gangs.

“I think they should bring the cane back in schools because there’s no discipline, or put them in the Army or somewhere where they are going to get disciplined for a long time under police supervision.

“I’ve had kids breaking my nose, making fun, trying to set fire to my house. I’ve had it all, so I know what I’m talking about,” she said.

Yesterday, Hague began an open-ended sentence for causing grievous bodily harm. At Warrington Crown Court, Judge Nicholas Woodward sentenced Hague to an indeterminate term of imprisonment for public protection and branded him a “dangerous young man”.

He was ordered to spend at least three years and 162 days in prison, but warned it was “extremely unlikely” that his release would be considered at that stage.

This week, three teenagers were found guilty of kicking Mr Newlove, 47, to death just three miles from where Hague attacked Mrs Collins.

The father of three was murdered when he confronted a gang outside his home who had been making his life “a misery”.

I am researching a book about modern policing in the United Kingdom.
For the book to be accurate and informative I would like to include the thoughts of some Police Officers, PCSOs and support staff on the subjects I am covering.  To that end I am looking to speak in the strictest confidence to Police Officers, PCSOs and support staff from across the country, from a variety of ranks, roles, specialisms and lengths of service.  Recent retirees would be welcome.
Interviews will be conducted in absolute confidence, preferably face to face or by email.  Your name and personal details will not be requested or used.  Anonymity is absolutely guaranteed so interviewees can speak freely.
If you are interested in contributing, please email me at  police_book@hotmail.com  To help me select a cross section of interviewees, please provide in complete confidence your rank, specialist unit if applicable, length of service, force name and if you are city/town/rural based.
You may prefer to use a free email account for peace of mind.  All emails will receive a reply and those selected will have interviews arranged at a time convenient to you.  I hope to hear from you soon.