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Hello Everyone,

Unfortunately I’m no longer interested in maintaining this site.  It’s costing me money to run each month and I’ve been running it for several years at a loss.

So I have a choice…. lose money each month running this for the community, close it or pass it onto someone else.

If you’re interested in taking on the running of this domain, the site contents and everything else please contact me via the email link in the right hand sidebar.

Please include your name, email address and interest in running the site.  The highest bidder that I believe will run the site appropriately based on the information they’ve provided by Midnight on Friday the 27th of January will be successful.  I’ll then work with that person to transfer all domain rights and content etc.

If no bidder is successful by that time the site will fall off the internet in the coming weeks.

Thanks

Planet Police Admin

 

 

 

Banker Bonuses

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My interest in this matter is as an example of how little we are free or democratic.  Bankers and financiers of all kinds don’t deserve their salaries,let alone the obscene bonuses that render full democracy impossible and take the rest of us down the road to serfdom.

The argument is clouded from the start by our legal systems which make this wrong a “right”.

The real argument should be about whether we can have full democracy and have the highly disproportionate wealth such “earnings” create.  My view is this is impossible so the “earnings” should be.  Although this may look crassly naive, the view can be supported.  The problem is that we are ideologically scared of a free and equal society and cannot have rational debate.  This condition of being ideologically scared is not simply a matter of propaganda and is linked to our condition as social animals.  So I would look first not at bankers and sports stars but mice.

Social mice, even in good times, live highly subordinate lives under a male king who keeps the rest in penury.  If we take a subordinate male out of this condition, feed it up and train it to kill a string of palooka mice, it will then challenge the old king, kill the sod and become just the same type of king itself.  The apparent dominance skills of the old king turn out not to be in short supply, but maintained by hierarchy (being ideologically scared).  I wrap ideology with genetics and the environment here and suggest we need to now more on this for social design.  We should not be looking for genetic determinism, but how to overcome it.  We need a much wider view of these animal matters than I have space for here.

In considering banker bonuses and such, we tend to argument based on wads of assumptions about pay, reward, motivation, innovation, fairness and more that may well just be a load of old fables rather than any scientific base.  People can argue (and have) for centuries about notions like the existence of god when the truth is we can’t establish any such entity.  I suspect our general understanding of how the world works is based on the authority of talking snakes too.

When we talk of a banker bonus, I hear only silence on what such payouts and consequent accumulations of wealth mean for the rest of us.  For the payments to be worth anything, they must force the rest of us to deliver something and they  also render the recipients to this welfare.  Many more questions arise, such as the opportunity costs of making these payments and, indeed, those of having a system in which they are sought after.  Is any of this the right quest for our alleged brightest and most able?

We lack a public, scientific account.


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Nights…

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I am on the second of my two rest days after nights… I suppose I really only get the one day really, since the first day I was asleep until 1400-hrs…

The ‘wall’ for nights is about 0400hrs for me… yuck.

Whilst I am not looking forward to work tomorrow, I can reflect on the fact I have managed to wrangle (that is the word that best suits…since it was no small feat) a transfer to a station 17-miles closer to home- a saving of at least 34-miles PER DAY! Some 200-plus miles a week! (I work 7-in a row for the troll…he has trouble with maths and often tries to boost his self-worth by attempting to demean mine… newsflash troll: I care not…).

My new posting has even got a railway station nearby!

Result.

Of course, it’s not a welfare matter-I swapped with another officer that was in the same situation as myself but on the other end so to speak.

We both asked our gaffer independently, but were rebuffed…it was only after a coincidental meeting that we came up with the plan.

Since we are both in the force CID we have similar skills and our line managers (good sorts, really…) did this with the minimum of effort and issue. It is heartening to know that whilst the SMT still continue with their cold, selfish and unfeeling attitude to the world, there are humanists above us.

Anyway, thanks Jack (he knows to whom I refer!) we will both be much better off.

Welfare.

When Police SMT hear this word they immediately reach for a dictionary.

They talk the talk but almost never walk the walk…

Unless, the person being fucked up is:

a visible ethnic minority; a woman that has a reputation for crying ‘bully!’ (note I did not mention women with children…they are fair game to being fucked up now…I know a few single mums that can testify to this…); a mason or someone with ‘black’ on the gaffer in question.

I can retire in 4-5 years and they can’t come quickly enough…in fact I have a job interview next week… I will let you know how I get on…

Anyway…

time for a nap I think…


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Olympic Outing For Met Police And Royal Marines

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A joint exercise involving the London Metropolitan Police and the British Royal Marines ahead of the Olympics has been hailed as a success by those responsible for Games security.

Officers from the Force's Marine Unit and military personnel rehearsed the skills and drills they will need to operate together in a week long package of manoeuvres.

The exercise focused on the River Thames, which will form an outer ring of security during the Games, and made use of assets including rigid boats and air support.

Assistant Commisioner Chris Allison, the National Olympic Security Co-ordinator, was satisfied at the results. He added: "There is no specific threat from the River but we would be failing in our duty if we did not consider this for Games time."

"All of the exercising is to get people to understand their roles and responsibilities – we need to know how we would work with those who would come and assist us if we have to deal with something beyond our capability and capacity.

AC Allison pointed out that the exercises not only focused on the practical capabilities of assets at his disposal during the Olympics, but also rules of engagement.

He said: "This is the wet-way into London and we need to make sure that we have tactics we can use on the River, many of which have been developed by the police."

The exercise saw a number of scenarios, ranging from a compliant stop to the use of armed officers boarding a moving vessel at speed, played out. Assets including police river launches plus rigid boats and landing craft from the Royal Marines were used along with a Royal Navy Lynx helicopter.

AC Allison said that the security of the Olympics remains the responsibility of the police, but that there will be niche military assets in support of that operation.

He concluded: "I know police officers will do their level best to ensure the Games pass off safely and securely. They will be the professionals they are, day in-day out."

Article Courtesy of: James Deller - www.PoliceOracle.com

Respect?

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Tony Melville

Following on from my last post, the Chief Constable of Gloucester, Tony Melville, has put his head over the parapet and publicly stated that the force are on a cliff edge regarding cuts to the budget. This is highly unusual for a Chief Constable and would normally be the end of a career.

Policing Minister, Nick Herbert, has come out with the usual rhetoric that cuts can be made without affecting front line services. Rubbish, Mr Herbert! Just count the number of police officers. 6000 less now than six months ago and still falling.

At first, this may seem a brave move by the Chief Constable and then you notice that he has 34 years service. Gloucester will be electing a new Police Commissioner in November (could be Katie Price or John Prescott, God help us!) and with it they will be getting a new Chief Constable. So this is just a parting shot from Mr Melville. I suppose it may cost him his QPM or other award.

Here is a letter dated May 2011 signed by 53 Chief Officers, including Mr Melville, telling the Police Federation that their concerns over cuts to the policing budget were legitimate but suggesting that the focus should be on the service to the communities we serve.

Let's see if some other senior officers, whose careers are on the line, step up and join, the retiring, Mr Melville. That will deserve some respect.

It’ll be difficult to live that one down

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From time to time various car companies will loan cars to different police forces so they can test them out, they hope officers and fleet managers will be so impressed they’ll place an order.

Often the cars are bog-standard run of the mill cars which manufacturers might want force to go over to instead of the standard Fords and Vauxhalls. Sometimes they are high powered sporty things which everyone wants a shot at driving.

Of course, when you have a car on loan, you want to test it out but you want to make sure it’s looked after. So you might make sure that it only goes to the best drivers the force has to offer, say a traffic or ANPR Intercept officer, such as BBC One Car Wars star, PC Paul Fletcher of the Greater Manchester Police ANPR Intercept Team.

PC Fletcher was given a VW Golf R, a high powered 155mph £33,000 hot hatch.

Given the highly publicised driving expertise of the officers on that specialist unit one might be forgiven for wondering what he did around 2am in the morning at a roundabout in Manchester to result in this…..

BBC News story

Attacker who stabbed PC four times has sentence reduced!

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After PC Nigel Albuery was stabbed four times during a stop-check in Croydon last May, I asked the power elites to: “arm us, start giving decent sentences (which they have to serve) and don’t cut our pay and pensions”.

I then wrote that “None of those things will happen until ministers, judges/magistrates and rail-regulators themselves start getting stabbed”.

OK, so I didn’t really expect the establishment to do any of those things for us. But I didn’t expect them to reduce the attackers sentence less than a year later!

“Your Local Guardian” on 26th January 2012 tells us the following:

A “dangerous” teenager who stabbed a police officer four times has had his indefinite jail term overturned by top judges.

Alastair Gregson, 19, launched the vicious knife attack on Croydon PC Nigel Albuery as the officer attempted to search him in the street.

The court heard Gregson was on bail for attacking his ex-girlfriend when he stabbed PC Albuery in May last year in Bute Road, Waddon.

He was with a group of youths in the area when the officer and a colleague – who were both in plain clothes – approached and spoke to them.

When PC Albuery attempted to search Gregson, the teenager tried to run away before stabbing the officer four times, in his shoulder, back and arms.

Five days before the incident, Gregson hit his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Kerr, with a brick following a heated argument in the street.

That attack, for which he admitted assault causing actual bodily harm, came just two days after he pleaded guilty to a common assault on Miss Kerr.

Even the snake-oil-salesman trying to get Gregson a shorter sentence accepted he was “dangerous”. But school fees and winter breaks in Bermuda don’t pay for themselves you know!

Appeal beaks Sir John Thomas, Mrs Justice Dobbs and Mr Justice Underhill, we salute you. But probably not in the way you would like.

Gadget Note: Thanks Julia M (who I don’t always agree with!) for the tip.


The Elusive Bobby on the Beat

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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.
Copyright of PC E E Bloggs
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Victoza Talking

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I’ve been spending a lot of time bored of late.  It’s a losing weight thing – plus adjusting to my new diabetic medication.  I’ve been fat since training slipped from 4 days (plus playing 2) in the week – even in my last days as a university amateur.  That’s 30 years and seems enough.  I don’t do fast food and despite the legend don’t drink much either.  The big issue in recent years has been exercise – my muscles seem to scream on the equivalent of feather-dusting a few objects d’art – not that I keep either!  I’ve lost 2 stone but have no diet advice to give as this has been done by not eating and being hungry.  The Victoza (once a day jab) has helped in the last 10 days as it’s made me vomit at both ends.  Touch wood this phase is over and I’ll be back on my porridge only diet three days a week and the Holy Grail of walking the legs off the dog.  He’s already grumping about for his evening session.

The Victoza seems to help me feel less knackered and my blood sugars are on their way down.  Diet advice seems either banal (eat less than 1500 calories – which at least complies with something a bit like e = mc2) or ludicrous (F-plan etc.).  With a quarter of our population now fatter than me (in BMI) you’d think we’d do something better.  Nothing bores me quicker than chefs on television except people with PhDs in nutrition and supermarket vegetable selections.

It couldn’t be the case that something as simple as porridge only three days a week and a ban on fast food and snack sales and processed crap would work, surely?  Or that we haven’t done this because it would depress GDP?  Our pubs are still closing and apart from television and the Internet I’m not sure what there is to do.  I certainly have to earn a lot to do anything much other than this.

I sense a radical overhaul of economics needs to start with issues like whether people who don’t get fat don’t because they have reasonable diets.  This might seem as unlikely as my plan for UDI for Scotland and Greater Lancashire, but note the first is underway.

 


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I nearly shocked myself SHOCK!

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As I walked through the car park at Ruraltown nick last evening, I saw a full house of SMT so-called ‘pool cars’. It was almost as if they had parked them there as a joke. From left to right there was a Jaguar, a Mercedes and a BMW. All near top of the range, all new and all very shiny.

I was surprised because I had just finished a 12 hour shift, most of which was spent looking for a high risk, suicidal missing person during which I was constantly reminded about the lack of overtime budget and resources due to the ‘cuts’.

I was the Silver Commander for this incident. ‘Silver’ should be a qualified Chief Inspector but we don’t have one on F Division, again due to the cuts. Apparently there is a ban on expensive national training courses at the moment. This is because, the Chief told us the other day, we are only ‘broadly in line’ with the savings we need to make this year.

Clearly, these ‘savings’ do not extend to the considerable collection of luxury automotive engineering sitting in the SMT bays back at the nick.

We couldn’t get our shared helicopter (something to do with some light drizzle and a wisp of fog over some heliport two counties away) neither could I find a single available police dog in the whole Shire (training, I was informed, really? I thought, what, all of them?) and the only 4X4 we could find broke down on the way to the RVP.

Eventually, along with two-thirds of my own response team (which is not many trust me!) a handful of disgruntled Neighbourhood officers, clearly very bitter about having been taken away from their appointments (as calls to the police over trivial matters are now called) some keen but hapless PCSO’s from G Division with a complete Force Tactical Reserve Team fresh from the gym at Headquarters, we managed to form a staggered line and begin the search.

We were in thick woodland with deep bogs and streams crossing the small clearings to the west. To the East was the motorway and to the north a major river system. To the south, the badlands adjoining Metrocity, and the promise of a spare dog team (which never arrived).

As I stood at the RVP looking at my muddy old map with the police search advisor, I could see the dull orange glow from Metroland way off to the south. Behind us it was starting to become pitch black in the woods. Can I say that in the modern police service? But it was, pitch black that is. All the usual suspects came in to play. Lack of resilience in the airwaves batteries, Response on the phone begging for the vehicles back so they can start to attend the evening’s Facebook death-threats and a rude little man from the control room asking me something about an Op name for budget purposes.

I asked for emergency lighting and new power cells for the search lamps. His tone made me feel like a criminal.

A senior officer phoned me to ask, rather too abruptly for my liking, if I had started a ‘policy file’. Yes Sir, the officers who have been at the search site for eight hours are fine thanks. What the centre really want above anything else (including actually finding the poor man) is for the audit trail to be sound. Stop looking and start writing. That’s the ticket.

Suddenly a shout from one of the search team officers. His mucker from the control room has phoned him to say that the bloke has been found in a motorway service station 100 miles away with a pipe attached to the exhaust of his car. He is alive, but only just. Then we receive the formal broadcast MISPER found over the failing airwaves. At that precise moment, the helicopter arrives.

I now await my phone call, in about a month, where the Super will shout at me for ‘lack of performance’ on such and such date. When I get a word in, I will tell her that we were looking for a suicidal missing person all day. This will not wash with her. She is mad with ambition. And besides, she and the others have promised the elected police chief candidates that crime will fall on their watch, not that missing people will be found, or not found because they were never there, as in our case.

Is this your force? I bet it is.

Gadget Note: For the search enthusiasts: we were at the location because bizarrely, his shoe was found on the road leading through the area by a dog walker, who thought it was odd to find an office shoe in the countryside! On the face of it, good call!