written by Sierra Charlie from Sierra Charlie 2
It will come as a terrible blow to those regular PCs who think we are a bunch of time and space wasters to learn that the Urban Special Constabulary will be getting involved in the London Olympics in 2012. It would be a mad world if we were not, because there simply are not enough "proper" police officers in the UK to police such a large event while also keeping the wheels on everywhere else. In the unlikely event that someone doesn't manage to derail things, the USC will be joining our big city colleagues in force come 2012.
As part of the ramping up of the challenges us Specials are presented with, we were asked to provide feet on the ground at Urbis' very own music festival this weekend, which you won't have heard about because it is always eclipsed by London's Notting Hill Carnival.
While I do not want to turn this into a rant about the frankly unfriendly attitudes presented to volunteers by some of our regular colleagues, it is worth the aside. There is an undercurrent of cliquishness in the police which I do not like at all. Rather than respecting the uniform that a special colleague is wearing and bothering to find out where we are coming from, some officers will simply assume that we know nothing or - worse - cannot be trusted. Response team PCs (in particular) often ignore us in the hope that we will get bored and go away.
Luckily some of the more highly-ranked officers I have worked with have been more open-minded. Perhaps the Sergeants and above know a bit more about motivation and team leadership (is there a course?). It is certainly nice to be appreciated. Particularly nice is when a Chief Inspector comes up to your serial to thank you personally for doing a grand job. Even better is when a second does the same, completely independently of the first. Better yet is when your serial inspector tells you at knock-off time that you were guinea pigs in an experiment that has gone well.
When I got back to the police station after we had been stood down, I noticed that I had spilled egg and bacon on my pristine black clip-on tie at breakfast time. The label said DRY CLEAN ONLY, but it inadvertently ended up in the machine. It survived: concept proved.
The original post can be found http://sierracharlie2.blogspot.com/2009/08/proof-of-concept.html
Resilience, what resiliance?
written by 200 from 200 Weeks
Resilience is the latest buzzword flying around the corridors of HQ. There appears to be a law which states the latest buzzword must be mentioned as often & as widely as possible. So we see it in emails, on the intranet & in any publication worth its salt.
Mentioning it appears all that is necessary for the Department in Charge of Making up Policies which sound great but nobody follows, to have fulfilled its brief. Actually doing something about it is immaterial.
Hence in the control room, we have no resilience, at least not where staffing issues are concerned.
We’ve got less staff in the control room than we’ve had in the history of the force. On night shifts the place is like the Marie Celeste.
I remember a few years ago when I was out on the street & one of my colleagues raised the issue of single-crewing radio channels with the chief. We were all told how important it was to have two people working the channel – if one was busy on the phone it was important for officer safety to have someone else permanently listening to the radio in case an officer had problems – the chief said no radio channel would be routinely single crewed. Perhaps policy changed without anyone telling us or the frontline troops because it’s not u usual to have between 20 & 90% of the channels single-crewed.
That’s the state of play when we are ‘fully staffed’.
It will be interesting to see how our ‘resilience’ will be affected once people really start to go down with swine flu after the summer.
The original post can be found http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/1839