Planet Police

Check out this Judge's conclusion to a recent case here.

Sometimes our Judiciary get right to the point and arrow in precisely on the target.

With such accurate wit perhaps the Sheriff should consider a stint at Bow Street.

Bullseye!

I'll get my hiviz......

Listening to: Sparks - Fletcher Honorama
via FoxyTunes

© Mr Plod
Published by Toy Town™ Times

Don’t panic! You haven’t been in an accident, fallen into a coma and then travelled through time. This is just a post-dated post to keep it at the top of the page. Having been out to grass for a few months now, the penny has finally dropped: Knoll building isn’t very exciting; whereas embroidery is full of thrills, spills and endless possibilities. While I try to get my (non-profit) pattern

Imagine giving a bairn such a daft moniker (sic).

It's amazing the level to which folk will sink. Having said that, I know of one poor soul in my parish who has all the surnames of the championship winning Celtic team of his year of birth as his forenames.

Listening to: Tori Amos - Talula
via FoxyTunes

p.s. I did like the choice of B&H though.

© Big Ears
Published by Toy Town™ Times

David Bieber shot unarmed PC Ian Broadhurst during a traffic stop in Leeds on Boxing Day 2003, and then calmly walked over as he was on the ground and shot him in the head at close range, despite the officer pleading for his life. He was also convicted of the attempted murders of unarmed PC’s Neil [...]

It’s the golden first half hour at work and that first cup of coffee is steaming gently on my desk. I am an early arriver so there is usually just me a DS, a DI, maybe one of the HOLMES team. My first pleasure of the day is reading the night Inspector’s logs from around [...]

Now that the Portugese police seem to have closed the file on the search for Madeline McCann, would it be a good time to suggest that the parents, Kate & Gerry McCann are finally prosecuted for child neglect? 

I said at the time, & I stick by it today 14 months later, that if it had been some old slapper from a council estate who had abandoned her 3-year-old to go round the corner on the piss with a group of mates, her feet wouldn’t have touched the custody suite floor.

However sad this whole case is there were 3 people responsible for whatever has befallen little Madeline; the person who took her & the people who left their children alone in a hotel room in a foreign country so they could quaff wine & food with pals.

Well the next time you go off for a spot of annual leave, that you will have booked up to a year in advance after the lottery of dealing with minimum staffing levels and trying to fit in with the rest of your colleagues............please, please, please bear a small thought ...

It seems only a few months ago that the government was giving us a pay award of 2.5% with one hand & taking back 0.6% with the other by refusing to back-date it.

The next battle for this years’ award started at the beginning of July with the negotiating body putting in an early claim for a 3.5% rise for 2008. They are looking at 5 to 6% for support staff. (some hope)

I have no doubt that  a) we won’t get anywhere near 3.5% in September - the traditional month for our annual pay rise, b) whatever rise we do get will be several months past September while we threaten to take them to court again & c) even when it does come it won’t be backdated, thus saving the government even more cash which they can use to purchase Ikea goodies for their second homes.

Finally, I predict that due to this year’s award not actually coming in 2008 or being backdated to September, that  I won’t get any more pay rises at all as a serving police officer.

Well the kids arrived from schools all over the County to see the brave boys and girls from the emergency services doing their bit at the County Emergency Services open day. Good for citizen focus and promoting the brand within the realms of those we can impress with our own ...

New Chairman, same old Fed..

The main reason for withholding the full pay award to police last year, according to the Home Secretary, Jacqui Spliff, was because to award to full amount would place too much inflationary pressure on the economy; if we got the £30 million they saved by reneging on their agreement, the Bank of England would explode, or something.

Bearing in mind this was at a time when the ‘credit crunch’ was but a glint in an economist’s eye, petrol hadn’t gone up a squillion pounds an hour & people weren’t screaming about huge rises in food bills with fuel bills set to rise by orders of magnitude.

Strange then, that whilst the economy can’t handle an additional £30 million to 155,000 police officers, it can handle, in these times of rapid inflation, £15 for 640 individuals with barely a raised eyebrow in the corridors of power.

That’ll be because the £15 million is for MPs’ expenses allowing them to claim an additional £24,000 a year towards a second home. The economy will additionally stand all these MPs pocketing up to hundreds of thousands of pounds profit when they eventually sell the home that the tax-payer paid for.

Meanwhile, back in the real world. Some prisoners are living and sleeping in toilets because of jail overcrowding, a report says.
HM Inspectorate of Prisons found lags in Doncaster jail were sleeping three to a two-man cell, this having been achieved by putting an extra bed in 'the toilet area'.
Oh, the horror of it!
The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, said this was 'unacceptable'.
Unacceptable to whom, Anne?
Do you think the people they have robbed, stabbed, battered and burgled find it 'unacceptable'?
Why not ask them? Given the fact that virtually no-one goes to prison these days unless they have a very substantial criminal record, you won't have any trouble finding victims.
I'm sure Anne Owers is a lovely woman. There's a great profile of her here.
Her mornings are nice and civilised, as you'd expect:

I’m usually woken at 7am by the Today programme. I shower, then get dressed in something reasonably smartish, usually from John Lewis or the Army & Navy stores. I have porridge or muesli and coffee, and leave the house at 8 for the 10-minute bus journey to the Home Office, behind Millbank. My predecessor had a driver, but I don’t need that.

What about the prisoners, though?
For me, meeting the prisoners is a privilege, because you are introduced to a parallel world where people haven’t been to school working out what GCSEs they’ll do or what university they’re going to. They are people who’ve come from difficult families, who may have been abused, who’ve often been in care, who have had the kind of life experiences that we all try to protect our children from.
How does Anne know they've been abused? Can it be because they say they have?

When I see some of the conditions in prison, I feel quite angry.

We know how you feel, Anne.












Occasionally, some of these prisoners are asked to do certain things and they refuse. Apparently, Anne Owers thinks they should be left alone, the poor lambs. If they want to stuff drugs and mobile phones up their backsides, they should be allowed to do so.

It’s important not to lose the capacity to be shocked. I was actually in a young offenders’ institution when a man was screaming because three prison officers were holding him down as he forcibly had his clothes removed. I expressed my concern, and now force isn’t used to strip-search in juvenile prisons.

Women prisoners tug hardest at her heart strings.
When men come out of prison there are wives and girlfriends waiting to meet them. Women leave alone. A third of them will have lost their homes, so they lose their kids. That’s why we need more alternatives to prison for women. Women in prison have very low self-esteem, which is why they end up where they are. One lovely woman said to me, ruefully: “You send us on assertiveness courses, then we get back to the wing and we’re nicked for being assertive.”
Haven't we all met loads of these lovely women, with their low-esteem, poignant love for their kids and rueful appreciation of life's little ironies? And Anne is spot on: if their menfolk won't be there waiting to greet them on their release from prison, like returning war heroes, obviously they cannot go inside in the first place.
Unfortunately, in the evenings Anne's home life isn't all that peaceful.
She has to step over ruefully passed-out junkies and run a gauntlet of misunderstood shanking hoodies just to get to her front door. And when she's inside, she's driven mad by the insistent whine of minibikes driven by abused teenagers, the thump of bat on skull (wielded by mums who love their kids) and high volume expletives which drown out Celebrity X Factor. Still, Bargain Booze has an offer on White Lighting!
Only kidding.

I’m a reasonable cook, as is my husband, so we have wine and a meal together, then watch TV between 9 and 10. But I’d hate you to think I lead this boring life where I just sit watching TV. We like going to concerts or the theatre — we’ve just seen The Alchemist at the National. And we go walking at weekends. I go to bed about 11, and have no trouble getting to sleep.

Still, there is one cloud on her horizon.
When people hear what I do, they often say: “Aren’t you scared?” I say: “I’m more scared walking home from the Tube alone in the evening than in prison.”
Unfortunately, she lacks either the honesty, or curiosity, or simple common sense to consider why this might be.

FOXTROT OSCAR

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

It seems that Police Dogs can be scary. Some times at least. I presume this is not the cuddly but somewhat hyperactive little springers or cocker spaniels, the sociable but eternally affable labradors often used in the realms of drugs and explosives detection work. I can only assume that this is aimed at ...

There would appear to be concerns regarding a 'fact finding mission' by senior management and our 2012 responsibilities.
I am not to sure how the Chinese approach to public order over this 'sporty festive period' can be applied to the UK's view of 'how to'

Still,we have our finest lined up to visit and to 'suss' things out.

Realistically, you could argue that you could probably get as much 'fact finding' by linking a bulk of the feedback on a video conferencing facility, courtesy of the Business suite at the Holiday Inn on the North Circular.

Anyway,this isn't some comment about how the Brass get the best 'jollys'

Personally if someone gave me a sniff of a trip away courtesy of the Job I would bite their hand off.I think the farthest flung place the Job has ever sent me is on a prisoner collection run to Haverfordwest.

Judith Chalmers can rest easy

I don’t work overtime now that I’m in the control room. To be honest, I could use the extra cash & there is a fair amount available - if you want it - to cover the never-ending & increasing staff shortfalls. I just don’t want to spend any time more than I have to at work.

I say I don’t do overtime, that’s not strictly correct; I do overtime when they cancel my rest days.

It seems that when one particular shift is short of staff, they scream that they need extra to cover. When they don’t get enough volunteers they scream a bit louder resulting in police officers getting their days off cancelled.

When my shift is short (most of the time, today we had 90% of our radio channels single-crewed when there should be two people per channel) we just have to get on & work single-crewed despite the extra pressures & stresses.

I don’t know whether it’s because our shift ‘managers’ aren’t shouting loud enough or whether the people who are responsible for rest day cancellations are using double-standards in the application of duties.

I guess it’s just too simplistic to employ more people.

Lean on Me by Kirk Franklin - Hurricane Katrina Tribute Amazing - and we live in a civilised society? I guess we don't have ghettoes in Britain?

My latest Tosser of the Week award goes to one Andrew Kellett of Leeds, dubbed as one of Britain’s Dumbest Criminals last week after receiving an ASBO. He has been banned from boasting about his unlawful activities via YouTube having posted over 80 films of himself breaking the law & engaging in fuck-whit type behaviour.

His directorial career, which is about as low as his IQ includes videos of him bilking from a Tescos Petrol Station, street racing in vehicles at high speeds, taking class A drugs. He has a string of convictions. He filmed himself driving round Leeds at very high speeds, including one film which showed him travelling at 140mph. At his court appearance he claimed his videos were "social commentary", yeah, right.

He posted his films on YouTube under the username mrchimp2007 which kind of sums him up really.

To make matters even worse, his videos are proper shite.

 

Steve Spielberg this man is not! 

With crooks & idiots like this on the street the detection rates are bound to increase. ASll we need to do is sit in the police station, eating donuts & watching YouTube.

 

Progress and change are at the forefront of Policing advancement. They suggest moving forward in a positive and meaningful way. They are the bywords of those who have the power to change things, sometimes for the better. they are the words used to create an upward and positive picture at times ...

• "You told us what you wanted, this is what we are doing about it." - Link to local policing plan.
• Advert for Google search engine.
• Find out what your Safer Neighbourhood Team is up to.
  
• Appeal for information about a minor assault.
• "GUNS AND KNIVES... TAKE LIVES" - a superb piece of poetry that will SAVE LIVES.

• "We are deeply saddened to report the death of a serving officer, who was last year crucified in the press before being cleared by an external and internal investigation. PC Mulhall's family have our full support - please leave messages of condolences here."

Bloody Comms!Comms/Call Takers are a fantastic bunch, very intelligent, witty and damn fast at typing stuff in to cool computer systems.


They have to get jobs resourced within a certain period of time. If someone calls in to the police and it’s not really an urgent matter they tend to add the following words to the log:

“Local PCSOs to be made aware and deal accordingly, incident closed”.


What this means is not that the incident is closed, and we are just to be made aware, ooo no, but that the incident can be taken off their queue and printed off, placed in our team tray and I'll get it when I’m next at work (or straight away over the radio).

In the olden days (before PCSOs), a lot of these jobs were just chucked in the bin. But now, with PCSOs and the new Safer Neighbourhood Teams (SNTs), or Neighbourhood Policing Teams (NPTs), they have to be dealt with, reports filled out with the initial problem, our actions, and some form of conclusion.

I read through the call logs, (a call log is basically a transcript of a call made to the police by the public who call in on 999 or the forces non-emergency number) and I’m noticing this phrase above being used a hell of a lot.It really makes me wonder if they were to get rid of PCSOs (as many PCs and The PolFed are asking for), would the PCs be ale to deal with all of these really 'trivial', 'crappy' jobs that they never used to have to deal with. Even if they did spend the extra money they now spend on PCSOs, on new PCs (considering you'd only get about 4,000 extra PCs for the money)..

Something strange has happened since we last spoke. No, I haven’t gone sick with stress. Nor gone ‘on the square’. I haven’t even transferred to the colonies with hundreds of my ex-colleagues. No, it’s stranger than that: You see, I’ve become an old sweat. This now means that the pens you can see in my pocket are there purely for show, and for filling in the overtime state of course. If you’

I worked on my own again this week. It’s got so I’m single crewed more than I’m double-crewed, as are my colleagues.

At the start of every shift I make a list of all the officers I have available. Just out of interest I checked out the dates they all joined. We had a sergeant & 8 PCs. The total service between them was 369 months or nearly 31 years, just a fraction over my total service. The average service between them is 41 months; less than 4 years.

The sergeant has a couple of months over 3 years.

Not many years ago I was on a shift where the average service was about 16 years, several of us had twenty plus, there were no probationers. This was quite unusual even then, it wasn’t that we were in any specialist role, we were front line shift, but we were somewhat remote from the rest with little supervision, so experienced officers were the norm.

Even when I was at one of the larger stations with a big shift, we had several officers who had ten to 15 years in the job. There were usually only one or 2 probationers out of 12. Now at least half of most shifts are probationers.

I’m not sure what this tells us about the demographics of the police service. I’ll hazard a guess though, that the job is so unattractive to those who have to do it that everyone wants out of it. There are so many opportunities not to do frontline policing & after a couple of years people just want the hell out. People want jobs with less stress, less hassle, where they don’t get pissed about, both by those within the job & those outside. They want to deal with interesting, worthwhile jobs & not the day-to-day shite that the government have forced upon us by making us investigate utter bloody tripe because a stat somewhere says it’s a crime.

I see officers as keen as mustard for 18 months or so who gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of them until they become weary & uninterested. It saddens me, they have over 30 years to go.

Of course the other side is that everyone out there who deserves a decent service, they’re getting folk who haven’t learned their craft, who spend half the time on the radio getting advise from their supervisors or senior colleagues. Just when they start to excell in their trade, they move on.

There aren’t many winners really.

 

Sacre Bleu!

Vee have it all explained. Zat Stringfellow chappie eez a very clever man, he simply turns up ze discotheque and ze punters tombez au-dessus d'ivre ou du combat avec la police plus rapide.

Well you don't go to a nightclub if you want genial conversation do you?



Listening to: M/A/R/R/S - Pump up the Volume
via FoxyTunes

© Chill Bill
Published by Toy Town™ Times

My Sweet Lord This is probably one of the great songs of our times. Chief Officer's might learn a little from these words. Have you ever wondered why so many of the older Black generation are church goers? The answers might  be found in this song.

Although I do whinge about the job a lot (I'm a blogger after all, it's what we do), there are still times like this, this and this, that make you think: "it is worthwhile", "you are appreciated by some" and you're motivated, not disheartened, for a few more weeks.

There will always be days like this that get you down a disheartened, and days like this where you feel you're job is hard, but necessary. There will always be good and bad days, with any job. The problem is, with this job they are at the extreme ends of the spectrum. If you have a bad day, they're REALLY bad, and when they're good, you feel like you've made a difference to someone's life, forever. That's a hell of a feeling.

I get a lot of comments and a few emails from people asking for advice on the job, what it's really like and is it worth it with all the negativity from the press, some of the public and Officers you work with. I'm quite often negative and sarcastic about the job on this blog, but it is a good job. One of the best in the world.

People say the role of a Police Officer is the best job you could do. I'd say that being a PCSO is the second best job in the world. And I wouldn't be lying. It's a bloody good job. It has highs and lows. You'll be frustrated, but you'll also have days when you get home and put your feet up and think to yourself "I did make a difference to that persons life", "I did improve things there".

Not many jobs where you could say that, and feel that deep sense of satisfaction. If you're applying for PCSO now, or about to start your training, good luck, work hard and you'll love it. But do have a thick skin, you'll need that too.

Mention recently about the billions of pounds wasted with tax credits & the news that millions of people now have to pay back around £4 billion in overpayments, reminded me of my earliest days in the job.

After leaving training school for my first nick, I was posted to one of the major towns in the area. In those days, the job had to provide either free accommodation or a rent allowance if you had your own place. The accommodation usually consisted of a police house - we had them in every community once - or a section house/hostel where single officers lived in shared facilities.

I got to lodge with a lady who worked at the police station & rented out a spare room to new probationers. For this I received a monthly rent allowance which covered the rent I paid to my landlady.

I used to walk to work from my digs as I didn’t have my own transport.

After some months I moved into the joint facilities & my rent allowance was no longer due since the shared accommodation was provided free of charge. It comes from the days when they had to give police officers lots of financial benefits as the wages were considered to be quite poor. (these have all been taken away over the years).

I duly notified the pay office at HQ that I was now in the free accommodation & they’d need to stop my rent allowance. I was quite surprised when they paid it to me the next month. I advised them again in writing & by telephone, but they paid it for several months before stopping it & notifying me I’d need to pay it back.

I didn’t have a problem with paying the money back, even though I hadn’t asked for it & had actively told them to stop sending it, after all, the money wasn’t mine. However, being young, free & single I had, of course, spent every penny of it. So I wrote to the pay office & requested that, as it would cause some financial hardship if they took it back in one go (it was about a month’s salary) & it was their cock-up, could they take it back at the same rate they gave it, i.e. in instalments. ‘Of course’, they said.

It should really have been no surprise when they took the whole lot out of my next month’s salary leaving me with 3 sheckles & a couple of groats to live on for the whole month. Happy days.

The Ford Focus isn’t all that popular over here, and when I tell people that they are used as police cars, many of them don’t believe me. It’s difficult to compare the size of the roads in the UK and Canada, but I don’t think the Crown Vic would actually fit down some of the smaller lanes! I’m not an expert, but the engine seems about the twice the size of the ones back home, the car is very powerful and goes pretty fast, the only thing is that the ride is rather barge-like.

The lights and sirens are very similar to the ones in the UK: you have a choice of sirens as well as alley lights and takedowns. The only thing is that the switches are bigger and therefore less fiddly. We have an air horn to get through intersections and (best of all) a tannoy which is used to direct drivers without having to shout.

The most noticeable thing about the photo is the keyboard and screen in the top right of the picture. It’s pretty much the same size as a laptop with the keyboard a little smaller than average. There’s also a built in mouse pad (like a laptop), a touch screen and it uses Microsoft windows. The computer gives you access to all the systems you would get in a police station in the UK: the Canadian equivalent of PNC, some intelligence software, mapping software (which works in conjunction with the car’s GPS), dispatch and call information and a report writing system. In addition we also have access to what you would call DVLA information.

If you’ve never had access to this kind of technology before, it’s a revelation and it makes far more difference to your working day than having a pistol. Someone over here once told me that he could remember a time when there were some cars in the fleet that didn’t have computers, and you had to write down the information you needed on a bit of paper. You also had to do all your updates and vehicle/person checks over the radio. Imagine that! The computer means that the radio is used a lot less: messages are sent to and from dispatch as well as between cars, via the computer terminals.

The system isn’t perfect and I’m still getting to grips with it, but it’s much more integrated than in the UK, where there are lots of separate systems and you have to enter information into one, then into another and you can’t get them to talk to each other. I don’t want to dwell on the different bureaucratic procedures but the Achilles heel of police IT in the UK is that no matter how advanced the computer system(s) people will always love to invent a new form that has to be filled in with a pen, so even if you could complete a report electronically, someone somewhere would want to print it out and staple something to it, necessitating yet another trip back to the station.

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

It's about time for some PCSO news I think..

I mentioned some time ago about the NPIA (National Policing Improvement Agency) and the work they were doing on PCSOs. They have now published their findings/recommendations.

It's quite a lengthy document, so I'll just sumarise their 22 recomendations:-

Recommendation 1 Forces to adopt the role and principles for PCSOs.

Recommendation 2 The NPIA consider with the tripartite partners whether further evaluation of the use of PCSOs is required, specifically looking at:
• Contribution of PCSOs to confidence and satisfaction
• Benefits in efficiency, costs and freeing up sworn officers (added value)
• Contribution to crime, anti-social behaviour (ASB) reduction
• Improvements in the awareness and understanding of the role by the public

Recommendation 3 Forces should review currently designated powers to ensure they are all required and used by their PCSOs

Recommendation 4 Following the Home Office powers audit, the NPIA will work with forces and the Home Office to consider additional and/or alternative powers and seek to resolve any anomalies.

Recommendation 5 The NPIA will work with forces to ensure that suitable training and awareness is available at all levels of the service in the role, deployment and powers of PCSOs.

Recommendation 6 Forces should recruit to defined National Standards using the national application form (long or short version) and the Integrated Competency Framework (ICF) behaviours agreed as core to the PCSO role.

Recommendation 7 Forces should adopt the WPLDP product by April 2009. [In the interim, forces who have not should ensure their product meets the learning outcomes of the WPLDP product.]

Recommendation 8 Forces should ensure that tutoring for new PCSOs is done by trained PCSO tutors.

Recommendation 9 Forces should review their refresher training to ensure it includes elements on problem solving and engagement. The NPIA should distribute good practice in these areas to assist forces.

Recommendation 10 Forces should consider the adoption of a national NVQ developed between the NPIA and Skills for Justice and/or the CLDP Neighbourhood Policing module.

Recommendation 11 The NPIA should develop a national strategy for the recognition of Accredited Prior Experience and Learning (APEL) for PCSOs transferring to become police officers.

Recommendation 12 Forces should ensure supervision of PCSOs is provided by police sergeants working as part of a Neighbourhood Policing Team.

Recommendation 13 Forces should review their existing supervision ratios to ensure these are realistic and in line with good practice.

Recommendation 14 Forces adopt the principles related to PCSO uniform by September 2008.

Recommendation 15 Future issues relating to PCSO uniform should be referred to the ACPO Uniform Appointments Board.

Recommendation 16 The NPIA should provide guidance in operational risk assessment to ensure that decision making and control measures are consistent.

Recommendation 17 Forces should conduct a full risk assessment around PPE issued to PCSOs, which is aligned to the corporate role and expectations of PCSOs as set out in recommendation 1.

Recommendation 18 Forces should ensure a clear training programme for PCSOs in personal safety and conflict management/resolution.

Recommendation 19 Forces should employ PCSOs over the age of 18 years.

Recommendation 20 The NPIA, with the support of the tripartite, should work together to raise public awareness of the role of the PCSO in Neighbourhood Policing

Recommendation 21 Forces should seek to increase awareness of the role of PCSOs internally

Recommendation 22 The tripartite partners consider how to address the issue of financial sustainability beyond 2008/09.

The full report can be found here.

I was wondering if anyone else noticed the correlation between the fact that recorded crime is at its lowest for years, yet the prison population is at a record high?