It was just gone ten in the morning at Big Pete and I had already been to three domestic incidents since starting at seven, locked people up at two of them; one male and one female just to ensure the balance, when call number four came in.

“Chaos, we know you are busy with prisoners, but any chance you can make a shoplifter in the first instance, mapping shows you and Pete the only unit in the area …”

Well of course we were the ‘only unit in the area’ … we were the only unit this side of the main nick at Medbury, some 15 miles away, and one of only three cars on in any case this fine Saturday morning.

The only reason we were double-crewed was not because the incidents we had already been to demanded more than a ‘one person’ response – although they did because, as is the norm, the people we had been going to were all ‘regular customers’ with plenty of warnings for violence, and especially violence towards police officers.

No, the reason we were double crewed was simply because between five of us on shift covering two towns this morning, simply there were only three working vehicles !

That being by the by, our prisoners would have to wait a bit longer to be dealt with. It wouldn’t matter so much as each of them was so steaming drunk they wouldn’t be fit for interview for many hours anyway. It was, much as we actually hate to do it, looking like a pair of handovers for lates. In one case, so drunk, possibly even nights !

What wasn’t so great was the delay that would be caused in getting to the victims and getting statements from them. It’s not ideal but it’s the reality of where we were.

Often the biggest problem we see when this happens, and it happens a lot, is that the victim suddenly has a change of heart, and decides they want nothing to do with the police, refuse to make a statement, and accuse us of all manner of things to try and get their loved one out of the slammer.

This is generally due to having had time to realise the potential repercussions of their actions rather than a genuine will for their abuser to return, but it creates a very high barrier we then have to break back down to get people onside. 

Sometimes we don’t manage it but if we can still build a case, the rules are such now that the CPS should be looking to take forward victimless prosecutions to keep victims safe even if they don’t support such action.

I guess in reality this can be a difficult one. Unless the courts come down hard on the perpetrator, and let’s be realistic, that’s the exception rather than the rule – the risk is great that we could inadvertently be adding to the pressure placed on the victim to such an extent that next time, they simply won’t call for help. It’s a toughy.

Anyway, we took call number four and headed to the local superstore. 

Out of the car and not even through the front doors of the shop were we before the first comment came. 

“Breakfast already is it” were the words that spurted from the mouth of a fine upstanding member of the public as he emerged from the shop, fag already in his mouth with one hand flicking the lighter as the other tried to shield the emitted flame whilst simultaneously hanging on to a bottle of cheap shops own brand equivalent of Jack Daniels.

“Ohh yes” replied Pete “ you should really try their Salmon and Basil Omelette or the Pancetta Avacado, they’re to die for”

Pete really couldn’t help himself sometimes. Mind you I guess the first few dozen times you hear the negativity thrown our way at every opportunity it’s quite humourous. After that it’s just plain boring.

“Are they even things Pete ?” I asked, uninterested in rising to the original bait myself.

“You uncouth youth Chaos” Pete replied “don’t you know the finer delicacies of the most important meal of the day”

“Nope” I retorted “If I want posh brekkie, it’s Brown Sauce instead of red”

 We made our way past the line of already busy checkouts as families and singletons alike paid homage to the great Gods of retail and filled their bags with numerous products that were ‘offer of the day’ but would most likely end up in the bin as something never tried nor wanted, merely purchased as the psychology of modern retail warfare had captured another victim.

As we got to the Security Office, which is really an oversized broom cupboard with a small chair that captured felons are deposited to await their fate, and a computer screen precariously balanced on top of copious amounts of paperwork and folders that share the rickety shelf upon which it resides, we were met by Sharon, Store Detective extraordinaire.

Sharon isn’t really a Store Detective. In fact the shop doesn’t employ any.  What happens is that each day, one lucky member of staff is relieved of their much looked forward to duties of stacking shelves on aisle 13 and told to play Super Sleuth for the day.

It doesn’t work very well as you can imagine. The staff receive no training in how to spot Sammy Shoplifter (other names available), they receive no input on how to deal with any miscreants should they happen upon one by accident, and worst of all for us, they receive no goddam training in how to use the worlds worst ever CCTV recording system.

Our intrepid miscreant had of course, made quick his getaway before we had arrived. Only it hadn’t been so quick …

As Sherlock Sharon was about to tell us, with her words of fury echoed in almost perfect synchronisation by her Store Manager who had appeared from nowhere, as if by magic (or at lest crept through a changing room door a-la Mr Benn), our quarry had given up ‘being detained’ by the store staff after twenty minutes, told them he had “a knife in his pocket and wasn’t afraid to use it”, and quite rightly, with concern for their safety, the staff had let him go.

This had all happened a further 20ish minutes ago, so all in all it had been somewhere around forty minutes since the shop had called police to report what had happened. The store weren’t happy bunnies !

This was clearly one of those quick jobs’ Comms like to give out so much …

Having spent the next ten minutes placating the Manager whilst Sharon did her very best to do battle with the stores CCTV machinery eventually, no doubt with a lot of luck and a little bit of Harry Potter wizardry, up on the screen appeared moving images, not very high quality to be fair but moving still, of the worlds currently most wanted criminal.

What surprised Pete and I most of all is that whoever it was, it wasn’t one of our ‘regulars’ or other local ne’er do wells but, luckily for us, an outsider stands out in ChaosTown as much as someone in a stripy top carrying a swag bag.

“What has he had away with ?” I asked. “Frozen stuff definitely” said Sharon “we got some of it back, normal stuff, meat joints, they flog it all for drugs don’t they ?” she added.

“Didn’t get chance to look in his man bag though, or his jacket; I’m sure he had stuff in there as well but he was having none of letting us look and we can’t force them can we ?”

We took the basic details, enough to submit the obligatory crime report, and told Sharon we would be back later in the day to collect the CCTV footage if, by any stretch of the imagination, she could find anyone who knew how to download it.

“In the meantime” I said, “we’ll go have a look around the area just in case”.

To be fair they were not really more than words; going through the motions if you like. We knew it, Sharon knew it, and her manager knew it. By this time a good hour or more had passed since the call first came in, criminal mastermind numero uno had been gone for over 40 minutes and all we had to go on was some fairly mediocre video footage from which to work. This job had ‘filed pending’ written all over it. 

As we left the store I updated the Control Room via the radio, making quite a meal of the bits relating to time delays in the vain hope some supervisor somewhere would be listening and fee inclined to think about doing something, anything, about a problem that was becoming more commonplace by the day and making the job of the frontline attending officers equally more difficult.

That bit fell, as expected, on deaf ears. The next bit, about the offender claiming to have a knife clearly didn’t however, as the radio world went crazy with supervisors and cops coming out of the woodwork from miles around, to get over to us and start hunting the now ‘prize catch’.

It mattered not any more that it was a 99.999% surety the claim had been made as no more than a means to get away before a collar was felt. The words had been said and the big ‘Manual of Everything for Police Managers Sat Behind Desks’ had been pulled off the shelf and the dust blown away. Ohh yes, the circus was coming to town …

“Let ‘em get on with it” Pete announced “we’ve got more than enough to do, and where were this lot offering to take the job when it was a simple theft” I won’t bother repeating the next few words that came from Pete’s mouth to describe his feelings as I’m not sure the spellcheck wouldn’t have a meltdown lol 

He was of course right. We still had victims to see and paperwork to put together even if we didn’t get as far as interviewing the prisoners ourselves. It was going to be a long day for both of us.

I could still hear the chatter on the radio as the Duty Officer in the Control Room tried desperately to find an ARV or at least a Taser officer to head over any try to intercept our proverbial very small needle in a very big haystack.

I was driving and Pete had his eyes glued to the streets. “THERE …. OVER THERE …” he suddenly shouting, almost causing me to do an emergency stop in the middle of Castle Street.

“What … who … where ??” I said

“That’s him, I’m sure of it” called Pete, pointing furiously at some random stranger just disappearing down a side street.

Now Pete is not normally wrong, but in this case he really was pushing his luck given all the circs, but none the less, before I’d even stopped the car, Pete’s door was open and he was off running.

I knew where the street Pete had gazelled down headed for so quickly spun the panda into blue light mode to get myself to the other end asap and hopefully be there before Pete and his quarry arrived.

As expected I got to the other end of the street first, stopped the panda and headed off towards Pete who I could see running in the opposite direction just catching up with the guy he had eyeballed.

As I got to them all I could say was “Fair play to you Pete, I thought you were way off but it looks like you got your man bang to rights”

The guys clothing was a perfect match for that we had seen on the shops CCTV, especially the ‘stand out’ purple and grey jacket he was wearing. But there was one other small thing which gave his game away.

“What you talking ‘bout you ijots I ain’t dun nuffin” came the immediate line of defence from the chap we had just completed a perfect pinscher movement on.

“Well, young sir” I said to him “I would say you were taking the p*** coming onto our patch and stealing from our shops but in your case, either you have the worst case of the trots I’ve ever seen or that’s a whole pile of Ben and Jerry’s finest running down your trouser legs”

“Yeah” said Pete “a proper case of Taking the Phish”

“You’re nicked !”

“Yeah Chaos, sorry ‘bout this, I know its not your patch but we’re a bit thin on the ground this morning. Any chance you could help out with a concern for welfare over Medbury way ?”

I swear that transmission from the Comms Room is just a recording someone taped and gets played out two dozen times a day; it’s always the same now, “everyone’s committed”, “can anyone break off the grade 1 they’re on …”

Not that many weekends ago, we broke off from Grade 1 to Grade 1 so many times, never actually landed at any of the jobs we were being sent to – Pete and I spent best part of two hours just diverting from call to call backing other officers up across what seemed to be half the county.

“No problem” was my reply, “go with details”

It was a problem, quite a big one actually. I’d already got a workload growing the size of an acne patch on a spotty teenager with no sign of it ever getting any smaller, plus a RTC report file about to go out of date in four days; it having spent most of the past six months bouncing around the ether of an internal mail system (There will be a lot of heads out the right now nodding in agreement … or at lest empathy).

“Thanks Chaos, call from Community Mental Health, worried one of their clients who’s been on the phone to them not making much sense. Talking about there being dragons in his flat. They suspect he may have taken something. Just doing the checks now…”

My heart had already sunk at the mere mention of the CMH team. A call from them can normally be interpreted if we’re lucky as ‘we haven’t got enough staff to cope and there is a real, genuine, bona fide concern for this persons health and wellbeing, and we really need your help’ or, as more often than not the case ‘congratulations, we’ve just passed the buck, it’s your problem now’.

I suppose I should have been glad for small mercies and the fact it was just gone 9.30am in the morning rather than 4.55pm in the afternoon so on the balance of probabilities, this call was more likely to fall into the first category rather than the second.

Having been given the address for the incident, which was a good 25 minutes drive from where I was, I did have to ponder the fact for the moment that by some strange fluke, I was apparently the only available police officer that could be despatched to this incident.

It didn’t pass me by that to get from my current location, to where this chap lived, would involve driving past Medbury police station, quite a substantial building, less than 10 minutes drive from the job and home, at this time of day, to probably in excess of 100 workers; police officers and admin staff combined.

But of course, the small number of response and neighbourhood officers based there would, like those at ChaosTown nick, already be out and about, committed with jobs they had been given or enquiries they had to follow up.

There’s no way the amassed ranks of ‘specialist departments’ could possibly be disturbed and asked to attend such a trivial matter as a bloke who appears to have taken some sort of hallucinogenic substance and could quite easily by now be in a battle for his own very existence. This after all is a job for response.

Makes you wonder a bit about that definition of ‘front line’ doesn’t it ??

The radio crackled and squawked back into life and some sort of garbled message was transmitted from the other end. “If that was aimed at me you sound like a Dalek, stick 50p in the meter and try again” was my response. Not very radio comms policy compliant I know but the message was the same.

“Is that better ?“ asked the Comms Op and then proceeded to carry on talking without giving me a chance to answer anyway “male you are on way to has all the normal warnings, mental health, alcohol, self harm, violence, I’ll get you some back up …. anyone able to break off and back up a single crewed officer?”

Silence …………….

And more silence …………

Eventually Pete called up on the radio “I’m in custody at Medbury with my prisoner but if there really is no one else available he’ll have to wait and I’ll go back Chaos up”

I can just imagine the look on the Custody Sergeants face, and possibly the defence brief, at that little gem but hey ho, not my problem.

The Furnace Park estate wasn’t hard to find. Just a few years ago it would have been even easier to spot just by following the seemingly constant trail of black rising smoke from one car or another being set on fire by its joyriding resident yoof.

Perhaps they were just trying to recreate the areas former existence as a foundry from a time when Britain ruled the waves (and most of the rest of the world) and we actually made things; real solid metal things that we sold around the world and made ourselves a proper world power … or slave drivers (sorry I digress).

Furnace Park is another of those squished together compacted living areas full of blocks of flats and houses smaller than a hamster cage which in someones mind, back in the 50’s or 60’s, were going to be the panacea of modern living. It’s the real reason we all had a fascination with flying cars – upwards was the only way out, the roads were so small and narrow there was no chance of driving forwards.

Nowadays it’s the sort of place that the rats go to their doctors and get a tetanus jab before entering, wear wellies and carry little pouches of anti-bacterial gel strapped to their tails.

“If we think this chap’s having some sort of episode or taken an overdose have we called an ambo, or more importantly did Mental Health Team call one before they called us ?” I asked whilst making my way to the location. It was a foolish question to which I already knew the answer on both accounts – experience does that to you – but it made me feel better to ask anyway.”

“No. Caller hasn’t and nor have we at this time. Supervisor asks that you make an assessment at the scene and take it from there…”

Excellent. So now we have a situation where a person has called the Community Mental Health team for help. They in turn have assessed that this person is in need of some sort of assistance AND that they may be under the influence of one kind of substance or another, legal or not. They haven’t summoned medical assistance for this person. Nor have they made any direct effort to visit the caller and check on their welfare. Instead they have called the police. Buck passed.

So now our Comms Room has the information that as member of the public is in need of help, they they may be in some form of distress, physically or mentally, that they may be under the influence of some form of substance which is affecting their wellbeing, and now the police haven’t summoned medical assistance either. And remember, we also have a history record on this person, and have created lots of ‘warning markers’ to highlight the various issues they have.

This will no doubt be down to some risk assessment procedure and in the vast majority of cases ‘it’ll be alright on the night’ … but what about that odd occasion when it’s not, and the subsequent enquiry starts shouting very loudly that ‘police knew of the situation and did nothing’. Because I can guarantee you that will be the first line of defence from the agency that called us, no matter who they are.

Factor in the time delays between the call to the third party agency who then decides on their course of action which is to call police; the time for someone in our call desk to take down all the information and enter a job onto our systems; the time for that job to then be assessed and categorised before being sent to the despatch supervisor; the time for them to pick the job up, re-asses it and then find a unit to deploy; and then the travelling time for the officers being tasked (in this case 25 minutes) and we are quickly in the region of 40-45 minutes AFTER the initial calls for assistance in the lucky circumstance we have someone to deploy straight away. Golden Hour and all that …..??

Anyway we got there. Pete had just pulled in ahead of me and was out of his panda and moaning before I even got the handbrake on. Custody Sergeant moaning he couldn’t just leave with a prisoner in the traps; PACE this, defence solicitor complaining that blah,blah … I can just imagine his reply though.

As would be typical, the address we were heading for was never going to be on the ground floor but at least it was only a two floor journey via a flight of concrete steps that judging by the debris, mess and graffiti could tell many a tale if only it could speak.

The first thing that struck me as odd on the balcony style walkway outside the door of the flat we were heading for were the potted plants. Quite a few of them actually, and well looked after too.

The immediate reaction was ‘we’ve been given the wrong flippin’ address’ and so a quick radio call to the Control Room was in order to verify the incident location and details. This wasn’t an area either Pete or myself had been to before; it’s not ‘our town’ and so we don’t know any of their local characters – we have more than enough to deal with on our own patch thank you very much.

Address verified, it was shrugged shoulders from the both of us and a knock on the door.

It was answered by quite a pleasant young chap in his mid thirties. “Can I help you officers” he said.

Now we were completely conflumuxed. None of this was adding up. “Yeah” I said “we’re looking for a guy named Michael”. “That’s me” he replied, “is something wrong ?”

“Errrmmmm … we’re not really sure, can we pop in for a chat for a couple of minutes”” ?” Confusion overload was well and truly in operation by now.

“Is my mum okay” asked Michael, clearly his brain scrambling to find a logical reason as to why we were knocking his door just as much as we were.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with mum or in fact anyone else Michael” Pete quipped in, “we’ve been asked to come and check you’re okay”. This seemed to puzzle Michael even further.

Looking round to find the inside of his flat quite neat and tidy, sparsely furnished but clean, certainly moreso than the bedroom of your average teenage lad by any stretch of the imagination, I said “Might seem an odd question Michael but have you had any dealings with the Community Mental Health Team ?”

Michael sat down. “Yes I have actually, I had a bad time after my wife died when we lived up north, she got killed by a drunk driver and I didn’t cope with it; I still don’t really. I got into a fair bit of bother at the time but it was all just what the heck, my life had ended really you just sort of carry on best you can don’t you ?”

And with that, all of our thoughts and presumptions just came crashing down around us.

“They aren’t much good really, I suppose they’re short staffed as well but whenever I feel a bit down and ring them, they just fob you off. I rang them this morning actually. to find out when they were next planning to come out. They are supposed to come and see me every so often but they haven’t been for over a year. Anyway how does that lead to you guys being here ?”

“Well Michael” I began, “they actually rang us this morning to say they were worried about you; thought you might be having some sort of episode or have taken something …”

“Taken something ???” interrupted Michael before I could say any more “taken something, what planet are they on ? … I know I drank too much after everything but I’ve never taken drugs in my life”

“I’m not too sure chap” I said “but the message we’ve had from them is that you were hallucinating and chasing dragons round your flat. They thought you were off your head”

Michael began to laugh. Quite a lot actually.

“You’ve gonna love this” he said. “I was on the phone having a bit of a rant because they couldn’t give me a visit date and I said I can’t be waiting for them any longer, my dragons got out and I need to catch it”. Michael stood up “come with me” he said walking towards another room.

Michael led us into his bedroom, closed the door behind us and then we began to laugh. “They are a pain when they want to be” Michael said “They hide under the bed and if I go one side they just come out the other”.

Then something must have twigged in Michael’s head. He now had two extra pairs of hands to assist. “Don’t suppose you’d give me a hand to catch them would you. It’d be easier with three of us ?”

‘They’ were Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Michael’s two pet bearded dragons.

It appeared Michael had been cleaning their vivarium out, having placed the terrible twosome on the floor for a wander around as normal, and his mind had then strayed into his need to speak to the Community Mental Health Service. It was whilst on the phone to them, his eyes being distracted by one of the creatures walking past him that he suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to put them away.

The next few minutes consisted of two six foot blokes, full kitted up in stab vests and belt kit, on their hands and knees in a strange blokes bedroom, with their heads stuck under a bed being taunted by two small spiky scaly things who clearly saw the amusing side of things.

“How do we get hold of these things” Pete called out to Michael “are these the things that their tails fall off if we grab them ??”

Luckily we were soon informed the best course of action was simply to usher the elusive twosome in a particular direction where Michael could then grab them when they finally appeared from the dark recesses under the bed where normally the bogeyman lurks.

With situation normal returned, Michael was quick to apologise for ‘wasting our time’

“Mate” said Pete “not your fault and certainly not your problem”. “You ain’t wasting our time and if anything, you’ve shown us not to make too many presumptions before we know all the facts”

“Well thank you anyway” said Michael “least I can do is offer you a brew before you go”

Sadly, and before we even had time to utter “that’d be fab thanks” our radios broke back into life “Anyone able to break off the job they’re on for a grade one domestic in Chaostown ..?”

“We’ll take a raincheck on that matey, this isn’t our patch but we’ll make a point of getting back over to see you and have that brew soon as”

“Custody skipper’s gonna be proper pi***d, looks like my guy’ll be sat in a cell a bit longer” said Pete.

And with that we were out of the door and running back to our vehicles.

This blog was written in March 2014 by a detective who describes her experience of depression and posted on the Avon & Somerset police website. The author has subsequently kindly given permission for it to be reposted here in the interests of further highlighting the problem of depression and related mental ill health as it affect members of the police family and hopefully offering some small amount of support and/or guidance for those in need a a little help or assistance.

She talks about her early symptoms, how she disregarded them, how problems built up and how she finally got help. She describes her very positive experience of recovery and gives very practical advice to colleagues who may be experiencing similar symptoms. 

I would just like to add that if, as a member of the emergency services, you feel the need for help, or just to talk to someone, the MIND charity operates a specific help/assistance programme for ‘blue light’ workers > http://mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/campaigns/bluelight/ or call 0300 303 5999

****

I am a detective constable with 24 years service. I recently had a breakdown and subsequently was diagnosed with depression.

This was caused by too much stress over a long period of time.

I am writing this because I feel one of the last taboos is talking about being in the police and recovering from this type of illness.

I want to help others understand more about stress and depression, how they can spot it in others and how they can reduce the risk of it happening to them.

More importantly I want people to know it is not the end of the world, that afterwards you can have an even happier and contented life than before you fell ill.

I believe more police officers and staff are suffering from stress than ever before. Stress related illness is on the rise and can have a devastating effect on the individual, colleagues, friends and families. And there’s the cost to the organisation with people going long term sick, and some not returning to the job. I believe stress statistics are never going to be accurate due to the amount of people who go sick with stress but then make up another reason for the sickness. They do this because of the stigma that’s still attached to stress and depression.

Stigma

Freak! Unstable! Lazy! Weak person! Get a grip! You’re making it up!

Let me get one thing perfectly clear. Depression means you are the complete opposite of these things.

“Depression is certainly not a sign of weakness but absolutely is a sign of being too strong for far too long.”

I can only talk about me and my experience. Everyone’s story is different, however I do feel there are common personality traits that can make a person more vulnerable to depression.

Personality traits

Reliability; (moral) strength; diligence; strong conscience; strong sense of responsibility; tendency to focus on needs of others before one’s own; sensitivity; vulnerability to criticism; self-esteem dependent on the evaluation of others. Most of those are police officers to a T!

So what happened to me?

After I had my son I started suffering from anxiety. Sometimes I could control it and push it out of my mind, other times when I was stressed it was more intrusive. I would be driving, in particular on motorways, and have a terrible fear that I was going to crash. I would keep having irrational thoughts, always worrying that the worst would happen in every situation.

I know now that this is called catastrophizing.

I have also had periods of panic attacks; at one point it got so bad I ended up in A&E convinced I was having a heart attack. I would check things a lot – I would walk back in my house many times checking gas rings were off.

I had awful sleep patterns; I would wake with a jump and see sudden vivid images come into my head like a lorry crashing in front of me. I would also over react to sudden noises like a balloon popping or fireworks going off, a bit similar to that Catherine Tate character who screams when the microwave goes ping.

It actually made me feel like I was being attacked. My reactions to a sudden noise were completely over the top.

It was like my fight/flight response had gone wrong and I was always on alert.

It wasn’t constantly awful but it was always there in the background to a certain degree. It was only when I was going through stressful times that it all seemed to get out of control.

What tipped it over from stress and anxiety to depression?

2013 was the year where things went very wrong.

Normally I would go through stressful periods like everyone else does and then things get better but this time it wasn’t getting better. I had been in the police for 24 years, many years in Child Protection/Public Protection Unit. I enjoyed my job which is why I’ve done it for so long and I feel perfectly capable of dealing with the type of cases that I deal with.

I felt it was a combination of events – the increasing work pressure, last five years of going through promotion process, feeling I was constantly jumping through hoops but not getting anywhere. This combined with anxiety problems, my own personality characteristics and some traumatic events in my past meant I was heading full speed towards a complete breakdown.

So what actually was my breakdown, what does that word even mean?

My head started spinning; my brain was racing with too many thoughts crammed in. I was coming home and being stressed and irritable with my family. I was smoking and drinking too much wine to try and relax. Normally I would be trying to exercise and do healthy things to combat stress but this time I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t switch my head off; I remember one evening trying to watch television and breaking down in tears sobbing to my husband, that I was so scared as my mind would not stop racing.

I stopped seeing my friends, I stopped any hobbies, I used to dread the phone ringing as it meant I had to focus and concentrate on whoever was phoning. I couldn’t talk to anyone about how I was feeling as that would have taken mental and emotional energy and I had not one bit of it left.

So I completely withdrew from friends and family.

“I felt a fraud like I was pretending to be happy but I was not really. The world just seemed grey; there was no colour left anywhere.”

Each day felt like I was wading through treacle and little tasks seemed huge. I over worried about everything. I felt like I had let everyone down, I felt like a failure.

So how was this affecting my work at this time?

Everything I am describing is being done retrospectively. When I was going through this I did not have the clarity of mind to realise I was ill.

For months I kept breaking down at work, I would overreact to the slightest thing and start crying. Not even a few tears but proper sobbing. I had no control over this, it was like I had no filters left on what was an appropriate reaction or not.

I know now that people were worried about me. In the summer my boss told me he thought I was unwell and that I should go to my GP. I was in complete denial and thought ‘what does he know? I’m just a bit stressed’. Under duress I agreed to visit my GP, where I underplayed how ill I was feeling and left.

So I carried on at work, in my head I really thought I was just a bit stressed and it would pass.

The straw that broke the camel’s back moment

I had planned a spa day with my mum and sister and each day I was thinking ‘come on, a few more days and then you can have a day to relax’. I really felt this one spa day was going to solve everything and I would be back to normal

Towards the end of the year I was waking up feeling worse than I did the day before, a fear of dread of going to work and getting through the day. In my head I was thinking, ‘come on, stop being so weak!’

Then my rest day got cancelled and I could no longer have my spa day. I completely lost the plot in the office and became hysterical, proper snot bubbles coming out of my nose and sobbing uncontrollably. I can still picture the look of horror on the faces of my colleagues and supervisors.

The next day I went back into work as I had a barrister’s conference. I popped in to see my detective inspector and tell him I was on my way to the conference. Instead he told me to sit down and told me in no uncertain terms he thought I was really ill and needed help. He told me I was going home and that the decision to go sick was being taken out of my hands.

“I remember thinking that’s it, my career is over, I have stuffed everything up and I am a complete and utter failure.”

The first three weeks being off sick was my lowest point, the office was particularly busy and I felt I had let my colleagues down. I was extremely paranoid thinking that everyone at work must be talking about me; I was overwhelmed with thoughts of being a failure and being weak. I couldn’t concentrate; I was unable to read anything; written words would dance up and down on the paper. I couldn’t complete the slightest task; I would have to keep walking away every few minutes. My memory and concentration were shot to pieces.

After a while, when it was clear I was not getting better by just resting there, was a bit of an intervention from my friends and family. With their support I went to my GP and at last I was honest about how I was feeling.

The GP signed me off sick for another month, diagnosed me with depression and prescribed anti-depressants. I went home, phoned occupational health and arranged counselling. Occupational Health have been so supportive, absolutely fantastic.

Going back to work

By mid-January the meds were starting to have an effect and although not fully recovered, I felt I had got as well as I could at home and I wanted to continue getting better whilst back at work. I needed routine and normality. In careful consultation with my GP, occupational health and bosses at work it was agreed that over the following month I would slowly build my hours back up. The reduced hours were non-negotiable and it was a condition I needed to agree to, to take the first step in getting back to work. That first day returning to work was so scary. I just wanted to get that moment of walking through the office door on the first day back over and done with.

The personality characteristics I have that made me ill in the first place were exactly the same ones that I now wanted to go back to work.

For the first time in ages I felt I had fire and determination back. I wanted to fight for what I felt was right for me. I absolutely refused to come back and be stuck in a broom cupboard because bosses may not know what to do with me.

Luckily for me and this part was crucial to my smooth return to work, I had bosses that listened to me. I explained I felt I was less of a risk than people currently at work who were suffering stress and depression but did not yet realise. So it was agreed I could go back to my normal work but with a clause that we had regular reviews and that I continued to be honest with them in how I was feeling.

The Elephant in the room!

I am not talking about my weight gain either. That was another effect of the depression, weight gain. A year of downing vast quantities of wine whilst eating lard and doing absolutely no exercise meant I was now packing a fair bit of extra timber.

Anyway I digress. I meant the other elephant in the room – what to say to other people! Should I say something? Should I not? What do they think has happened to me? What do they know?

In the end I decided that I was not going to make any big announcement, I would just crack on with my work. Slowly over the weeks it all just came out naturally, chatting to people on a one to one basis.

So that brings us up to date really. I am now back full time, getting stuck in, a bit of overtime and just generally back to normality.

“The whole return to work experience has been made much easier by some very supportive bosses and friends, you know who you are!”

I am still recovering; my concentration is still not fully back. I have days where I’m extremely tired; those days I just need to be aware not to overdo it and after work go home and relax.

What advice would I now offer?

To anyone who recognises themselves in all this, then please try and get help. You really cannot do this on your own. Start by talking to someone you trust. Once you are honest with yourself and able to admit that things are not great then you can start the slow process of unpicking the reasons it got this way.

Colleagues

If you see someone acting consistently out of character and you are concerned about them, then speak up. They may be at a stage where they are so deeply entrenched in their illness they do not have the self-awareness to know they are unwell.

Police officers are naturally suspicious and we need evidence to back things up. Well, with this type of illness you don’t always get direct evidence; there is no visible injury, no cast on a leg for example.

Instead of thinking ‘unless I get evidence that tells me they are ill, I will assume they are pulling a fast one’ consider taking a default position – ‘I genuinely believe they are ill, unless I get concrete evidence to suggest otherwise’. That would be fantastic. Although to be honest no rumours or nasty comments are in any way as awful as the thoughts that person is most likely having about themselves.

Just remember a little bit of basic human kindness and compassion costs nothing and goes such a long way.

If someone goes sick, a simple text that you are thinking of them will mean the world to them. If you want to go the extra mile and offer them support tell them, so they know who they can contact. The isolation from colleagues is one of the worst parts of it all to deal with.

For me on the whole I have been lucky to have had colleagues that have not judged me, not jumped to conclusions and have been supportive. 

Bosses

Listen to what the person is telling you; don’t think you know all the answers. No one knows them better than they know themselves. A move to a broom cupboard or making it someone else’s problem is really not the best solution. The easy one maybe. But not always the best one.

Anyway as I said at the beginning if I can change just one person’s views or help someone suffering the same, then my work here is done.

I realise putting myself out there like this is opening myself up to being judged and opinions being cast. However what other people think of me no longer worries me like it did last year. To be fair what other people think of me, is really none of my business.

Did I tell you I own this great company ?

We are … without a doubt … the world’s finest manufacturer of high quality WidgetWangles (we’ve patented, trademarked and copyrighted that name by the way so no getting any ideas !!)

Our WidgetWangles are better, more robust, longer lasting and better value than any comparable product on the market … and business has been so great that we are expanding beyond all belief.

We now need more people to come and join us; quality people; only the best people for the job; only those that can live and breathe our product – and believe it … we need the best of the best of the best to become world leading ambassadors of the WidgetWangle world … to take our products to markets new and make the world a better place – indeed a WidgetWangleWorld !!

Just one small thing … well two actually. You see, it doesn’t matter to us if you know all about Widgets and Wangles. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve done work experience, an internship or even been a lifelong member of the WidgetWangle fan club and can recite load capacities and structural dimensions to the hundredth point.

No … if you want to be part of our team, to be a WidgetWangleWarrior, you must die your hair green.

Not just any green, but bright green, nay even luminous green if you really want to make it to the top !

And you must eat blue cheese. not just a nibble now and then, but blue cheese MUST be the staple food in your daily diet.

No if’s, no buts, no practical experience, or longing to devote your whole life to the WidgetWangleWorld … if you don’t dye your hair green and live on blue cheese, you ain’t coming in – is that clear ??

Sounds a crazy idea doesn’t it ?

But I’ll tell you something … for those people who are desperate to work in the world of WidgetWangles, they will do it !

To achieve their life’s dream of being the number one performer in the number one company in the world of WidgetWangles, above all else, some people will do whatever it takes to realise their dream.

You could say my idea is ‘doomed to succeed’ … for no matter how foolish or rediculous an idea it is, it will, at the end of the day … work.

It will not make my WidgetWangle sellers, makers or promoters a single slither of that blue cheese any better at what they do, and more importantly it will mean that perhaps some of the very best people in the Wangle world; with the best ideas on how to promote the product; how to improve the product; in fact how to take my WidgetWangles and make them even better and more useful in the future, won’t want to work for me.

They will go and work elsewhere, where the job requirements are not so ridiculous; where they are appreciated and respected for their abilities; their capability; their profound desire to improve the Wangle world … but it won’t be with WidgetWangles because they either can’t, or won’t dye their hair green and live on blue cheese.

Or maybe they aren’t able to afford to by regular supplies of green hair dye, or copious amounts of blue cheese, i mean it isn’t cheap you know. Maybe I could arrange a rather large loan to cover the next three years supplies and you could spend the next thirty years paying me back ??

I did have another idea … I thought about advertising just for the best people to do the job, and then taking the time over the next couple of years training them and providing them with the knowledge to know which is the best blue cheese to eat. You never know, at the end of it, some might like blue cheese and some might not .. and some might even decide to dye their hair green

What I will have though, is a workforce that knows what it’s talking about; will live and breathe the world of WidgetWangles, will be fully experienced in helping our customers choose just the right WidgetWangle for their needs, and ultimately will help me help WidgetWangles to flourish and grow for a long time to come.

And you know what ? Demanding my prospective employees dye their hair green and live on blue cheese is just about as viable an idea as demanding that anyone who wants to become a police officer MUST have a degree BEFORE they are even allowed to apply for a job.

And that’s a fair ‘Degree’ of common sense

This article has been re-blogged with permission from the site of Jeffrey Harris, Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner for Surrey.

Why on earth am I posting something like this you may ask …. well, simply because it’s 100% on the ball …

Policing as we know it in England & Wales faces its biggest threat ever …

The ONLY way to get the message to the public about what is happening to a public service, and let’s be frank here, they pay for, is to shout loudly, continually, and from every single angle we can.

Posted in the interests of creating debate.

CC

…….

Over the last few years with the help of some stupid people, criminal behaviour by a few, and own goals from all  sections of Policing; the media and many politicians have had a field day criticising the many for the actions of the few – a tiny minority by any ones standards, but that’s life…..or is it? Every day Police Officers and support staff- and that includes Special Constables, put themselves in harms way, rushing to danger and putting themselves between the ‘wolves’ and the ‘sheep’.

We constantly hear ‘experts’ and those who  can’t possibly understand the complexities of modern policing, internally as well as external to policing, vent their beliefs about ‘How the Police should do it….What the Police must do…’, ‘What the CC’s/PCC’s must do, etc, etc.

 Seems to me that nowadays the only people who don’t know anything about policing after 190 years, are the Police themselves

A classic comment from the Policing Minister – who should know better – is’ The Police have enough resources, it’s just about how they deploy them’ , (How do you deploy invisibility?) or even better from the new Shadow Home Secretary: ” Labour supports PCC’s but we also believe there could be another 10% cut from the budget”… I may have slightly paraphrased that but my response is to both..

As the Americans say it…………. WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE! 

You and the other 650 MPs and 900 Members of the House of Lords took an oath to protect the people of Great Britain. 

By your comments, politically motivated and vendetta driven policies you and the other 1600 members of Government are sytemically – and that is the right word -destroying the very fabric of community safety – not just policing, hence my carefully chosen wording

Quite rightly there is a fuss about the loss of the livelihood of 1700 Steelworkers in Redcar-and quite rightly Government are now (at last) stepping in to re-train the jobless, and finding £80million to do so. I will keep my personal views about the timing and agendas at play here. (other than the say ‘Northern Powerhouse’).

But when TWENTY times that number of Police jobs go, and another TWENTY times that are going in the next 3-4 years…WHERE is the Fuss? Where is the Govt Finance package? Where is the Opposition spokesman defending policing?

His words this week……..’I think Policing can  afford another 10% loss of budget’…..(By my maths Mr Burnham – That’s just under £800 Million) -and he’s in opposition!

I”m a simple person, but here’s my summary…..Lose 1700 jobs -find £80million from Govt. Lose 34,000 from policing with another 34,000 and just keep cutting…cutting…cutting.

Some will argue my theory/opinion is wrong, if so let’s have that public discussion  at PMQT, or even National TV, but I doubt if H.M Opposition care enough-with the odd exception-to raise the issue. The Govt certainly don’t give a ……..

I’ll finish with my usual statement – There’s a perfectstorm coming to the safety of our communities, and the very people who  are charged with keeping us safe are looking the other way…..deliberately.

 That, sir/madam, is unforgiveable.
JH

A response & alternative view to my ‘Football Crazy’ blog by Alison Gurden, Social Justice Barrister

Last week Twitter’s laughing policeman, Constable Chaos posted his own impressions on his day of football policing Football Crazy . I have reblogged this below. While I can’t dispute what he says, because I wasn’t with him, his experience doesn’t reflect mine, nor the majority of police officers I speak to and who police football matches.

Most of his gripes seem to relate more to the fact he had his rest day cancelled, had to get up early to provide mutual aid, ad by virtue of the fact he was providing mutual aid he wasn’t familiar with the town, and he didn’t get a very clear briefing from the Match Command. My response to that is, I feel sympathy for cops who are now facing this on a daily basis in all levels of their duty, but that is not the football fans’ fault. As the Twitter hash tag says #cutshaveconsequences

In reality, hundreds of thousands of fans travel across the country every week to watch their team play football. And these hundreds of thousands of fans are policed by a handful of police officers, compared to the number of police required most Friday and Saturday nights in towns up and down the country…..

Read full blog post here > http://wp.me/p2vym0-aF

It’s that time of year, now that’ summer’s in the air

When 22 wet gits, with their girly curly hair

Kick a ball about, for 90 minutes, sometimes more

And then cry to mummy, when they fall down on the floor

Ohh the rugby players, with their arms and legs all hanging off,

Laugh and call them names, cos a hair is out of place

They make millions each year but should get some proper jobs,

And a number of their fans are a bunch of smelly yobs.

(With apologies to any Spitting Image fans … ohh and any rugby fans who may be disgusted by the mere association )

.

Yup peeps, it’s August, that time of year when schools have broken up for the summer holidays, families are excitingly taking their well earned vacations to places new and (hopefully) sunny, and you’ve just walked into your first early shift to find a plethora of emails telling you every Saturday you were due to be on rest days for the next 6 months has been cancelled and you are now going to be spending them cramped up in the back of a very uncomfortable overcrowded minibus wearing your own personal sauna with an equally unhappy bunch of you best work colleagues.

You guessed it, the football season is back !

In fairness, there aren’t that many Saturday’s actually cancelled, but they are the only 3 or 4 you were due to have off to spend with family and/or friends (if you have any left cos they’re so fed up of you letting them down due to ever-changing work commitments) this side of the new year. And let’s face it, you’ve got no chance of booking that off either !

And what makes it even worse, if it could in anyway be, is that half the rest day cancellations aren’t even to cover football matches in your own town. No, half of them are mutual aid somewhere else – so your force is actually charging another one handsomely for the pleasure of cancelling your day off and moving it somewhere else to suit them …. as in the third Tuesday of next month when you would have been on earlies.

And that was us last Saturday, the #ChaosTeam and many others from adjoining stations from quite and area, up at the crack of dawn while the rest of the family sleep, other halves miffed off that the rare treat of a Friday night out together scuppered because you have to be up, dressed and out the door by 5am, squished with all our Public Order kit into a van better suited for delivering the weekly groceries, and and an hour or two’s mind numbing travelling across country to a strange town you’ve never been to, don’t know, yet are expected to keep perfectly safe without knowing any of the potential trouble makers from wither side, nor the geographical layout of the place and therefore no knowledge of likely hotspots, cut throughs and generally anything else that would help you do the job better ….. or at least even adequately.

Briefing for us, as the ‘Stage One’ team – which means we are out on the ground first, was at 8.00am .. sorry 08.00 hours in police gobbledegook. Waffle, waffle, blah, blah about the town and it’s football clubs history, silver strategy, human rights, R v Moss (& others) over and over again. It matters not if you get stoned, bricked, glassed or generally beaten to a pulp, but if you don’t known about ‘the last opportunity’ woe betide you !

Briefing over and out we go, 2 PSU’s, for anyone who doesn’t know and is mildly interested, that’s six vans full of PC’s, a sergeant on each van and an Inspector per three vans, to drive and/or walk aimlessly round the local town hoping to spot likely troublemakers or flashpoints (see my earlier reference about not knowing the area where you are or at least the local home team buffoons). It’s now 8.30am. Kick off is at 3.00pm. It’s going to be a long day.

The first couple of hours are spent, predictably, taking flak form the nice normal residents of town, complaining about the ‘vast waste of money’ it is having all these police officers roaming the streets of their fine abode. This week of course, it’s coupled with the predictable ‘ huh, you say you can’t send anyone to burglaries but look, there’s hundreds of you here and there’s nothing going on’

Ironically, the main reason half these people are in the town doing their shopping as soon as the doors are open is so that they don’t have to be here later in the day when all the football hooligans descend and we try and stop the idiots trashing this fine town, but let’s not pick on minor details – what they don’t see there and then or can’t comprehend doesn’t happen does it.

Sometime around 10.30am the calls start coming through from BTP (British Transport Police). Why do they call them that by the way, they only deal with the railways, not road or air transport ??

“Next train due in at 10.46 – approximately 200 away fans on board, between 70 and 100 identified as risk supporters” Ohh joy !

Control room now goes into panic and the Operation Commander immediately reaches for the big book of things to find the Janet & John instructions on what to do next. In the meantime, and as if by magic, the skippers on the ground have already diverted three of the vans to the railway station to meet and greet our visiting guests, and point the identified naughty boys and girls in the direction of the single town pub that will accept them for the day. And why is that pub always the other end of town to the railway/bus station ?

The families and ‘normal’ supporters (which are by the way the majority) can go explore all they like before the game

Well, when I say point, I really mean escort positively. The last thing we want is a large number of buffoons looking for a fight actually finding one, or at least something that isn’t browkn that they would like to break. It’s messy and means paperwork for us and panic for the bosses.

Of course, the travelling clowns love this too. Being escorted half way across the town by us as one big crowd makes them feel extra special. So much they even like to sing about it. Loudly. All the way. Badly.

It also makes them feel brave being protected by the very thin blue line of cops. With probably a dozen or so of us and a hundred of them, it doesn’t take a Professor of Math to work out we are hopelessly outnumbered and the hard guys could easily get past us and cause carnage at any point they like. But for the most part they aren’t actually that brave.

The like it behind our cordon, it gives them a reason for not actually being able to get involved with anything that might ruffle their Stone Island collar and fake Burberry hat.

They can safely hurl abuse at anyone they think is a home fan, or a pigeon, safe in the knowledge that the main reason we are there is to keep their butts safe from getting a good kicking by the irritated locals. But they won’t tell you that.

And so, with one pile of high risk buffoon safely stashed in a local hostelry where the landlord is only too pleased with the sudden and vast increase in business which has befallen him, and all the free extra security he has just acquired (as of course we are going to have to leave one van full of bobbies at this location to keep an eye on things) the rest of us start trudging back to the railway station to start the cycle once again.

After two or three goes at this game it does start to get boring. Really boring. And it is a game; to both them and us. Our goal is to get the danger gang from location ‘A’ to football ground ‘B’ as quickly and simply as possible, without them destroying any part of our town or the people within. Their goal of course is to prevent, delay or otherwise interfere with our aims, normally taking the very tried, tested and repetitive scenarios of those at the front trying to walk as quickly as they can; those at the back almost losing the ability to walk altogether and those in the middle trying to burst out everywhere they can and create merry mayhem.

It’s also amazing how many people in the soccer snakes suddenly find their shoelaces have come undone so they need to stop and tie them up …. sometimes many times over during the journey.

Arriving at our destination, albeit very noisily form the loud and normally bloody awful singing, and having hopefully incurred the added bonus of walking the fight out of our quarry, disaster strikes.

Several of the other vans of officers, who had travelled some fair distance to support us and clearly hadn’t got a clue about the local layout, flashpoints, or indeed anything else relevant to a town and bunch of people they’d never encountered before, and who were supposed to be monitoring the home crowd had, in a very practical manner, used their vans to create a barrier between the access areas of the ground for the home and away fans.

What they hadn’t done, as we quickly found out to out cost, was to position enough of themselves in the gaps between the vans; rather they were too spread out, possibly waiting for further instructions from the Event Commander or maybe trying to cover to much ground for the y numbers they had available. What this meant in practical terms were a number of gaps big enough for people to easily pass through unhindered. And they did. In droves. Leading very quickly to disorder and brawling right outside the front of the stadium.

As we then battled to restore order and separate the two warring groups, I think it was more the realisation that they were about to miss the start of the match them caused the fighting to cease, rather than the presence of a couple of dozen yellow coat wearing cops waving silly little sticks about that caused the fighting to stop, and both groups scuttled of to their respective stands to watch the ‘gentleman’s game’ in action.

For us it was time to breathe. We’d been on the road since before 6.00am – 9 hours ago and already we were bushwhacked. As well as dealing with the one main crowd, we;d been split off here and there to deal with ‘sporadic outbursts’ across the town centre where small pockets of opposing fans had come into contact with varying degrees of outcome.

In a rare moment of forward planning, it had already been considered a high risk game and so plans had been made for early and late PSU’s and word came over the radio our relief vans were about to deploy into position so we could stand down and return to our home stations, tired, sweaty, battered and bruised.

The end of the game was to be another teams problem. And from the updates we got the following day, a problem it was, with more fighting and running battles after the match going on until mid evening.

It’s a great game football isn’t it ? ….or not ?

For me, I’d rather chuck a tin of wet paint at a wall and watch it dry but each to their own.

All I want to know is, considering all the vast amounts of money flying around in main league football, does the public really think the general taxation purse should have to keep forking out tens of thousands of pounds a time to deal with a problem that the game itself can’t get under control …. or should the clubs themselves be charged a fair old levy depending on the troublemakers associated with their club and ground ? That might just focus their minds just enough to do more to help stamp the problem out.

Guest blog by Mike Pannett

It’s no surprise that in the recent National Rural Crime Survey nearly two-thirds of respondents thought that the police weren’t doing a good job and felt less safe as a result. Government soundbites say the police “must do more with less”. The “less” refers to less funding, but the truth is it actually means fewer police officers. More than 12,000 front-line officers in fact, with at least another 15,000 to go over the next two years. That’s on top of 35,000 departing civilian staff, whose work needs to be covered by officers.

The knock-on effect is that police have to put much smaller numbers of officers where the demand is greatest, just to cope with crime and disorder in the cities, towns and sprawling estates. The glaring consequence of this, of course, is that it makes rural areas ripe for the picking.

We’ve recently seen a spate of criminal gangs brazenly ripping out cash machines from walls in quiet rural towns at 4am. After all, the odds of coming across patrolling police officers is pretty slim, and with a police helicopter coming from 100 miles away, escaping into the night is pretty much a certainty. If they can get away with brazen acts like this, what chance of getting caught sneakily stealing fuel, tools, tractors, quad bikes or livestock in the dead of night?

So where are the police at night? Well, behind the scenes the Government is telling the police to forcibly reform. In the face of hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of cuts, senior officers are looking at tearing up the familiar policing model and starting again from scratch.

Terrorism, online fraud and sex offences, all investigatory roles, are the policing priorities of now and the foreseeable future, which means they are getting the lion’s share of finances and resources. The police left over – the visible uniformed officers – simply can’t manage to do as good a job as before when it comes to traditional roles such as patrolling the streets, community policing and maintaining road safety. The creeping effect of this is already being felt in rural communities which increasingly feel they’re being left to fend for themselves. There is a massive issue around the under-reporting of rural crime and figures due out are likely to show that criminals are actively preying on vulnerable rural communities.

The role of the police officers we see around our local communities is vast. Often highly experienced, I call them “the golden thread” when it comes to gathering vital intelligence and building relationships. To simply remove them is disastrous on so many levels.

The harsh reality of the huge reductions to finances and sweeping reorganisation currently facing the police face means those at the top of policing, along with Police Crime Commissioners, are weighing up how they manage and police the greater risk to society. They have to consider the risk represented by rural burglaries and thefts against the threats posed by child exploitation, sex crimes and terrorism.

It’s like having four sick children and only having enough money to take two of them to the doctors. Such an awful predicament doesn’t bode well for rural communities.

So where are we going? Well the police service is being rebuilt – not by choice, but by the dire financial constraints imposed upon it. Some police chiefs have warned that it’s the end of bobbies on the beat, which for the public means the end of police patrols both in cars and on foot. The police who are left out and about will be busy with reactive policing – taking a crime report, taking statements or processing an arrest related to something that has already occurred – rather than having sufficient numbers of police to have prevented the crime in the first place. It’s a dreadful way to work but that’s the reality and what’s now happening.

It’s no wonder crime figures are rising and surveys show reducing confidence in our rural police. Ordinary police officers I know can’t influence any of this. The PCs, sergeants and inspectors are at their wits’ end. Dedicated police officers are run ragged and bogged down with files and investigations (the only thing this government hasn’t reduced is bureaucracy) because now there are only four or five of them policing our towns and villages, whereas four years ago there were 10 or 12.

My real concern is how and where the public fit into this? Who is asking what we think and what we want? Police bosses and the Home Office are identifying amongst themselves what the policing priorities should be are and everything else gets measured on a scale of risk. Where does the theft of tractors and livestock and general rural policing sit on that scale? It’s worrying isn’t it?

I do empathise with the predicament the police bosses find themselves in. In manager-speak, members of the public are known as “stakeholders” and we should be aware of exactly what is at stake. There are fundamental changes going on and we must ensure that we, the stakeholders, are consulted. The transformation of our police service must be done with our consent.

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This article originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post newspaper on August 1st 2015

You can follow Mike Pannett on Twitter > @MikePannett

Or visit his website > www.mikepannett.co.uk

I’ve just read a blog post on an American police related website. The story, as the site tells us all of the articles on it are, is satire. No more, no less. Sounds a bit like my site actually.

the problem with this particular blog post is that the more you read it, the more it actually begins to sound like the sort of policing scenario we are allowing ourselves to fall into this side of the pond.

It sort of goes along this theme …

Police departments across the country are pulling patrol officers off the road. Police will still be on duty but will only respond to 911 calls. No pro-active policing will take place.

It quotes the now famous (or infamous if you prefer) Kansas Patrol Experiment as a basis for this change in policing policy and reason for hiding all the cops away until they are called for.

If you want to read the whole thing, it’s here > http://www.callthecops.net/police-ending-patrol-operations-response-public-fear-cops/

The Kansas City Experiment, for those who don’t know, was carried out, oddly enough in Kansas City in 1972 and 1973. Yes, even that long ago police were actually carrying out research on how to do the job better !

It was designed to test the assumption that the presence (or potential presence) of police officers in marked police cars reduced the likelihood of a crime being committed as opposed to just making people ‘feel’ safer. It was the first study to demonstrate that research into the effectiveness of different policing styles could be carried out responsibly and safely.

It worked like this :

Officials took three different police beats in Kansas City, and varied the patrol routines in them. The first group received no routine patrols, instead the police responded only to calls for service from residents. The second group had the normal level of patrols, while the third had two to three times as many patrols.

The experiment ran for 12 months, from 1 October 1972 to 30 September 1973.

Victim surveys, reported crime rates, arrest data, a survey of local businesses, attitudinal surveys, and trained observers who monitored police-citizen interaction were used to gather data. These were taken before the start of the experiment (September 1972), and after (October 1973), giving ‘before’ and ‘after’ conditions for comparison.

What the review found at the end was absolutely startling :

1. Citizens did not notice the difference when the frequency of patrols was changed.
2. Increasing or decreasing the level of patrol had no significant effect on resident and commercial burglaries, auto thefts, larcenies (theft to you and I) involving auto accessories, robberies, or vandalism crimes.
3. The rate at which crimes were reported did not differ significantly across the experimental beats.
4. Citizen reported fear of crime was not affected by different levels of patrol.
5. Citizen satisfaction with police did not vary.

The conclusion was that routine preventive patrols in marked police cars had little value in preventing crime or making citizens feel safer and that resources normally allocated to these activities could better be allocated elsewhere.

Moving back to this side of the water, this is exactly the style and process of policing we are fast plummeting towards, whether the great and the good on the top floor wish to admit and acknowledge it or not.

We are already seeing the decimation of Neighbourhood Policing Teams, both officers and PCSO’s up and down the country. Local knowledge is being lost hand over fist and in an increasing number of areas, cops are being withdrawn back into cars as a drastically reduced number of staff tries to cope with a vastly increasing demand for service.

We are running head over heels into a firefighting model of policing. Paraphrasing back to the American blog article;

The FD is not out patrolling looking for fire. EMS is not out patrolling looking for sick people. So why are we patrolling looking for crime?

All that I’m surprised about here is than one or more of our crazy think-tanks hasn’t already picked up the Kansas model, Anglicised the odd word or two, passed it off as their own and tried to get it introduced over here … or maybe they have and we are now seeing the beginning of the end … ?

The problem of course with this method is, we do things differently over here. We police by consent for a start. Going back to the original Peelian Principle that the police are the public and the public are the police.

In the UK the police are ‘of the people’ (although some would like to make you believe otherwise), we are citizens in uniform, not agents of the state.

Our communities like to see police officers out and about; they like to see bobbies on foot patrol; they like to say ‘Good Morning’ and tell us face to face about their issues and concerns.

Does having a police officer walk the beat around your estate prevent crime ? Who knows; it may do, it may not. It’s an immeasurable quantity … and by definition you can’t measure the success of that. What it does do of course, is make the local people feel better and safer, and as we all know whatever the crime level in a given area, the fear of crime locally is always many times higher.

There’s another Peelian Principle we perhaps forget too often as well – the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Either way, unless some drastic intervention and strong leadership is forthcoming to protect the system of policing that we now have, it’s going to take more than clicking a pair of red shoes to sort the mess out !

We live in austere times you know. Thought I’d just mention that in case you’d been living down a remote Peak District cave for the past half decade and hadn’t heard.

The last few years have been cut this, cut that, cut the other – not just in policing, but in all the essential emergency and public services.

It may appear somewhat perverse or at odds to simple folk like you and me, that an immense amount of money has been spent in the last few years telling us how to cut costs and save money but it has !

Looking just at policing, across the land, Chief Police Officers have had to make some very difficult decisions about how to reduce the amount of money spent on policing, whist still trying to provide an acceptable level of service to the public.

Whether they have so far been successful or not will depend perhaps on your point of view – public, police of bean counter. Yes, a thankless task I will agree and maybe subject material for another blog other than this, but some of the seemingly ‘odd’ decisions taken do make me stop and think ‘really ??’

Take for instance police stations .. well actually, someone already has because there aren’t a great deal of them left. Many have been sold off across the country, and at what cost to the respective local communities. And at what ‘actual’ cost to the respective forces.

Let us consider the closure of one hypothetical police station in a small town somewhere non specific where the staff based have been moved to a central station around 15 miles away in the name of efficiency. After all, 15 miles is not a long distance in the bigger scheme of things is it ??

So you sell the building, for say £250,000, nah, let’s be generous, say £300,000. Some capital released there, and a bit of a saving on ongoing running costs; water, electric, rates, etc.

Trouble is, once you’ve sold that building, you can’t sell it again.

It’s gone.

Forever.

What can you sell off to cut more money next time in an organisation where the vast majority of your operating costs are in staff salaries and now non existent real estate anyway ?

You’ve still got to house those staff. And when they are based somewhere else they will be adding additional costs onto the maintenance and running of wherever they are then posted. Not as much as the costs at the station just closed of course, but it’s certainly not a ‘zero cost’ option.

And then there are the cars. You still have to police the areas covered by the station you have just closed so the officers now based elsewhere will need to drive further to get to their place of work in the first place.

And because you are now further away, you might even need more cars – because for instance, the Neighbourhood Team, who traditionally walked everywhere, are now also 15 miles from where they need to be and it’s gonna be a long walk for them.

On a good day I’m sure it could be a very pleasant walk, but when it’s chucking it down with rain or 2 feet deep in snow, maybe not so much fun.

On top of that, the average walking speed is 3.1mph. So it’s going to take them about 5 hours to walk to get on patch. And that’s assuming those pesky Neighbourhood Teams don’t stop and talk to anyone on the way, which is something they have that annoying habit of doing.

And when they get to where they need to be to start work, it’s another 5 hour walk back to the station to book off.

The average Neighbourhood Team shift is 8 or 9 hours long. So, every day, if they just walked to patch then straight back, they would already be into overtime, and will not have even done a single thing when they got there.

Maybe not an entirely realistic approach but you can see the point.

And back to those cars. Let’s say you now have three police patrol vehicles to cover that patch.

It’s 15 miles each way to get from the station to ‘on patch’ so each police vehicle has a 30 mile round trip from station to patch and back before it does any actual patrolling.

And you have three cars. So that’s 3 x 30 mile round trips a day – 90 miles, before you do any police work.

And of course, there are three shifts a day to account for. So that’s 3 x 90 miles – 270 miles a day travelled just to get the police vehicles on patch.

Not a single bit of patrol done yet and not a single incident attended remember !

Ohh, and another thing – there are 365 days in a year (yes, I know about leap years but stick with  me) and as response teams work every day of the year (feel free to take note some of you Specialist Units) that’s 270 miles a day x 365 days a year = 98,550 miles covered per year by three police vehicles, just to get from a police station to where they need to be to start work for the day.

Now, I don’t profess to be an expert on these matters, but I’d stick my neck out and suggest there’s a fair old amount of money required here for extra fuel and running costs, plus additional wear and tear that was never needed before … so suddenly the financial savings from closing that police station begin to diminish just that little bit more.

It wasn’t that long ago that operational vehicles were replaced at 100,000 miles anyway, so by those figures, just getting to patch and back would cost an additional panda a year for every three you already have !

Then the replacement intervals went up to 120,000 … and then 150,000 … and the odd one or two of our vehicles has got a fair few miles more than that on the clock !

In fairness, the modern motor car IS better built than those of yesteryear, and as such should be able to manage a longer lifespan and higher mileage than it’s grandpappy built 20 years ago, but don’t forget, the police don’t use their 1.3 basic spec diesel Astra’s / Focus’s / Hyundai’s or whatever in the same way that Granny Smith from number 73 does; popping down to the post office once a week and then off to see Auntie Joyce on a Sunday. Police vehicles are in use, commonly hard use, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Much as many would have you believe, they aren’t ‘souped up’, they aren’t ‘chipped’ and they aren’t that quick either ! What they are is falling apart every five minutes because they are a domestic product being used in a commercial environment being held together by copious amounts of gaffa tape and a workshop who’s own staffing levels have also been decimated . Try using your £150 house washing machine in a laundrette and see how long it lasts, that’s where we’re at !

And I’ve just remembered something else I forgot to throw into the equation – staff. Those pesky police officers and PCSO’s that have to drive those rattle-bang police cars and go to those incidents.

Yes, I know they are already there so they don’t cost any more no matter which station they are based at. But it does cost by moving them – in their time, the additional time travelling between stations; the time between when one shift leaves the town to travel back to the new station to hand over to the oncoming shift who then have to travel back, the time when they are not ‘on patch’ doing their job, serving the public.

What are we really saving in the bigger scheme of things ?

Many moons ago, I worked in the buying office. Well actually it was a shared office where I did all the marketing/promotional & sales support work for the company and I shared it with the Buyer, but I used to help him out as well as he was generally busier than I, and so I learned a lot in quite a short space of time.

The first lesson he taught me, and one that stuck in my mind from day one, and can be applied to most situations, so stand by and get ready to make notes is ….

the cheapest price is rarely the best value !

This can often be translated more simply as ‘buy cheap, buy twice … or in police terms three or four times’ …

It’s a concept which seems to have past swiftly by the memory nodes of the vast majority of people in purchasing departments of most public sector organisations like a Japanese Bullet Train that’s three seconds behind schedule !

Think about this for example ….

When I helped in the afore-mentioned Buying office, we used to handle some rather large accounts, including some Government departments (and the odd police force or two as it happens)

One of the organisations we had the contract to supply a particular brand of photocopier paper to used to have some of the equipment they purchased made in the United States. This equipment had to have instruction manuals with it and because the equipment was coming back into the EU, those instruction manuals were to be printed on A4 paper.

This led to two problems for the American supplier of their products to our client back here in the UK.

Number one was that the Americans, for very complicated reasons I’m not sure I even want to think about, don’t use civilised paper sizes, they have their own, and they can’t even decide on that completely, so they have 2 common sizes; US Letter and US Legal, neither of which are the same as A4

Their number 2 problem was that as part of their contract, they had to produce their products using materials authorised by their client back here in Blighty, even down to the instruction manuals, which had to be produced to A4 size, using the ‘authorised’ brand of paper, which we held the contract to supply.

Still following ?? I bet you can guess what’s coming next.

Because of the way these Government contracts worked, this massive multi-national conglomerate on the West Coast of the USA was compelled to buy the paper for it’s instruction manuals from a small business in sunny old England.

And, because, as many manufacturing companies do, they operated on a ‘just in time’ principle, they would place an order with ourselves and demand delivery within 72 hours.

Have you ever considered the concept, and cost !!, of shipping pallets of paper from England to the west coast of the USA in 72 hours.

I have …. and I became quite an expert in it. It can be done. On some days we could trim it down to less than 48 hours end to end. Suffice to say, even back in the early 90’s, I could have brought a fairly decent new car every couple of weeks with the money being thrown at shipping costs alone.

Now, it’s easy to say that a multi-national can afford to do this but, don’t forget, they were building these costs into their tenders and ultimately selling products back to us, the UK taxpayer, so we, as UK plc were in effect paying for all of this unnecessary buffoonery. But no one could change it because that’s the way it was !

Being the helpful, diligent people we were, we even tried to come up with ways to make this process quicker, simpler and cheaper – all those qualities that work well out there in the real world.

We soon established that the manufacturer of the ‘authorised’ paper brand actually sold the same product in the USA in commercial sheet sizes, and so it seems easy, and obvious to us, that we could arrange for the processing mill in America to cut large sheet sizes into European A4 and supply from there … but no, that could not be done.

The paper company were happy to oblige, but both the equipment manufacturer and client over here wouldn’t have that because …. wait for it …. the very same paper is sold under a different brand name in USA so is not on the authorised supply list. You really could not make it up but that appeared to be public sector purchasing for you !

There is another tale I could tell about us being asked to take over the end of contract for supply of Post-It notes, you know those little yellow sticky message notes, after the company with the contract went under, and the Gov department for whom that contract existed, was paying 50% more than retail and refused all our attempts to offer the product at a greatly reduced price because ‘we can’t change the contract price’ but I’ve bored you enough already.

And anyway, this blog is supposed to be about staples and sticky tape !

As part of the afore-mentioned austerity measures, it has been brought to my attention that some bright spark has taken it upon themselves in at least one force to try and cut costs a bit more by only putting one staple into officers pocket notebooks instead of two.

Now these little things are our life and blood, No, not the staples, the pocket notebooks … although drawing blood from a badly stapled staple was not an unusual occurrence in itself. Everything of note has to be recorded in a police officers pocket notebook and it is a disclosable document which can be used in a court of law.

Aside from the almost necessary requirement of drawing silly little pictures in the pocket notebook of any officer who leaves their’s lying around unattended (disclaimer: I have only ever heard rumour of this and never seen any real-life examples anywhere .. ever .. at all )  they do need to be kept in a reasonable condition and looked after.

Most officers would lose count of however many times a day they take their pocket notebook out of their … well .. pocket … write in it and put it back again so you can imagine the amount of wear they take – they are only a thin card cover and paper pages inside after all.

So, when they only have one staple in them, in the middle, all of the pages ‘wobble’, become loose and very quickly start falling out. And there belies the problem.

Someone decided saving one staple per pocket notebook was going to help solve all of the financial crises facing the British Police Service.

What they didn’t count on was the much larger costs incurred by police officers now having to use roll upon roll of sticky type to fix the pages back into their pocket notebooks because the damn things keep falling apart !

And that one small example completely typifies where we are going wrong in trying to save money in policing and massively missing the whole point of the exercise.

.

“My neighbours blocking the path again, why don’t you lot f***in’ ever do anything about it ? …. If you don’t sort it, I’ll f**in’ sort it myself !!!”

And so began the opening gambit to yet another call to police (on 999 of course !!) regarding neighbourhood disputes.

Don’t get me wrong, in many cases, problems between neighbours have festered for a very long time and evolved into some pretty serious situations, with lives literally being made hell by one person or family who is completely adamant that the general rules of society don’t apply to them …… unless of course they themselves have an issue, which is most days, when the whole goddam universe spins on its axis and for the gazillions time this month, revolves solely around them.

And footpaths, driveways and other such areas being blocked by poor, inconsiderate or downright illegal vehicle parking is the source of a great many calls to police; it fact, in some areas it can be as high as 70-80% of nuisance complaints forthcoming. It’s certainly up around that mark in Chaos Town believe me.

On this occasion however, neither the caller of the offenders address were on our systems, so there was no ‘history’, no ‘known nominal’ and no flagged up ‘system warnings’ and so the Control Room decided to despatch one of our local PCSO’s, Derek, to have a look at what the issue was and see if they could assist / intervene / resolve.

There may of course been a situation on-going for some period of time or another, but it certainly had not been brought to the attention of the local constabulary.

Sending a ‘mere’ PCSO to Mr Angry of leafy suburb street, was just adding fuel to his fire …. “What’s wrong with your lot”, “can’t they even be bothered to send us a proper copper”, “you can’t do nothing, you’re a waste of time anyway” were, apparently, just some of the opening lines of grief Derek encountered. Why he didn’t just walk away at that point instead of standing there taking the grief is beyond me – at the end of the day, whether or not you like or approve of the Community Support Officer role (for my ten penneth they are invaluable to us, because they are actually allowed to get out there and walk the streets and, wait for it …. still talk to people), there is no need or reason to be abusive to anyone who is just trying to help.

Anyway …. my erstwhile colleague did stand there and take the unwarranted flak thrust in his direction, and from the later recollection as he recounted the tale, found it very difficult to remain composed when it transpired the focus of objection, strife and abomination in the street was not in fact the neighbours vehicle, but indeed their overgrown front garden hedge !

“Well” said the by now bemused Derek, still trying to remain fully professional … “have you spoken to your neighbour and asked them to cut their hedge back ?”

“NO” came the instant and balling reply “Not, my problem to sort it, that’s why I called your lot, well the cops anyway …”

“To be quite honest Sir, there’s not a great deal in reality the police can do about an overgrown hedge” Derek continued “but as it’s affecting the footpath, maybe the local council might be able to do some..” but before they could continue any further Mr Over-Angry interjected loudly “That f***in’ lot are more of a bunch of w***ers that you lot, why do I bother paying the f***in’ poll tax just for you lot to swan around doing sod all .. just go, get out of my house“

Remaining still the polite one, Derek simply replied “No problem, I will just pop round next door myself on the way out and have a little word, let them know about the problem, do you know their name by chance ?”

“Haven’t got a clue and I don’t care” was the answer and so our friendly PCSO wandered off down the garden path. Apparently Mr Less-Than-Impressed was still rambling at the top of his foul mouthed voice all the way until the gate at which point he clearly decided he’d ‘shown us what for’ and went back inside his haven of peace and tranquillity.

Passing the protruding privet, Derek then went up the garden path of the property next door, also noting that the front garden, clearly once very well kept and landscaped was now also very overgrown. A multitude of once pristine and sculptured plants and flowers were now succumbed to the green weed a la the red weed from War of The Worlds).

Apparently, peering through the un-curtained front window of the property also revealed a room that had also seen better (and tidier times). For quite an ‘affluent’ part of town to which the forces of law and order rarely have cause to visit, in the space of a few minutes Derek had encountered first of all, the type of ‘regular’ caller we normally have the pleasure of visiting daily on the Meadow Fields estate, and now he found himself at the home of clearly a previously unknown domicile of the Great Unwashed of Society.

How wrong it turned out Derek was going to be … well in relation to the second premises anyway.

Knocking the door at this house resulted in the much as expected no response form inside, even though it could be heard that a TV or radio was on somewhere within the property, albeit at a remarkably lower volume than is the norm at properties we tend to visit.

Having waited a short while for the non-response, Derek was half way back down the weed strewn path when the front door finally opened and Derek turned to see not the overweight, underworked and over Jeremy Kyle’d tracksuit wearing family of miscreants, but rather a very small, frail, polite and elderly gentleman called Ernest.

Ernest is 83.

Ernest lost his wife of 55 years, Dorothy, who passed away in 2010.

Ernest has 2 children and 5 grandchildren.

Ernest now lives alone.

As Derek quickly found out, Ernest does not see much, if anything of his family. He doesn’t drive. In fact on his meagre pension he doesn’t get to do an awful lot.

The family rarely visit. He still religiously sends Birthday and Christmas cards to the grandchildren but never gets a thank you back.

Ernest explains this by telling Derek that its ‘’”alright” how busy his children are with their own lives and problems, and of course that he “doesn’t want to be a burden” to them.

Both of Ernest’s children, as Derek soon found out, live less than a twenty minute drive away. But they still don’t visit.

Ernest does his best to live his life without being a bother to anyone so it seems. Derek, bless him, decided this was time to sit one old guy down, make him a brew, and spend some quality time making someone else life a little better. It that what Derek is paid to do ? Some would say no, but in my books it’s a big fat YES !!! What better example of community engagement could you ask for than making sure one of the more genuinely vulnerable members of our society was being properly cared for ?

As their chat continued, Derek discovered that Ernest grew up in a Northern town, left school, did his National Service, met and married Dorothy and then went to work in a factory when he spent much of his career, paying his taxes, never claiming anything back, only moving to ChaosTown after retirement, strangely enough, to be near the children and grandchildren …..

Ernest’s home wasn’t a ‘mess’ .. but it certainly wasn’t the tidiest of places. To save money, like so many elderly people on the breadline, was basically living in two rooms – his bedroom and the kitchen. the rest of the house appeared to have remained untouched and unchanged since the day Dorothy departed.

“Do you get any help” Derek asked. “Help with what ?” Ernest replied “I manage ok, there’s plenty who need the help more than me you know” . It was a typical make do and mend attitude which kept that generation going through the difficult years after the Second World War.

When Ernest asked Derek what had caused him to visit and Derek mentioned about the hedge, Ernest was mortified, physically upset that, in his mind, he had caused a problem for the neighbours.

“I’m so sorry” he kept repeating, I’ll get out and cut it in the morning I promise”. And he probably would have tried as well bless him, at the crack of dawn probably !!

“No, no” replied Derek “Don’t worry about it, I’ll give a guy I know at the Council a ring, see if he can help us”, knowing he was owed more than a few favours and thought this would be a good time to call one in. “I’ll pop back tomorrow and let you know how I get on” he said, as Derek got up to leave.

Carrying on with his day, and with his patrol, Ernest must have clearly been playing on Derek’s mind. I’d already heard him on the radio asking for a series of checks to be carried out and for a Social Services referral to be put through but didn’t realise just how much luck Derek was about to have along his way.

Heading towards the municipal park in town, Derek bumped into a couple of the local Council Landscape Gardeners tending to the grounds. He took the opportunity to ask them who the best person to contact or harass to try and get Ernest a bit of help would be. It was by now somewhere around 4.45pm on a Friday afternoon– just coming up to their knocking off time for the weekend.

Derek was generally chatting with these guys, recalling what had gone on during the day, his long chat with Ernest, the attitude of the next door neighbour and Ernest’s kids when the two Council employees said “Jump in the van mate. Show us where it is and we’ll have a look see. We’ll have a word with the foreman and see what he thinks”

And with that Derek guided the two chaps to Ernest’s home and let them see for themselves what the problem was.

Apparently, the guys stood there, shaking their heads, and when Mr Angry of this Parish came out to nose at what was going on, they weren’t shy at all with coming forward and telling him exactly what they thought of him and how he should have been first in line to help the old guy out !

Derek and the two Council guys then went and quickly knocked on Ernest’s door. “We’ll speak to our gaffer on Monday Sir” said one of the groundsman, “I’m sure we can fit in trimming your hedge a bit for you, won’t take us long at all”

Ernest was overcome with emotion, and desperately tried to start thrusting money from his wallet at the two workmen which they had a heck of a battle on their hands to get Ernest to keep.

Finally, they all left, Ernest back to his own devices, the council workmen to go home, and Derek to head back to station to book off for the day.

Sometimes, and it is only occasionally, you take your working day home with you. For most of the time, we have to try and leave it behind; to separate our work and home life. It’s a coping mechanism as much as anything – plus a lot of the time we tend not to tell our nearest and dearest war and peace of what’s been going on so as not to worry them any more – ask the partners of anyone in the police family; many of them worry every day about whether they are next for that knock on the door that comes around far too often.

On this day, it was Ernest that Derek took home with him. Not literally, but in his mind. Derek discussed his concerns with his wife who, as wives always seem to manage instantly, came up with a plan … or rather a cake ! Derek now had specific instructions from Moonbase Alpha to return to Ernest’s house the following day, with a gift of a freshly cooked jam and cream filled Victoria Sponge to lift his spirits … (memo to self – must question Derek as to why he never brings these delicacies in for the troops at work …)

And so it was … 10.00am the following day, a Saturday morning, Derek blissfully headed back in the direction of Ernest’s home to deliver a prime example of his good lady’s cooking skills, when on turning the corner into the street he got the absolute shock of his life !

Outside Ernest’s home were not one but two Council vans and beavering away were the two groundsmen Derek had bumped into the day previous, along with a couple other of their colleagues.

Derek headed straight in their direction “Blimey, that was quick” he said “but on a Saturday as well, that’s gonna cost the poor old guy a fortune”

“Not a penny” came the response “I got home last night and said to my missus what you told us. She agreed we needed to do something so I called Manny (his colleague) and then the boss and asked if we could borrow the van and tools this morning to give the old fella a chuck”

“Thing was” he carried on, “the boss insisted in coming along to give us a hand and roped one of the other lads in as well ! We’ll have old Ernie’s placed sorted in no time. Is that cake ?”

“Best I go have a word with Ernest and and stick the kettle on” Derek told them and went off to make himself busy

And there it was; a bunch of complete strangers, giving up their own time to help a guy in genuine need of a bit of a hand.

They didn’t have to but they chose to. They weren’t getting paid but it didn’t matter.

So next time someone slags off PCSO’s or says to you we should be out there doing ‘proper police work’, catching the proverbial muggers thieves and rapists, just remember Ernest … is he any less worthy of our attention that ranting Tracey or Wayne down the flats who can’t sort out their own self-induced mess of a handout dependent lifestyle and ring us constantly, demanding we sort out their issues with the latest ‘other half’ they’ve hooked up with and now want rid of because something better has come along …. until next week when the whole cycle starts again ??

Is Ernest any less worthy than any of the other multitude of demands for service that the police receive every single day ??

His neighbour had failed him; his own family had definitely failed him, the local Adult Social Care Services had failed him. But the policing family and the guys from the Council Maintenance Team didn’t.

I think that’s something to be damn proud of !

Cue the music ….

“Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the …” hold on a minute, ain’t that a tad sexist these days … why can only men be heroes ??

Anyway, moving on quickly. Picture the scene; you’re on holiday at the beach with your partner and kids, when suddenly you become aware of a commotion a few hundred metres off shore. Along with half the rest of the beachgoers, you jump up and start looking out into the now choppy waves and can see two youngish kids on an inflatable crocodile, being pulled out to sea by the current.

What do you do ??

Even if you were a strong swimmer, it would be far too far to swim out – you would likely come down with exhaustion or hypothermia before you got half way there and end up dead yourself.

No, what you do is call 999 and ask for the Coastguard who’ll more than likely page the nearest RNLI Lifeboat. In a remarkably short space of time, around the bay you will see a blaze of orange as a dedicated crew of seafaring guys and girls charge to the rescue and return the children (and their crocodile) to terra firma..

As a matter of course, the Coastguard will contact the police and couple of bobbies may be despatched as well, but what they won’t be doing is going into the water.

There’s absolutely no point or use in another dead hero. Police officers are neither trained nor equipped for dealing with such an emergency. That’s why we have specialist rescue services like the Lifeboats.

No, what the police will be there to do is ‘manage the incident’ – quite how they are expected to do that from a beach several hundred metres and a few million gallons of salty water away is beyond me but hey, I don’t make the rules ! You can bet though, that the officer that doesn’t submit the necessary ‘child in danger’ incident report will be licking the Super’s boots clean for the next month and a half.

Now, imagine you are walking up a hill, a really big hill, nay a mountain. I do a lot of hill and mountain walking myself, especially in the Lake District (other mountain ranges available at no extra cost).

If you see me, don’t forget to wave !!

Anyway, three quarters of the way up this mountain, in a particularly inaccessible area; you know, the sort of place you’ve just spent an hour doing a vertical ascent followed by a grade one scramble  and shimmied across the worlds narrowest ledge to get to, you happen upon 2 or 3 people in a total state of panic.

One of their group is lying on the ground, writhing around in absolute agony. The party quickly tell you the casualty has fallen a good 50 – 60 metres down the rockface, but luckily, some of the regions finest granite had stopped their descent, aided admirably by the casualty’s own head which had operated as a sort of dampener brake.

You can just about remember the basics of that first aid refresher you did nine months ago, although most of the flashbacks relate to practising bandage wrapping by tying the most senior ranking officer present on the course to the nearest chair, radiator or light fitting you can find, all in the name of team morale boosting of course !

This is serious though. Common sense kicks in and you can manage the basics to keep the injured party safe, warm and try to prevent their condition getting any worse. You need help. And fast !

What do you do ? Call 999 for the police of course.

What happens next is not a Land Rover full of appropriately trained bobbies coming to the rescue. No, what the police control room does is contact the nearest Mountain Rescue Team who, before you know it, will be on their way with all the kit and experience needed to extract an injured person for the most impossible to reach places, and get them to help just as fast as they can.

I’ve been around this situation and believe me, the sound of an approaching diesel Land Rover engine or the bark of an over excited rescue border collie charging towards you leading a team of Orange Knights is the best feeling in the world !

Before you know it, a team of fully trained, often medically qualified professionals will have taken over and begun the process of removing the casualty from the mountain side to a place where either a rescue helicopter of land ambulance can take over and head for the nearest A&E.

The police will most probably turn out as well, but their role will most likely be to ‘oversee’ the ongoing rescue and relay ‘important’ information back to a Duty Officer clutching his pension countdown statement sat in a comfy chair in a nice office somewhere a long, long way away and many degrees warmer and drier than where you find yourself at this moment..

And if that wasn’t all enough action for one day, when you and your family get back down off the mountain, there’s a blizzard. Within half an hour there’s so much snow you can’t see 10 feet in front of the car. it’s a white out. There’s nothing you can do but sit and wait with all the other drivers, hoping it will go away …. but it doesn’t.

After several hours you all realise you are stranded on the road. No way out. The road doesn’t exist any more. The landscape is just one big fluffy white cushion.

You aren’t anywhere near prepared for this. There’s no food or water supplies in your car, you only have the clothes on your back and slightly les than a quarter tank of fuel left to run the engine and keep everybody warm.

It’s time to call for help.

What you do is call 999 and speak to the police control room operator. What they do next is call out the nearest search and rescue team; a bunch of highly trained professionals, experienced in handling crises just like this and with the right equipment to deal with any scenario.

Again, the police will most likely be deployed, but in reality their role will be a minor one.

The point I’m making here is that in the UK, we are fortunate to have some very professional, very well trained, very well equipped, very enthusiastic mountain, cave, lowland and sea rescue personnel ….. and they are all volunteers !! … Charities !! … even our air ambulances, although crewed by paid staff, are funded and operated by charitable donations.

We all, yes you and I as well, pay a great deal of money to the Government every year through direct and indirect taxation, partly to fund our 999 emergency services, but when the going gets tough, do the tough get going ? No, they pick up the phone and call on the assistance of Geoff the plumber and Nigel the ex army guy.

Now that’s in no way meant as a derogatory statement but the fact is when push comes to shove, your life and wellbeing doesn’t necessarily rely on the statutory emergency services, how fast I can drive a clapped out old 150K miles on the clock diesel Astra to get to your aid or how good the micro-surgeon who is sowing your body parts back together after that argument with the band saw is, it quite often relies on Granny Miggins and the 10p she dropped into a charity box being shook outside Asda last week.

Our volunteer rescue services are fab.

Full stop.

All of them.

Every single one.

Without them, we really would be in big, big trouble. They will turn out in terrible conditions, in the howling wind, rain or snow, in the middle of the night, in sub zero temperatures, without grumbling about it, and will do a fantastic job every time …. without being paid a penny for it. They are, without a shadow of a doubt, each and every one of them, REAL HEROES !

The question I have to ask is ‘Is this the right way to be going about things ?’

So I asked the question, and based on the reply I got I would have to say Yes it is. Keep the Government, Civil Service and all the bureaucracy that goes along with it as far away from these organisations as is humanely possible. I spoke with a fellow police officer who, in his (little) spare time, is also an active member of a volunteer search and rescue organisation. I asked him why he does what he does, and what motivates him. This is what he said:

“Even in the current climate I enjoy being a bobby, I enjoy trying to make a difference even if we don’t always manage it.  Police officers put themselves in harm’s way on a regular basis – we see this through social media, although the mainstream media don’t always choose to share it as a it doesn’t suit their masters’ agendas.  We also remember colleagues and forebears who have lost their lives saving or trying to save others.

“ Despite the commitment of individual officers though, the police service, and all the other emergency services, are hampered by funding and bureaucracy – and I don’t just mean the over-cautious ‘elf and safety’ risk assessments.  Being large government organisations there are tendering processes, contractual obligations, legislation, statements of purpose, departmental remits, all of which inhibit the individuals’ ability to get on with the job on the ground. 

“ Most volunteer rescue teams are self-controlling, cutting through much of this to get to a solution – for example, if we need a particular piece of equipment, we research the best bit of kit for the job and get it.  Likewise if we are asked to go to a job and its within our capabilities we go.  We can often be there, do the job and be back at base in the time it would take the statutory emergency services to fill in the paperwork and do the risk assessment before a single blue light is switched on.”

“In the current financial climate the police are looking to these volunteer teams more and more as a cheaper alternative to paid police resources – seeing how their specialist skills and equipment can assist the ever thinning blue line in ways that they haven’t previously done.  This will inevitably put more of a demand on the volunteers’ time and the charities’ finances.”

“This isn’t to detract from the hard-working cops on the ground, but to highlight the ways in which the voluntary sector can sometimes do things quicker, more efficiently, safer and certainly cheaper than the statutory services.”

If you are still reading this I implore you; Support our volunteer rescue services.

• Visit that charity shop they run,
• Leave them a bequest in your will;
• Drop your loose change in the bucket outside Tesco.
• Run that 10K race dressed as Chewbacca.
• Every single penny is going to help people in desperate times of need.
• Visit their websites, click on their link for the relevant donation page. Give them some money, lots of money.

Please. As much as you can spare because one day, your life could literally depend on it !

There’s been quite a bit in the news recently regarding whether Police Authorised Firearms Officers (AFO’s) should attend ‘routine’ calls (if there ever could be such a thing) whilst actually being armed with their weapons.

The matter first arose publicly in Scotland where after a change in ‘standing policy’ was introduced back in 2013 authorising AFO’s on duty to be permanently armed with their sidearm – typically a Glock 9mm automatic pistol. Such was the outcry form councillors and ‘concerned people’ that Police Scotland back-tracked and revised their policy to state that armed officers would only be sent to specific incident types.

Other police forces in England and Wales have also had a similar working practice for some years, and to most, it makes perfect sense, especially in the ‘Shire’ forces where officer numbers are lower, the area to be covered is bigger, and there is a perhaps bigger need to get the nearest resource to get to an incident that say, would be the case in a major city where available officer numbers are (hopefully) more plentiful.

For clarification here, we aren’t talking officers wandering the streets with MP5 machine guns strapped across their chests all the while – although officers equipped with these have been stationed at airports and other primary locations for many years without concern – we are talking about officers permanently on patrol with sidearms on display (like in the picture above).

From speaking to AFO’s in my own force, who are permanently armed, and do attend all types of calls to police from RTC’s to missing people to domestic incidents to burglaries and beyond, their comments seem to marry up with feedback I’ve received from cops in other forces – namely that the public don’t really care. If they need police they just want officers there, it doesn’t matter if they are armed or not.

My colleagues tell me that most people never seem to notice the pistol strapped to their leg or at least never mention it, but daily they get quizzed about the highly visible, bright yellow Taser that they also carry.

In the new world order, with the massive cuts in funding and officer numbers that have already taken place in the last few years, and the threat of much more of a budget reduction in the next three years, can we really afford to say ‘NO, firearms officers only go to firearms jobs”

Can it be right that an Armed Response Vehicle may be literally minute away from an urgent call for assistance where a person may be real danger, but because there is no ‘firearm’ or ‘weapon’ threat, then a panda from 20 miles away has to respond ?

Surely an armed cop turning up to help is better than no cop at all ??

Remember, the first priority of any police officer is to protect life and property. And AFO’s are everyday police officers. They have just volunteered to take on an additional, very important, role. They still carry a warrant card, still have powers of arrest, and still have taken an oath to uphold the law.

Christopher Salmon, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Dyfed Powys Police has taken the move of polling the public to gauge their opinion on the matter. Now I’m not going to pass comment or judgement on whether that’s his role to be involved with anyway, and if that’s an operational decision that should be left to the forces’ Chief Officers, but the question has been raised again so in the balance of fairness, I’ve created the survey below to ask what you think about the matter.

Now I fully appreciate the majority of people reading this will in fact be police related, either serving or retired officers, their families or friends, but I do also get the odd ‘one or two’ people that aren’t so closely connected to the policing family happening along for a good read too so their opinion is just as, if not more, important.

Please take the survey below, and add your comments on the subject, positive or negative, at the bottom of this page.

“Chaos, I know it’s early and you said you were committed first thing, but we’ve got an job coming in on your patch, can you turn out please ….” came the call over the radio from the Control Room at 07.12 precisely.

Twelve minutes into a shift when I’m supposed to have been written off to complete three file upgrades, all of which rolled in whilst I was on leave last week and were due back to our intrepid bunch of Case File Prep Clerks just as quick – sorry, typing error in previous few words – I inadvertently used the word ‘clerks’ as in the plural. This would have been the case some two years ago however due to the current ‘fiscal climate’, there is one poor sod trying to do the work of three !!

In addition, this ‘streamlined file prep’ malarkey works well …. if you’re a fifth floor office dweller who no longer has to worry themselves with the menial task of producing half a rain-forests worth of paper with the same information written on half a dozen or more forms, just because someone else further along the judicial system than the police hasn’t grasped the concept of turning pages but hey ho that’s where we’re at …..

“Yeah, no problem, what’s the details ?” I replied in my always keen, first day back from leave, I’ve 200+ emails to ignore (sorry I mean go through) and it’s still almost dark outside kind of voice.

“Well it’s a bit of a strange one” said the controller, actually in quite a strange sort of voice. “Dog walker along the lane at the back of the old quarry (which, oddly enough, and as would be known by anyone with the slightest bit of local knowledge is called ….. Quarry Lane) says they’ve found a baby in a bush, we assume it’s some sort of toy but could you go and have a look and see what you can find please”

Thinking to myself ‘bang goes the peaceful start to the day then’ I might as well go and sort this out then get back and carrying on my deforestation plans before the day does get busy I grabbed a set of panda keys off the board (the only set as it happens – our ‘other’ patrol vehicle aka ‘The Shed’ was in workshops again having had one part of another, or more likely several, fall off again) and headed off in the general direction of hopefully, another ‘call with good intent’.

The only niggle I had in the back of my mind was extensive knowledge of the uncanny ability of early morning joggers and dog walkers to find dead bodies lurking in the undergrowth in the most obscure and ‘off the beaten track’ places.

It was a good twenty minute drive from our new ‘operating base’ to the location of the incident, so there was always the chance by the time I got there, said dog walker, or more likely dog, would have sniffed the ‘suspicious package’, declared it safe and moved along. I wasn’t to be that lucky though as I found out when I turned off the road and onto the glorified dirt track which is all that Quarry Lane really is.

Immediately on turning the corner, two ladies in rather brightly coloured / garish / luminous (delete as appropriate) woolly jumpers came running towards we, hands waving frantically in the air and shouting ….. shouting something, I have no idea what. Have you ever tried the concept of listening to people from a good distance away, whilst bouncing around on a pot-holed track in a clattering, banging diesel-engined car that sounds and feels as if it’s about to fall apart at any minute ?

“Quickly, come quickly officer” I could make out the shouts of one woman as I got closer. The others was the far more predictable “I thought you’d have been here ages ago, you haven’t even bothered putting your blue lights on”, we saw you coming down the bypass”.

“Good morning Ladies” was my always courteous response to both “what have we actually discovered along here then ?”

“Don’t tell me they didn’t tell you” retorted lady number two, “God do your lot know what they’re doing about anything these days?”. This was going to be fun.

Anyway, I alighted my patrol vehicle to calls of “come on, come on” as my two new friends began to run back along the track with far more enthusiasm than could have been healthy for them. As we rounded the first bend in the track I saw four more people, along with several of their pet pooches, all stood there, in the middle of the lane, and now staring in my direction. I could see the look of absolute relief on their faces with every single size 11 footstep I took nearer to them, each of them beckoning me on quicker with their waving hands.

When I reached the group, and saw the focus of all their attention, I honestly didn’t know whether to be astounded, amazed or ashamed.

There, on the ground, tucked slightly off the lane itself, under the (not very good cover from the elements) edge of the hedgeline was a small baby.

A very real, alive, kicking and not screaming, but smiling and gurgling baby. Wrapped in a  very clean, white wrap-around blanket. At this point I had no idea just how young or old the baby was, suffice to say it didn’t appear to be newborn.

Now let’s just dwell on this point for a moment. After getting the call from the Control Room, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to reach the location of the incident. Add to that the time taken for one or more of these people now stood in front of me to have discovered this abandoned bundle of joy, probably discuss between themselves what they have found and what on earth they are going to do about it, and whether it’s ‘their problem or not’ in the first place. Hopefully they’ve already had a good look around to make sure whoever left the baby there in the first place wasn’t close by watching, heck even having a wee the other side of the bush !!

On top of that, you then have the physical time taken for someone to call the police, the call taker to record the incident onto the police computer system, and then pass the job to the despatch desk who then has to read the details, grade and then find a resource to send. We can probably safely add a good ten minutes on for all those processes. So there’s around thirty minutes elapsed between the baby being found under a bush and the first police officer arriving at the scene.

Now these were not young people stood around looking at a very young child on the floor in front of them. We are talking half a dozen people aged between mid 40’s to late 60’s. Some of whom I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest have had children of their own. Some may even have grandchildren. Yes between all that age, life experience and maturity, NOT ONE OF THEM HAD THE BASIC NOUSE OR COMMON SENSE TO PICK THE POOR BLOOMIN’ CHILD UP OFF THE FLOOR, OFFER IT SOME COMFORT OR AT A VERY BASIC LEVEL, KEEP THE POOR LITTLE MITE WARM !!!

So what’s the first thing I do …. scoop the little baby up whilst at the same time distributing Darth Vader-esque death stares at the combined forces of insensibility and incompetence stood before me.

“Be careful with it” one of the onlookers called. “Do you know what you’re doing” was the comment from another. IT ????? Luckily, by a fluke of nature and the necessities of the furtherance of mankind, I have had the benefits of parenthood on more than one occasion, but the temptation to respond with more than one comment that certainly wouldn’t be repeatable on here sat very firmly on the edge of my lips.

Having got my new best friend and placed him/her safely onto the front seat of my panda and got the heater going on low just to make sure the infant was comfortable, I was straight on the radio calling for assistance; more units, supervisory attendance, make the Force Duty Commander aware and get me a dog and helicopter like yesterday. Chances were high that whoever had left the babe in a bush would have wanted to make sure they were found and safe. Hopefully that same person would still not be far away.

Just about this point two cars raced up the track behind me. Surely this would be someone connected to the family of the child; mom having got home in a distressed state and blurted out what she had done in desperation, with other members of her family trying to regain control of a very sad and difficult family breakdown. But no, it was more friends of the ‘finding party’ who they had called to spread their gossip, and like rubberneckers at a road crash, wanted to come along and see the spectacle for themselves.

Having told them, perhaps a little impolitely, to shift their cars off the lane or be prepared to be blocked in by just about every emergency vehicle for miles around, I then turned my attention to rallying the people in front of me into some sort of impromptu search party in order that at the very least, we could check the immediate area before the cavalry arrived. Given their keenness to hang around until I got there, I was somewhat disappointed to all bar one of the people present suddenly became very busying with ‘prior arranged appointments’ or needed to take their budgerigar to the hairdressers and so couldn’t help.

Even obtaining all their details so we could get someone round to speak with them later in the day began to be an uphill task with a sudden ‘not getting involved’ and ‘nothing to do with me’ group attitude forming.

Still, within a very short space of time, Pete arrived, having decided this was a far more urgent task, and a more worthy use of his time and efforts than the Facebook slanging match he had been deployed to by the Control Room. oddly though they didn’t seem to see it that way !

Once Pete was with me, I quickly briefed him on the little info I had been able to obtain from my cluster of well-meaning but no longer very helpful bystanders and set him the task of organising a search party for a potential mother or father nearby; tried to keep a straight face as Pete promptly told me exactly what he thought of their communal lack of action, but in normal Pete style, just loud enough so everyone around could hear quite clearly, and then told him I was off to get my new bestest little friend down to the Childrens Ward at the local hospital where they could give the child a proper check over, some food and more importantly, some warmth and attention.

Pete, even more luckily for me, had a Special Constable with him. A strange breed of Special Constable at that. One that is more than happy to come in at 7am on a weekday morning instead of the usual Friday / Saturday night crowd looking for a bit of fun and action.  The extra pair of hands meant I had someone to hold onto the baby whilst I drove (sorry, dear reader, one piece of kit not standard issue in your average panda is a birth to whenever car seat. It’s make-do time !

Now the thing about quarries, just like the one that we were are the rear of, is that they don’t tend to be in the middle of towns; or rather they don’t tend to build towns right on the doorstep of quarries. After all the quarry is going to be where the raw material is and the town is going to be just far enough away so as not to have to put up with the noise, dust and disruption of heavy vehicles and plant machinery going past your window every two minutes.

Being away from a town also commonly mean quarries and the like can be close to local authority borders and boundaries; in the case of our quarry, right on the border, with our location being in one local authority area, and the front entrance, offices and access road in another.

From a policing point of view that causes another issue. Even within the same force, police ‘divisions’ or ‘command units’ do tend to follow local authority borders. As a result of this, it’s common that the two neighbouring divisions will be allocated different radio channels. It makes perfect sense of course – each area is very busy in it’s own right and no one wants to have the airwaves cluttered up with detail and info on something happening miles away in another divisions area.

The problem arises when you actually police on the ‘borderlands’. Something that can be happening just a few metres the other side of the divisional boundary will not be drawn to your attention, even if you were just a few metres your side of the same piece of boundary – simply because it is being controlled by another Controller and essentially, it’s none of your business. Typically specialist resources like Firearms Units and Dog handlers will have extra police radios in their vehicles so they can monitor more than one channel at a time. And it was pretty lucky for us on this morning that one switched on dog handler was doing exactly that ….

Whilst on route to us Ralph, the Dog Handler, along with his faithful pooch Rox, had been re-routed by the neighbouring division to a concern for welfare at Rowsons Aggregates, Valley Rise, where staff had reported a distressed woman wandering around in their machinery yard. Now Ralph doesn’t normally function properly until his fifth cup of disgustingly sweetened coffee but even he was awake enough on this occasion to be able to point out to the Control Room that they were sending him to the front entrance of the same place where we were all at the rear ! It appeared as simple as because neither the company name nor the address included the word ‘quarry’ in it, combined with a different postcode and differing ‘policing divisions’, no one in the call taking or despatch areas had yet made the connection.

Very swiftly, the majority of attending police officers were directed to the main entrance to the quarry and began a systematical search of the premises. Thankfully, at that time of the morning, quarrying operations hadn’t started and so as staff arrived for work, they too were co-opted into the search which was a handy thing really, as it was a vast site to cover as quickly as possible and the workers undoubtedly had a far better knowledge of the layout that we ever could.

Listening in via the radio was very frustrating, and I have to admit to feeling somewhat ‘left out of the action’ despite having the responsibility for the safe delivery of the focus of this entire incident. The Control Room had rung ahead so Staff from the Children’s Ward were waiting at the Hospital entrance for my arrival ready to charge charge of my passenger – and to be fair I was equally as glad to hand the little one over.

I hung around long enough to establish the baby was a he, was guestimated at being about 8-12 weeks old and was extremely clean and well looked after – the nurses reckoned he couldn’t have been on the ground for more than a few minutes at most – something which my skilled detective nose had already considered on the basis that the white robe in which he was wrapped was sparklingly clean. Chances were, we decided, that whoever had left him under the bush had waited until they saw someone heading in their direction and then placed him there to be found very quickly.

Despite all this good news, I was desperately keen to get out of the hospital and find out what was going on with the search for the lady in the quarry. I don’t know about all areas, but our local hospital is a complete deadspot for police radios and so every minute in there was another where I was completely out of the loop.

And so it was. I stepped (or rather ran) out of the front doors of the hospital just as my police radio chirped back into life with the news that Ralph and Rox had located a highly distressed female wandering aimlessly around one of the active and quite inaccessible vertigo inducing areas of the quarry and was calling for other officers to assist him in bringing her to safety. In a strange twist of fate, or maybe just demonstrating the far higher intelligence of dogs, far for adopting the normal aggressive ‘stay still or I’ll eat your face off’ approach Rox normally applies to people, be they the public or fellow police officers when he’s on his working lead, on this occasion Rox clearly sensed the fear, angst and distress in the female and appropriately turned himself back into a three month old, dribbling slobbering, rolling on the floor puppy dog, in an apparent self-induced attempt to put her at her ease.

Once quickly established that lady and child were indeed mother and baby, what followed next was a far too familiar tale of a person driven to the end of their wits/tether/abilities, following the loss of a parent, the breakdown of a relationship, impending redundancy, and goodness knows what else, all in a very short space of time. The signs and cries for help had, as ever, gone un-noticed, or unresolved, and the poor lady had reached that lowest of low points where she clearly felt she could not carry on.

She told Ralph her plan was to make sure little one was taken care of and then fully intended to solve her rapidly deteriorating state of mind by throwing herself several hundred feet into one of the quarry pools.

Never having found myself anywhere near the state of flux that this poor lady found her, I cannot even begin to imagine the thought process that brings a person to this position. I’m equally not sure what it says about the professions who are there to support people in times of crisis, but then again, did they know ? If she were not a ‘regular’ customer of doctors, police, social services, mental health services etc, and this was a singular implosion, how would the statutory services be made aware ?

And what about surrounding family ? Had they not spotted the signs of stress and depression which had led us all to where we were today. Had the lady hidden them all so well that there was nothing to be seen? Had this ‘turn for the worse’ happened on the spur of the moment, that morning? Had, until only a few hours ago, everything seemed happy in the rose garden?

Either way, there was clear evidence that this was a lady who needed help, not hindrance. Protection not punishment.

After being led back to the relative safety of the quarry’s main car park by Rox the Slobber, and checked out by an ambulance crew who had been called to the scene, the young lady was transported to the hospital to be seen by the local Crisis Intervention Team, and hopefully begin some process of support and recovery.

I decided the best thing I could do now was about turn, head back into the Children’s Ward and update the Sister there that mom had been found, safe and well, explained the circumstances as we knew them, and that she was now on route to the very same hospital where we all were, along with her child. The Sister agreed that it was vital that mum and baby be reunited as soon as possible after she arrived, and she gave me her personal assurance that all the necessary buttons would be pressed to get this family the help it so badly needed. Somehow I knew she was determined to make this happen.

In our job, people come and go; we attend soooo many incidents every day that it is impossible to keep track of ‘what happened next’ or even remember many of the jobs a single officer has attended. In fact, due to a multitude of obstacles, normally shoe-boxed under the catchall heading of Data Protection, it’s actually a nigh impossibility to find out how a case you may have been involved with from the start has progressed. This case, of course, was going to stay with many of us for a considerable amount of time.

It was probably a fortnight later when I was called down to the front counter at ChaosTown nick. There, waiting for me, was a lady whom I’d never personally met, along with her father, the remaining parent and a small happy, smiling baby sat in a pushchair. “I just wanted to come and say thank you to everyone” the young lady said. “If it wasn’t for you guys I’d probably be dead by now”.

Well, just what can you say to that ? …. her and dad both started to cry as I tried to usher them both into a side room for a bit of privacy and find out that the Ward Sister had been true to her word, and bent over backwards to set up a whole support system around mother and child, keeping them together as a family unit, rather than tearing them apart.

It made me realise that sometimes, just sometimes, we actually do get to do a great job

A story on the news caught my eye this morning, but not for the reason you were probably thinking.

Read this >> Vagina piercings count as FGM, even if you’re a consenting adult .

Apparently, according to the Department for Health, women who have piercings down below will now be considered to be victims of Female Genital Mutilation.

Let me just say that again in case you missed it. Grown women, of full mental capacity, who make their own decision, of their own free will, to have their private bits pierced, will now be considered victims of a vile and disgusting crime … which by default, must have been committed by well trained staff at highly regulated, clinically clean, piercing parlours.

Now I’m no expert in this, mainly due to lack of available and willing research subjects this morning, but if we can’t tell the difference between a grown woman who wants to have a piercing on her body, no matter where it might be, in a safe, sterile environment, and a young child held down on a grotty back street kitchen table, often by their own family, whilst some complete stranger hacks away at their body for the sake of it, we might as well all pack up and go home now.

It’s also worthy of note that Male genital piercings are not a problem. If that’s not a prime example of double standards, feel free to tell me what is !

Let’s just get this straight. Female Genital Mutilation is VILE. It’s an outdated, barbaric ritual, carried out for culturally backwards reasons intended for the sole purpose that the young girl being violated is not able to enjoy sex as a willing partner, with a willing partner, later in her life … which if you think about it, is the polar opposite of piercings which are intended to actually increase or intensify a womans’ pleasure.

So we have to ask the question, what on earth is the purpose of such a decision ?

We know that FGM is vastly underestimated and vastly underreported. We know it goes on but I think we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we were even touching the tip of the iceberg.

All that a ludicrous move like this will do is swamp the statistics relating to FGM offences, immediately masking, burying, hiding or diluting the true picture of such an horrific crime, and make it far, far more difficult for the police and other agencies to devote adequate resources (especially with fast dwindling budgets) to tackle to true offenders in this.

So ladies, (and gents), I say, if you want to stick things in your bits, crack on and fill ya boots !

On May 10th 2012, over 30,000 people, police and public alike, marched through the streets of London to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Policing budgets were being cut by 20% and jobs were being lost.

Since then, cuts to policing budgets have got bigger, and they will continue to do so for some years to come. Approximately 17,000 police officer posts have gone already. Some sources say numbers may ultimately drop to around 80,000 – and at a time when the UK is facing some of it’s biggest threats in a generation.

On top of this, thousands upon thousands more Support Staff roles have vanished to save money – jobs now being done by police officers, paid a higher wage than those who were doing the role before, but as a result keeping them off the streets where they should be; fighting crime and keeping the public safe.

Lately, I’ve been getting a number of emails and Twitter DM’s asking if I ever thought the police would march against to protest about the latest round of budget cuts.

Initially I,like many others no doubt, said ‘No. what’s the point, it’ll never change anything, minds are made up and that’s that !’

And then I thought, what a defeatist attitude that is. Whether or not anything actually changes is somewhat irrelevant. it matters not so much what effect a march has of policy change as it does the awareness created for the general public.

It is they who will suffer most when more police officer, PCSO and support staff jobs go.

It is they who will suffer most when they call 999 and there is simply no one to respond to their call.

It is they who will suffer when their elderly vulnerable relative goes missing in the cold dead of the night and there is no one to go and look for them.

It is they who will suffer most when having been burgled; their homes violated; their possessions stolen or vandalised, they don’t see an police or forensic officer for days

It is they who will suffer most when as a victim of crime, they do not see justice done for many months because the officer dealing with their case has dozens more like it vying for his or her attention.

It is they who will suffer most when the cost of their shopping or car insurance rises steeply to compensate for the losses incurred through higher crime levels.

The list goes on and on and on …..

So, the question is, IF THE OPPORTUNITY AROSE AGAIN, WOULD YOU MARCH IN LONDON TO SAY ‘#CUTSHAVECONSEQUENCES’ ??

This has nothing whatsoever to do with pay or pensions.

It matters not what change we could ever hope to achieve.

What is important is that the public are aware of the increased dangers they face if there aren’t enough police out there to protect them.

Answer this simple poll YES or NO and feel free to comment below.

The ONLY group capable of organising a second march, with all the planning and logistics involved, is the Police Federation and they are not me. At this time, this is purely hypothetical.

What I will guarantee is that they will be made aware of everyone’s answers and thoughts. Maybe it’s a question for officers to also ask of their Fed Reps ???

The interwebnet of things and Twitterworld have been full this week of an image of a dress. Not just any dress, but the dress, or rather #TheDress to be correct. Did you see a Black and Blue dress or a White and Gold one ? (I saw white and gold by the way).

It’s all something to do with our eyes and ability to see different colours – all very technical but either way, a light hearted demonstration of peoples perception of colours and the light spectrum.

The Salvation Army in South Africa however, has spun all this frivolity into a new, somewhat darker, but far more important and far reaching attempt to encourage people to improve their vision of colours, specifically the black and blue shades referred to by #TheDress.

Fellow blogger, survivor of and campaigner for Domestic Violence awareness and support here in the UK @SammieB1980 has, like me, picked up on these new images, and Sam has written her own blog detailing her thoughts on the question ‘Why is it so hard to see black and blue ?’

I have reproduced Sam’s blog below. Long time readers of my blog may recall I posted my own blog talking about Sam and her efforts some three years ago now, back in 2012 – you can read my blog about Sam and her victim support group Survivors of Domestic Abuse here.

You can read all of Sam’s blogs here or visit her Domestic Violence support website here.

The answer, by the way, may be found in the second of Salvation Army South Africa’s posters:

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Sam’s Blog Post:

A powerful image but just the tip of the iceberg for many that suffer coercive control and domestic abuse on a daily basis.  It’s not just about a punch, slap or kick it’s about all that she has had to endure to even get those marks.  Verbal abuse, verbal threats to kill, manipulation, isolation, possessiveness, control, intimidation – not just once but every single day.

Perpetrators will do anything and everything they can to gain and maintain power and control over the victim yet society finds it so hard to see black and blue.

• Society chooses to ignore it
• It’s the victims fault
• It’s a one-off
• She shouldn’t have said/done something to provoke the perpetrator
• Society doesn’t understand the cycle
• It’s seen as normal behaviour in relationships
• If it was that bad, she would leave
• She deserves it
• But he seems such a caring partner, not a controlling perpetrator
• He must have had a bad day/poor upbringing/bad relationship

Ignorance to such a horrific crime and that’s what domestic abuse is, a crime, not care and love but power and control contributes to perpetrators being allowed and getting away with doing this – to the person they claim to love.

Domestic abuse isn’t just black and blue, a victim goes through so much more before getting to this point.  The complex cycle starts with isolation, control, manipulation before a hand is raised.

Domestic abuse isn’t an illusion, it is happening in the here and now, with the Police receiving one call every 60 seconds relating to domestic abuse, that is how real this epidemic is, destroying lives, ripping families apart, killing victims and this image portrays the true impact of the physical side of this crime.

Society will be looking at this image but somehow subconsciously looking past the bruises and being judgmental toward why she got these bruises rather than judging the perpetrator on their behaviour.  There is never an excuse for abuse.  Ever.  But we are still hearing society with their judgmental attitude thinking and believe a victim “asks” to be abused rather than seeing it from the true perspective of a perpetrator choosing to abuse.

It is so hard to see black and blue because judgement clouds our vision, lack of awareness, education, training and understanding leads us to believe that this is completely the victims fault, that they deserve it and it’s not all that bad because if it was, they would just leave.  It is so hard to see black and blue because domestic abuse is still often seen as a taboo subject that we feel is best dealt with if we sweep it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn’t even exist so then it might just magically disappear.

It is so hard to see black and blue because negative attitudes, funding cuts, no legal aid and closure of refuges make it impossible for victims to just leave, with trails of verbal death threats, harassment and stalking quickly following behind.  It’s so hard to see black and blue because in today’s society this is seen as normal behaviour, something that is tolerated and part of a great deal of relationships today with perpetrators and victims getting younger and young.

It is so hard to see black and blue because of cultures attitude toward this complex cycle.  So when you look at this picture, take a good look, soak up everything that surrounds it.  The physical and psychological torture that the victim received, how the perpetrator made this her fault, how the perpetrator blamed her for his actions, how she would have to apologise for something she didn’t do wrong.  How that this isn’t the end of the the abuse for her.  How this is how victims live their life everyday, how they have to walk on eggshells so they “don’t do something wrong” to “deserve” this.

It’s so hard to see black and blue when we live in a society that doesn’t even want to admit, acknowledge or act upon that this even happens.  With 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men becoming a victim of domestic abuse during their lifetime, it *is* happening, it *is* real and it *is* a crime.

If you are experiencing domestic abuse or know someone is, please report it.

No one deserves this treatment and no one asks to be treated this way.

The impossible happened this morning.

Big Pete and I, the grand total of 100% of the Eastern Sector of Chaostown response officers (there were another 3 on Western but they did have the town centre to cover as well), had arrived at the station and kitted up ready for earlies by 06.45 hours (6.45am to anyone who speaks plain English) and already booted the night shift out the door when the radio blared into life.

Why …. just why does this ALWAYS happen to us ????

“Any early turn for an Immediate Response, possible break in progress, 7 Church Lane. Neighbours can hear banging and the owners are on holiday, any units please” came the call from the Control Room.

Pete and I ‘would’ have been a couple of minutes maximum from this job had our nick not been closed six months ago as part of the nation-wide ‘cost saving / efficiency / austerity (delete as appropriate) measures’ hitting the police service. As it was we were headed for a 10-15 minute dash across to the other side of town, just feeling lucky it wasn’t rush hour, the roads were still quiet and the risk of hitting something or worse, someone, whilst on route was therefore greatly reduced.

We were convinced that by the time we got there, any intruders, if there really were any, would be long gone. The chances were far greater, as they normally are, that the noise was something completely innocent, normally a member of the houses occupants extended family checking the house over, or even them themselves, returning home early from wherever they had been.

“Mike 4-2” came the voice over the radio “message from the Inspector, silent approach to the property and once you’ve assessed, let us know if you need further resources”.

“Well, how about you bloody well send some extra bodies anyway then at least they’ll be in the same postcode if something does kick off” shouted Pete loudly …. at me … not down the radio, the handset mike in the car hadn’t worked in millennia anyway. “and who does he thing he’s preaching to bloody silent approach, who does he thing we are, Keystone bloomin’ cops, how long we been doing this job now ….”

And on, and on, and on he went …. Clearly Pete had either not had a good set of rest days, or Mrs P had brought him a jar of decaf coffee by mistake !

We arrived just round the corner from the target premises safely, thank goodness. Leaving the car where it was we were going to walk the last bit in. Hopefully, given that the world was now arising around us, there had been enough background noise so that any Billy Burglars there were hadn’t heard and been scared off by the dulcet tones of a screaming but knackered diesel engine approaching the estate.

We got to the house with ease. For a change, the properties round here actually had numbers on the doors. Dear reader, unless you’ve been there, you can never imagine the frustration ourselves and the ambulance crews have trying to find a house in a street of anonymity. Those folk at Trumpton don’t know how lucky they are trying to find where their job is. At least they generally get a clue, or at the very least smoke signals, to tell them where they are going.

Quickly we surrounded the house …. all two of us. I watched the front whilst Pete scrambled his way round the back. One of the side walls was conveniently inescapable by the fact it was attached to the other half of the pair of semi’s we were now outside, which left only one external side to be conscious of. But with a bit of shuffling and side-stepping even Michael Jackson would have been proud of, we could just about manage to keep tabs on everywhere.

There was certainly no one around but Big Pete did quickly discover some tell-tale jemmy or big screwdriver marks (sorry ‘blunt instrument marks’, we’re not qualified to suggest what the offending item might be you see). If we wrote screwdriver in a statement and it went to court, the defence solicitor could say “but officer, I put it to you, my client never had a screwdriver on him; crowbar, flattened piece of pipe, dirty great penknife and hand-held rocket launcher* yes, but screwdriver no. I suggest you are in fact dishonest, lying, making it all up. You honour I move that this case be dismissed, the police officer is clearly fabricating evidence”. It’s just how it is. Create that doubt. However you get there doesn’t really matter.

Having ensured the house was safe and secure, we both went round to the neighbour who had been kind enough to alert us in the first place. Pete started talking before I could even get in through their front door. “Sorry my love” he began “missed the little buggers. We’d have had ‘em if we were still in the local nick but this is what we get every day now, see …”

“Yes very good Pete” I interjected, before he turned the whole conversation into a prophecy of impending doom and gloom “anyway Mrs Williams, someone has clearly tried to get in next door, we’ll go and have a scoot round the area, see who’s about”. Having established our caller had not witnessed anything and obtained the contact details of the owners of the attacked house we were about to leave to go and have a wander around the streets ‘just in case’ when we all clearly heard the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass

“The f***kers can’t have come back surely” said Pete “we’re still here”

“But they won’t know that will they” I replied quickly apologising for Pete’s language at the same time “we’re in this house and the car’s down the road. If they didn’t see us come in here they’ll think we’ve long gone”

The noise was coming from the back of the house. After quickly calling up on the radio for any other available officers to head our way, enjoy five seconds of humour by asking for a dog unit and helicopter to attend and asking the occupants of the house we were now in to keep an eye out the back in case the bad guys did another runner, Pete and I let ourselves out of the front door and as quietly as we could, made our way back round to the back of the house being attacked … for a second time in minutes.

Even as we crept around the side of the house, the gate now clearly open where it had not been before. “We did shut that gate didn’t we Chaos” whispered Pete, in his not very quiet whispering voice. I nodded, trying my best to be as quiet as the proverbial church mouse and not scare away whoever was round the back before we got there this time.

As the back porch door came into view, well blow me ! It was open and inside the porch area itself, huddled round the actual rear door into the property were two lads hoodies up, gloves on, banging away at the back door with a large screwdriver and mini crowbar; the thudding noise as matey boy number one repeatedly banged the crowbar into the now increasing gap between door and frame, trying with all his might to get enough purchase to try and force the door open whilst his chum did his best with screwdriver in hand to prise out the beading around an adjacent window.

Well, we’d have to give them 10 marks for effort and concentration I suppose, for they were so engrossed with the job at hand they didn’t notice two stealth mode ninja turtles (Me and Pete that is, just in case you weren’t sure) sneaking up on them. By the time they realised we were there, I was virtually at the rear porch and Pete was but a step behind me.

The first lad took one look at us and just had time to dart out of the porch before I got there, running straight for the rear of the garden. I really thought he was going to do a ‘Hot Fuzz’ and try to run through the fence  but at the last second, he made a leap for the nearby dog kennel roof, managing to grab the top of the fence panel next to it and try to haul himself up and over.

I was on him like a leech…. well as well as a thirteen stone leech in size 12 boots with heck knows what weight of kit and contraptions wrapped around me could be.

Pete had already trapped Billy burglar number two in the porch of the house itself, and the lad had obviously resigned himself to his fate and given up, notwithstanding Pete was about twice his size and if he’d made the slightest move to resist or put up a fight, he’d probably have left through a window rather than the open doorway.

I locked my arms around my lads waist and started to pull him back towards my side of the fence and generally towards me. I heard the cracking and splitting of the wood in the fence panel as I did so, but in my tunnel vision focused attempt to make sure my prey didn’t escape and have to face the ridicule from Pete and anyone else we bumped into at the nick for the next twenty years, I completely failed to see the claw hammer in matey boy’s hand that was currently swinging it’s way towards the side of my head.

In fact, I still didn’t see the hammer when it struck me, luckily, due to chance and the fluke of my position as much as anything, on the top of my right shoulder rather than my soft, delicate, catwalk ready head.

I felt it though. Bloomin’ heck did I feel it. Let me tell you, having some adrenaline pumped up prat clout you full pelt with the inch round end of a hammer head does sting a tad, even through the high quality, ballistic resistant fleece and uniform shirt we are provided with (you didn’t really believe that last bit did you – my loo paper is thicker than a police issue fleece material !)

Spurred on by the encouragement my new friend had provided me with to assist him down from his lofty height (in the same way a racehorse is spurred on when the jockey repeatedly hits him with a whip to make him go faster), I pulled harder with all my might on the half a body I had a damn good grip on and bingo – he flew off the fence like a 100kg ball launched from a cannon.

My clear concern that my now attached miscreant might harm himself as his projectile body hurtled towards terra firma was thankfully negated after it quickly became clear that it wasn’t the grass covering the garden that had broken his fall directly, rather a couple of very large piles of Fido’s finest territory marking mess which the owner of the attacked property probably hadn’t had time to clear off before they set off for their holiday. I mean after all, dog poo it may be, but I don’t expect the houseowner was expecting some degenerate house breaker to be making efforts to smear themselves in it before anyone had a chance to bag and bin.

The secondary upside of this for me (did I mention the first was the merry amusement Billy burglar number one’s misfortune had cast upon me) was that my man had clearly had enough and showed no signs of wanting to put up a struggle. This was probably a shame for him from an escapology point of view because to be fair, I didn’t really fancy having to lay hands on him if he did want to start squirming about.

Even with him pinned to the floor and me shouting at him to ‘get his hands behind his back’ so they could be ‘cuffed, i didn’t really fancy the job of actually applying the steel bracelets. even his hands were brown … although I suppose that could have been the result of being one of the great unwashed of Chaostown rather than a direct result of his current predicament – he certainly smelt like it – the dog excrement was about the best scent wafting from him at that point.

Cuffed and stood to his feet I marched my man back over to where Pete was sat, along with his new friend and detainee, both of whom had formed some form of friendship by now, or at least a common bond revolving round taking the mickey out of Poo-man and Cop.

“I’ve already asked for a van” Pete said to me, between the muffled giggles. “And it’s all on his phone too” said matey boy number two, nodding his head in Pete’s direction.

Great I thought … that’s sorted the decoration of my works tray for the next month or so. It’s an unwritten law in the Chaos Constabulary you know, and maybe in your local force, that one of the worst work ‘offences’ you can commit is to remove ANY picture or comment your colleagues put on your tray. It will cost you cakes for a month at the very least !

With the arrival of the van I quickly deposited my chap in the rear cage and took several gulps of good, clean, fresh air to clear my nostrils and sinuses. The lad with Pete quipped up “Do I have to go in the back with him, I don’t want to get that shit on me as well”.

Pete bless him, for probably the first time in his life, took pity, and agreed his lad could sit in the rear seating area of the van and Pete would sit with him ‘as long as he behaved’.

I followed the van, driving our panda back to the custody block, which of course is no longer at the nick where we deployed from, but now at a central location a good 20 miles away. All the way there I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the thought of the delightful scent that Pete and the poor lad driving the van had submitted themselves to for quite a length of time.

Once booked in, my man was sent off to the shower room to get himself sorted and found some clean clothes to put on, although he even grumbled about them – apparently green overalls are not the thing to be seen in; even in the confines of a police custody suite.

Both the lads, unsurprisingly, were ‘well known’. very well known. So well know in fact that Pete’s lad had only left the pleasures of our en0suite hotel the day before, having been charged and bailed for another house break. Me thinks he might be staying a bit longer this time.

As was Mr Stinky Man … wanted for a number of theft and burglary offences across three police force areas. All in all, a bloody good start to the day as it turned out.

Pete and I then left, to head back over to our nick, and try to persuade the dicky-tec’s in CID we had a job they might want to be dealing with. But that’s another story in itself …….

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* OK maybe not.

I’ve been away for a while …. well quite a long while actually !

Some may have noticed …. some have been somewhat concerned …. some thought I had ‘done a Bobby Ewing* ’ and been in the shower too long …. some may not have been particularly bothered ….

Either way, I thought it only right and proper to explain where I’ve been. It’s quite simple really.

For the first time in forever (aaarrrgh not that movie again!!) I had the chance to grab some refs – yes you heard me correctly, a uniformed frontline constable in one of Her Majesty’s great modern police forces, sorry, sorry, police services, was going to sit down for five minutes and get something to eat ! 

This, almost biblical miracle, only came about as I was working the appointments car / diary car / Facebook car / diarrhoea car, call it whatever you do in your force) and my 7pm appointment had cancelled for the gazillionth time (but I’m sure the control room will spend another week chasing them round to rebook ‘just in case’). Dazed, confused, and to be honest, not entirely sure how to react, or what to do with myself for the next 60 minutes,  I headed for the refs room.

Having used all my might to force open the door which clearly hadn’t been used in a long, long time, pushed copious amounts of stacked rubbish (sorry, files waiting to go to HQ Storage) out of the way, decided standing was a far better, healthier and less contaminated option than taking advantage of any of the seating facilities, opened the £1 Asda Lasagne I had treated myself to especially for such a monumentous occasion and put it in the microwave with eyes closed (have you looked inside the average microwave in a police station ???), I then opened the cutlery door and arrrrghh ….

I couldn’t find a fork !!

I hunted high and low in every drawer, cupboard, nook and cranny, sneezing my way through the inches (no seriously) of accumulated dust, ancient sweet wrappers (can you still buy Fry’s Chocolate Cream anyway ??), petrified banana skins (as in so old, they’ve turned to stone not scared of the dark lol) but it was not good; the forks were gone, all gonny gone gone

The next stop was the Inspectors office … well, you know what rank does don’t you … makes you hoard things, want to control thing … be in charge of things … more likely want to keep an eye on any sharp spiky object so that us clowns don’t go round sticking them into each other during some overly-animated heated debate over why Billy brought Hob Nobs instead of Ginger Nuts to briefing today. He just told me ‘not to be so stupid for thinking he’d be allowed near them either’ and to ‘go away quickly before he found me a constant watch to do’.

I got about 20ft along the corridor before the Inspector called me on point-to-point “Chaos, if you do find any forks make sure you bring me one, no make it two, straight in here before putting the rest in the drawer – got it ??”. “Yes boss, of course Boss” said I, quickly heading for the only place left in the nick where the holy grail of eating instruments would be found …… the top floor.

The top floor …

I don’t think I’ve ever been this high in the nick before .. well except for that time when I had to go and see the Super over a minor matter of going to a petrol station that had just been robbed by a bloke with a gun before the paper pushers had chance to have a meeting about how they should deal with it and how many meetings they would have to have to decide who to send but hey, I had the phone book down my pants reading for a good smacking … be prepared, that’s the plan !

And so, through those fabled doors I went …. “Jeez” I called out, loud so it turned out not just to myself, “they’ve got a bloody carpet up here”. And plastered walls with pictures on too it transpired. Downstairs it’s just magnolia emulsion on breeze blocks as you walk around from office to office. I tip-toed along the corridor, hoping not to disturb anyone working away, crunching numbers and planning how next we could reduce the crime in Chaostown and keep our communities safe.

Who was I kidding ?? It was well gone seven o’clock by now for goodness sake. The lights were off, the doors were closed and the radiators were cold. Hang on, did I just say radiators ??? have they got heat up here as well ???

I quickly found the room with a nice little engraved plaque on the door saying ‘Hospitality & Meeting Suite’, as slowly and as quietly as I could turned the handle and, millimetre by millimetre, pushed the door open. The “ssssshhhhhh” of door bottom scraping across the carpet pile was the only sound to be heard. The lights suddenly blazed into life … all by themselves. I nearly jumped out of my skin, fearing I had been busted by PSD, but no, it was just me, a shagpile and an movement sensor light switch. Visions of bigwigs having to dance and boogie every 5 minutes during meetings to stop the lights automatically turning themselves back off kept going through my head as one by one, I nosed through the cupboard drawers in search of my Holy Grail.

And then I found it. The one. The drawer that held within in all of the dreams and desires of every single uniformed response cop who had ever graced the doors of this most grand and gracious building ……The Senior Management Team cutlery drawer.

SILVER !!! …. BLOOMIN’ SILVER !!! …. they got silver cutlery !!! … with patterns on !!! … small swirly pretty patterns on the handles !!! …. and it’s all clean and shiny, like someone has been paid to sit and polish the afore-mentioned items every day after they have been used ….. actually they probably have but hey ….

And then I saw.

The one thing I could not believe.

The one thing that finally, after all these years; after all the long hours; after all the cold, wet, dreary night shifts, would send me over the edge ….

There wore no forks !!!!!

I left the room in a sullen state. I didn’t even have the energy or will to close the cutlery drawer.

It took all the might I had left just to open the door to get out. I was a broken man. I was hungry. I had nothing left to give. I would have to face my own Inspector and tell him I had failed. I could feel the action plan being written already.

By now it was five to eight. My next appointment would be here in minutes and ready to tell me that their ex-partners new partners mums ex had called them a slag on Bookface and that they wanted them ‘done’ but that they weren’t going to give me a statement about it ‘cos they weren’t a grass’ and they wouldn’t heed my advice to block the aforementioned super suspect on the said social media site because ‘they wanted to know what else was happening’ on the estate where they all lived.

Of course they didn’t turn up. As it later turned out, within micro-seconds of putting the phone down to police to report their dastardly crime, everyone was best of friends again and would spend the next week shouting ‘having you lot got anything better to do’ as we wasted umpteen hours of police time and taxpayers money trying to ‘re-establish contact with the informant’ so we could ‘accurately risk assess the danger’.

Ohh the joys of modern policing !!

Since that day I have been aimlessly wandering the corridors of our station, back and forth, without rhyme or reason, going nowhere, still searching for those four prongs of joyfulness. If you do see one, catch it quick before it gets chance to escape … and please let me know, a message; a drawing; a photo would be nice ….

* Bobby Ewing – character played by Patrick Duffy in the 80’s American mega-soap Dallas. Brother of JR Ewing (who got shot by his sister in law/mistress who also claimed to be pregnant with his child). Bobby was killed off in the final episode of the 1984–1985 season, and Patrick Duffy left the show for a year, returning in the infamous “shower scene” at the end of the 1985–1986 season. His accident, death and absence from the show was explained as being no more than a bad dream by his ex-wife and subsequently fiancé again (and you think Jeremy Kyle is bad !!). Yes I know you are too young to remember it all, go ask your gran !

This by the way is not really why I haven’t been around but it’s far more interesting. I’ll explain properly in another blog

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The use of Taser devices by police is back in the news, after video footage of an incident involving a man with knives in Battersea, London was uploaded to YouTube . Taser has always been a controversial subject in the UK. Maybe it’s primarily seen as the end to the default non-armed position of the everyday British police officer or maybe it’s something else ….

What is known is that Taser devices are a highly effective method of dealing with violent and dangerous situations, reducing the risk of harm and injury to police officers and members of the general public.

On a basic level, the ‘pro’ side will say a Taser can be used without needing to get ‘up and close’ with the subject as would be needed with a baton, immediately creating a ‘safe working space’ and greatly reducing risk to the officers dealing. The effects of Taser use are gone in a few seconds unlike 15-20 mins for CS/Pava/Pepper Spray, plus there is no risk of collateral effect on officers dealing as there would be with a spray – (having been there on many occasions where the officers dealing have been far more affected by CS/Pava/Pepper spray than the subject, I can tell you it’s not a nice place to be !!)

This clip demonstrates precisely how effective correct use of Taser can be in dealing with a dangerous situation. In it, a male brandishing two knives appears to be threatening to harm himself, not others, but clearly, outside Buckingham Palace, with hundreds of tourists, adults and children within a few metres, just about anything could have happened

But Taser is not without it’s critics, and there are many would will say that they are dangerous and shouldn’t be used at all. The are also numerous reports to suggest that deaths have occurred following the use of Taser although looking at the online reports and news articles I have found, none of them can directly link a death to a Taser discharge. There is quite a lot of info here > Wikipedia – Taser Safety Issues

At present, Taser devices in the UK are only issued to Firearms and a limited number of other police officers, primarily those in ‘specialist’ roles. Many officers, and members of the public, believe that ALL police officers should be issued with Taser, and then again, many believe no police officer should have one.

But what do you think ? Please take the survey below and let your opinion be known. There are two survey options, one for police officers and one for members of the public. The questions are the same, I am just trying to establish if there is a difference in opinion from inside and outside ‘the job’.

POLICE OFFICERS – please answer this survey

MEMBERS OF PUBLIC – please answer this survey

Please do not expect any startling changes in national police policy to arise from this poll – it’s just a snapshot of what people think 🙂

Comments can be left by clicking the ‘Leave a comment’ or ‘XX comments’ link under the post title.

I was reminded yesterday by the good eggs at Avon & Somerset Police Federation of a saying I had not heard since I was a kid – a comment my dad used to come out with quite often when watching news stories about the latest Royal visit or boat launch or whatever it was …. Dad always used to say “The Queen must think the whole country smells of fresh paint and flowers”, remarking on the vast amount of public space housekeeping that used to get done by whichever council was responsible for looking after the area of the impending Royal visit.

It’s right though isn’t it – as the pavements get swept at the crack of midnight, council decorators on double time are painting railings in the wee small hours, and every litter bin for miles around suddenly appears to have a plant pot full of pansies stuck on top of it – all to show to Her Majesty what a wonderful part of her realm she is about to set foot in …… but we all know it’s no more than a ‘papering over the cracks’ exercise – and I’m sure the Queen knows it too – but just plays along so that everything looks good in the rose garden.

And so it appears to be with policing at the moment. if you are to believe those that dwell on the top floor, the wheels are full turning, every officer is full of the joys of Spring, and any suggestion of unhappiness is a dreamt up fantasy of the few with some imaginary axe to bear. Well, sadly, that’s not the case in the Chaos Constabulary, and talking to frontline officers around the country (you know, the protected species that everyone keeps telling us won’t be affected by all the budgetary and funding changes and cuts) it seems that an awful lot of bobbies have got more grazes on their knees than the average 10 year old after falling off his bike !

I’ve said on previous blogs that when I joined the job, our then Chief Inspector and Super used to insist that Senior Officers took it in turns to go out on the Public Order vans and response cars on a Friday and Saturday night ….. AND to get involved – they were expected to be making arrests and submit crime reports – the reasoning ? to make sure they never lost sight of what life on the frontline is really like, and to make sure their future planning and decision making took account of what hard working officers went through every day to protect the public. Not any more.

The police service as a whole has been taking an almighty battering for a long time now, with the actions of a very few bad eggs causing everyone of the 135,000 hard working officers to be simultaneously tarred with the same brush. The ‘Big 3’ – Stephen Lawrence, Hillsborough and G20 are being rolled out time and time again as defacto evidence that every police officer up and down the land is institutionally racist, overtly violent and a liar. There’s no disputing things were very wrong in each of those cases, but that is three out of how many millions of incidents police officers attend every year and get right ???

How many, murderers, burglars, muggers and rapists get caught, prosecuted and jailed every year ???

How many young, old, or otherwise vulnerable people go missing every year and are located safely by officers ???

How many dead bodies get pulled from rivers, out of trees, off railway lines or off our roads by frontline teams who then also have to deal with the distraught families left behind ???

How many people with Mental Ill Health issues find the police are their first line of help and support as the NHS and Community Mental Health provision are destroyed ???

How many drunken, violent, off their head buffoons get scraped up outside one or another pub or club, taken home or to hospital by police simply because they can’t look after themselves ???

Clearly some officers, somewhere, must be doing something right !!! We keep getting told the prisons are full to bursting and I’m pretty sure 100% of the occupants didn’t venture in there all on their own !!!

Former cop, now author and TV/Radio commentator Mike Pannett appeared on BBC Radio 4 on the morning of Sunday 20th October 2013 to debate the flatline in Police Morale alongside Nick Gargan, Chief Constable of Avon & Somerset Police.  Mike explained that despite trying to get frontline officers to give their thoughts on morale in the job at the moment, no-one (myself included) was prepared to speak on air for fear or repercussions on themselves.

Mike described how frontline officers felt the service is now ‘on its knees’ and ‘run ragged’

Nick Gargan disputed this, commenting “the leadership of the service works very hard to keep the workforce motivated and keep the workforce as happy as we can in difficult times”.

When the presenter challenged Mr Gargan over Mike Pannett’s comments re the service being ‘on its knees’ Mr Gargan replied “I was out with firearms officers at our Almondsbury base last week and with city centre officers in Bristol over the previous weekend and that’s just not what I saw, I saw good officers, they feel a bit bruised about pay, they do feel suspicious of the press, they feel they’re not understood all the time but actually they’re very brave committed people”. You can listen to the full interview here >

It certainly painted a picture that in Avon & Somerset at least, the national trend had been bucked and officers working in that force at least, didn’t appear to feel the same as many others around the country.

Or did they ??

Or had Avon & Somerset had a hypothetical visit from The Queen, and the two counties had been treated to a massive dollop of fresh paint and flowers that the rest of the country had missed out on ???

So why not ask frontline officers from around the country how they really felt …….. so I did !!! …. and below are just a small fraction of the replies I received within 24 hours of asking !!

Hopefully the odd one or two senior officers will read these, stop and reflect for a moment and think, ‘actually – there is a problem here and we need to start talking to people about it’

Avon & Somerset – Morale is low on the front line. Our promotion process is is severe disrepute after the last round of psychometric testing. Our force seems determined to promote those that do projects than those who have proven leadership credentials. Windsor has taken its toll and the latest debacle with Mitchell has pissed us off. We have a bit of confidence in our new chief as our last one was widely reviled. I joined loving the job. It was the plan to do the 30 and work my ass off all the way. I know plenty of people doing the same as me and my concern is a strata of those with 5-10 years in currently will jump ship. We seem to have a prevalence of senior officers that want to be more interested in politics than policing. The federation is also quite unpopular. We view them as a little bit pointless and not worth the money we pay them. However what is important is that I still love my team. I love the people that I work with. That is the thing that keeps us going. I am proud to wear the uniform and I’m proud to be a copper. I think that the public individually don’t really care what Tory spin doctors say or the media say. They know what we do and they are still (generally) grateful.

Unnamed Force – We’ve lost the Force Helicopter through cuts, we’re now covered from a neighbouring force so it’s about 40 miles away. By the time it lifts off and gets here its all over, so we’ve just stopped requesting it. The gap is trying to be filled by the Police Dogs , but now they’re being cut too. The criminals must be laughing their heads off. There were 8 of us on the shift 2yrs ago, now there’s 4 if no one’s off – how’s that “no reduction to frontline” ??? Who is kidding who ?

Nottinghamshire – It’s safe to say that moral in Nottingham City division (two divisions, city and county) is horrendously low. I work on a neighbourhoods team and we currently have 3 operations running (long term) which result in constant abstractions from beats. Constant shift changes to later night or early morning shifts and then constant questions asking why updates haven’t been done, or why violent crimes are spiking on my beat. My response was, I don’t know I haven’t been on my beat in over three weeks on a late shift….their response…..5 shift changes the next day moving me from my beat to another for yet another operation!!!! So morale is at an all time low, we cannot win for trying.

West Midlands –  I have seven years in the job and in the past 12 months I have lost my public order course, driving grade and been moved to an investigation team where all I do is deal with old crime reports. I have been told I will not get any training in relation public order or driving! They expect me to continue to give 100 per cent when they take things away from me to do the job and that I enjoy about the job. My morale went months ago and I can’t see it coming back. How on earth are we meant to provide a high level of service when we don’t get treated well??

Unnamed Force – This “frontline is being maintained” quote is a joke, are they counting PCSO’s ??? – we come on duty and there can be six PCSO’s and three Response Cops on duty.
By the way someone told us they’re counting investigation departments etc as “frontline” – isn’t that a bit misleading ??? – the public perception of frontline is uniform cops out and about & that’s definitely reduced.

Hampshire – Morale is horrendous.  Everyone is exhausted, on the point of burnout.  They keep up the line that the cuts won’t affect the frontline.  Well guess what?  The numbers on 999 response may or may not have been damaged – depending on which set of statistics you believe – but the work that our “backroom” staff were doing still needs doing.  So who does it?  The frontline staff.  Why?  Because there aren’t enough backroom staff left, and the work doesn’t go away.
Lose file prep staff?  Who preps the files we’re submitting?  We do. This means fewer of us available for 999 calls.
Lose CSI support?  Who does their files and paperwork?  They do.  This means fewer of them available to attend your burglaries, TFMV etc.
Lose Station Officers?  Who mans the front desk?  We do.  Or volunteers do.  Who can’t be forced to work if they don’t turn up.
Lose police officers in favour of police staff investigators?  Who works when they go home?  Police do.  You can’t order a PSI to stay on duty.  We’ve had that this week on our department – they all buggered off at 4pm, we were still on duty at 3am, but instead of 8 of us working on, only 4 of us could be compelled to do so.

Unnamed Force – Morale is rock bottom. Shift pattern brought in Jan 13 killing people. Job is bringing diff pattern in Jan 14. 15 transferred to us  recently. 2 going back to where they came from already, 2 off with stress and rest questioning why they moved here. We had most of a shift leave for another force at the same time when they advertised for transferees

Essex – I’m a 10 year cop serving in uniform. I am actively looking for a job outside of the police and once I get a job offering me the same (or even slightly less money) I’ll be gone. I am degree educated but no longer have the stomach for the constant battle against the management just to do the job I joined to do. My day is a constant battle against pointless bureaucracy, and it is a struggle to keep the faith when on the one hand I am told I need to keep on top of my paperwork and emails whilst at the same time I am constantly chased by a Control Room because I am shown as the closest resource to a job (that might be the other side of the division). Morale across the board is non-existent. Frontline cops are under ever-mounting pressure to improve arrest and detection rates, response times and meet various other targets all with practically no staff. We drift from crisis to crisis, one day we’re force critical for burglary/domestics so all eggs are put into the burglary/domestic reduction basked, followed up the following day by another management panic because the amount of unattended 999/101 calls has gone through the roof (because we’ve all been tackling burglaries/domestics the previous day).

Unnamed Force – I’m on Response and to be honest we’re all exhausted, we’re run ragged and snowed under with paperwork and all I read or hear in the media is that we’re collectively crap. It’s really getting us down , if I could do something else that would pay the bills – I’d leave .

Unnamed Force – Morale certainly seems to be decreasing but it’s quite hard as an outsider to put a finger on exactly what the prevailing cause is. As a Special, last year I thought I’d give joining a go. I’ve passed everything so far, assessments, force interviews etc. with a pencilled in start date of early next year but given the current state of everything especially wages, lack of promotion prospects and the treatment of officers I’m just not sure I can go through with joining. My force have put a lot of effort into my training and given me some really great experiences over the years but I’m just not sure whether joining is worth it anymore.

Cheshire – Utterly desperate. Under pressure, losing staff, no replacements, run ragged, put at risk and shifts being changed all over the place. I’ve never seen it so bad.

Merseyside – Morale is horrendous, especially on front line response teams. It is hilarious to see the size of the response teams now compared to five years ago. The public would be aghast if they knew how few officers were there to answer their 999 calls at times. There are so many issues at the moment, from daily media attacks to the IPCC literally gunning for officers. Forces no longer support officers and the CPS run prosecutions in cases where officers clearly have no case to answer but politician/media opinion interferes with their decision. However, the scariest most anger invoking proposal for me and all my federated colleagues is compulsory severance. The inability to be made redundant is the sole protection afforded to being an independent office holder (that of the office if constable). If that is taken away from us, where is the motivation to discharge your duties faithfully and according to law? It changes the game – officers WILL succumb to senior officer pressure in discharging their duties. In turn the senior officers will succumb to media, political and ‘interest group’ opinion. RIP British Policing and a hostile hello to continental policing.

Unnamed Force – I have a First Class degree and other higher education qualifications, but I’ve stayed as a PC for the last 20 years because it’s the only level in the organisation where you can make a real difference to individual lives. But because I want to serve the community directly and remain a PC I’m seen as thick, with worthless opinions. I’ve seen what the pursuit of rank does to people and it disgusts me. It appears that forces are effectively run to provide evidence for a small number of people to achieve the next rank. This means officers have adopted almost every ill-conceived measure thought up by politicians, all of which have proved to be highly flawed. All the above is bad enough in itself, but front-line staff levels are at a critical level, proactive work is gone and all we do is react. Yet we still see the same number of ACPO and Superintendents, while front line officers are thin on the ground. Those who remain are stressed beyond belief. It rubs salt into the wound when the Home Office say that their ‘reforms’ are working because crime is falling. Crime is NOT falling, recorded crime is falling because of many technical advances making traditional crimes less attractive to criminals. I can tell you that things like cyber crime, fraud, drug supply, people trafficking is flourishing and rarely gets included into the official crime figures. In addition, the amount of non- crime incidents which the police attend is increasing drastically as other public services are cut and they reply on police.

Durham – Morale?  Well, I would say it’s right on the bottom.  And the sad thing is….most cops I work with have no idea what’s coming.  Lots of cops are down due to single crewing, MASSIVE workload, and things like Increment freezes, losing  CRTP, increase in pension contributions.  Cos this is starting to affect them NOW.  I warned them of this in March 2011 with Winsor part 1 being published.  I was told I was all doom and gloom and look where we are now. Even now, I would say about 75% of Cops I work with have no idea that CS is imminent!  The ones that are aware think that our Force will not use it!  Talk about being complacent!  None of them know about the skills test due to come in 2016, where they may lose £5500 a year!  Imagine what morale will be like with £300 net. out of your monthly pay gone

South Wales – The Morale in the Public Service Centre of South Wales Police is pretty low mostly down to the management attitude and the fact that the only concern is that calls are answered, not the quality of the incident that is created or the service that is actually provided

Unnamed Force – Every time I put the telly on there’s someone having a dig at the Police to suit their own agenda. I was in school when most of these ‘failings’ occurred , what can I say ? , I’m sorry ? , yes I am sorry – but I was 6yrs old when it happened.

West Mercia – After a spending review we have had numerous stations shut. Loads of Officers have been relocated into large Divisional stations. Yes that again! Bobbies who have been serving their communities for years have been uprooted and thrown into a pot. This has been done in such a draconian way by SMT. No arguments little in the way of appeals. Now have massive areas to cover single crewed. All advanced cars are being withdrawn so we all lose our tickets. Not allowed to return to stations during shift, lap tops in cars for files to enable this. The SMT are saying lump it or leave. I’ve never seen so many Officers looking for other work. Me included. People are burning out. Hundreds of qualified bods no promotions Sgt/Insp for years.

West Yorkshire – I’m a response bobby with just over 4yrs service. The general feel at our nick in West Yorkshire is dire. No motivation, team split up and parade at different nicks, briefing via a video link, meaning separate to keep numbers out, more and more single crewing. Staff levels at an all time low. Losing rest days for things and unable to re allocate due to numbers it’s really demoralising.

Unnamed Force – Politicians moan that police are overly cautious, but it’s because they made police subject to H&S laws and are happy for forces and individuals to be prosecuted if H&S is breached. They moan when police don’t react straight away, yet they brought in RIPA which makes any sort of immediate plain clothed operation impossible. They moan that officers are short, not having a commanding presence, but they made police subject to equality laws. They moan about paperwork, but they require the police to comply with CPS and court requirements and CPIA is a nightmare. The IPCC and HMIC requires everything to be audited. The Home Office requires forces to provide a massive amount of information which needs recording and processing. They say they will bring back discretion, but policies like NCRS and ACPO guidelines mean the opposite occurs. They moan about standards, but they brought in the very expensive national recruitment system, which is devised by psychologists and assessed by lay MoPs (neither with police experience). What other job would the recruitment process not allow much input from those who actually do the job? All the this is bad enough in itself, but front-line staff levels are at a critical level, proactive work is gone and all we do is react. Yet we still see the same number of ACPO and Superintendents, while front line officers are thin on the ground. Those who remain are stressed beyond belief.

PSNI – I’m in the PSNI, have been for 7 yrs now. Morale !! There is none. We now have big brother watching us. They can tell exactly where we are every second. They want more detail in our files. So it’s get out and patrol, oh wait, no we want you in the station more doing paperwork. There’s more danger inside the station than the dissidents outside the station wanting to kill us. The senior management haven’t a clue about real life policing. They come up with stupid ideas when promotion is out. Yes the supers is out now.  Fed up not being able to police the common sense way.

Greater Manchester – Morale went out the window with the arrival of the Tories and their war on bobbies. In short they have turned a career into a job, overnight. Not only are many officers feeling financial pain but their opportunities for advancement / development are Ali but gone.  Unless you are a senior officer of course.

Unnamed Force – Savile – I was child when this man was committing these terrible crimes in the 70’s. I even wrote to Jim’ll Fix It like 1000’s of other kids – I wanted to meet the my heroes the Red Arrows. Yet the press & media criticise shortcomings of my predecessors from decades ago they make no distinction between us, but its like its my failing? The same applies to Hillsborough, I was 19 and in College in 1989 when it happened. I’m an LFC supporter and some of my friends lost their friends in this awful event. Its reported in the media as a ‘Police Cover up’ with the inference that it’s always institutional corruption in the ‘Police’. I work with PC’s who are out there doing their best who weren’t even born in 1989. The Police isn’t manifestly corrupt , there are tens of thousands of Police Officers doing an extremely challenging and dangerous job day in and day feel we are being constantly undermined by some hostile elements in the press & politics. All we ask – is a bit of balance and perspective.

Hampshire – The cuts are killing us.  Privatisation is not the answer.  This government are running a campaign against us.  Compulsory severance comes up very shortly at PAT.  This government have already wrecked the tripartite structure of our criminal justice system, which has been for so long the pride of our nation and the bastion of justice around the world for centuries.  Now, they have brought politics into policing with the PCC’s and with the ongoing attacks on policing.  That, more than anything else, frightens me.  I am afraid that one day there will be a way to compel me as a police officer, to arrest someone against my better judgement.  This cannot be allowed to happen.  Liberty agree and want to see the British Police remain independent.  I want to remain independent.  I want to be able to protect myself from being involved in any miscarriage of justice, without fear or favour and without being influenced by any political party or individual to do their bidding beyond that of upholding the oath.

BTP – I have worked for the BTP for 10 years in Sussex and in London.  Overtime ebbs and flows in the BTP but, dare I say, it’s probably better than most other forces so if I really need it then I can find it. Also if you joined pre 2007 then a BTP pension is still a railway linked pension so at the moment we’re cushioned from the assault on this front. I’m also lucky to be in a unit as we look after each other, manage to get things done, have a few laughs, crunch the numbers (as figures do occasionally become an issue) and we enjoy a flexible work structure so long as we’re flexible too! So after all that preamble life is pretty sweet! So here’s my point, I’m afraid I am one of those people that likes to think we’re doing a good job and my morale takes a knock every time I hear another negative story, proven or unfounded tosh.  Sometimes it seems that we’re being made to pay for the MP’s expense scandal and the journalists phone hacking escapades so they’ve banded together to ruin us!
I really don’t understand why the Feds can’t look out for us more and I can’t see why direct entry and big hitters dropping into the chiefs chair will help us. I find it incredible that we can’t make our voice heard and have a say in the future of the police service we provide. Put this on top of all the usual: we’re searching too many people, the wrong people, not enough people plus raking over historic incidents and accidents plus political correctness plus human rights plus cases dropped plus criminals walking free plus heavy handedness plus red tape plus… All the usual, I don’t need to tell you! It genuinely depresses me but I have been determined to still do it my way, to do the right thing by victims and witnesses and arrest people that need nicking.

Unnamed Force – I don’t think the public realise just how the cuts have bitten – because on the face of it they still see the Police out and about.
I wish we could tell them there’s only 4 of us on duty, they think there’s dozens of us and they understandably feel let down when it takes us hours or even days to respond to their call – and we can’t tell them why.

Durham – a beautiful City, and the work is varied but, we are slowly being used for other tasks. I don’t believe for a minute my PCC or C. Constable wants to sack us when they get the power, but….if the budgets continue to get reduced, their hands may be forced! So the loss of job security will be another massive blow. I myself really fear that my job may go at some point.  I’ll never forget what this Govt. has done to my job. It didn’t used to be too bad when our wage went a good way. But now, with wage freezes, energy bills going through the roof it’s going to come to the point where we are literally going to work just to eat! I’m starting to see it in peoples faces day in day out now at work.

Staffordshire – In my 14 year’s as a front line officer I’ve never known morale to be so low,  we are just getting by on the good will of officers,  but now that’s going.  When are the powers that be going to understand, let us have a meal break, go home on time occasionally and give us our leave when we want to it and we will happily work away. We were recently told by a supervisor that meal breaks are a privilege and we should be happy to be working and if we didn’t like it leave,  there are plenty of people who want our jobs.  A real morale boosting speech that was…

South Wales –  In 11 years service I’ve never known morale so low, which ranks alongside the halved front line resource levels. Dangerous for both public and officers alike. If i had a trade behind me, I’d leave tomorrow. Angry  and frustrated at  May, Winsor and Cameron for creating an atmosphere where officers feel unappreciated, undervalued and cheated by imposing brutal cuts and pay freezes only to spend hundreds of thousands on police crime commissioners and their retinue.

Unnamed Force – Crime is falling apparently – really ? I wish someone would tell the criminals. We have never been busier, we literally do not stop , you’re lucky to get a 15 minute break in a 10hr shift. Then I turn up to a call I take a jibe about how long it’s taken for us to come out, like we’re in the station drinking tea, I wish I could tell them there are only 4 of us on duty covering hundreds of thousands of people – but I’m not allowed to in case it undermines public confidence…. Where have all the Police gone ? . Spending cuts have hit us very hard, cutting back office Support Staff was a quick cost saving fix, but those functions still need doing – so Police Officers are doing them which inevitably diverts them from actual Policing . Police Officers are burning out , we’re just ordinary human beings, I’ve never known a period where stress has been such a factor , I wish some research could be done into breakdowns and stress related illness in the Police, it’s known as a job that has a heavy toll on relationships and the average life expectancy of a Police Officer after 30yrs service is less than 10yrs. I worry that many of the young Cops in their 20’s today won’t see their retirement in their 60’s. It used to be 30yrs service or 55yrs old , but its recently been changed by the Government, obviously they aren’t the ones who are actually expected to do it , 60 year old Police Officers ? – If it wasn’t so desperate it would be funny.

Unnamed Force – I’m a PC at a very rural nick. Just a year ago we had three on response, plus a few community bobbies and PCSOs floating about. Now there are just two of us (on paper) but in reality only one because the other will be on abstractions for whichever operation is flavour of the month. When I joined we had six on response at each nick so I don’t know where this ‘cuts won’t effect the front line’ has come from because my nick is like a ghost town. It gets worse than that, there’s also no money for training, so I still haven’t had my standard response driving course. Due to the location of where I work it can take me 30 minutes to get to a grade 1 call. When I hear updates over the radio, “caller has blood coming from her head and locked herself in the bathroom”, “Can we have more mobiles here NOW!”, “Offender is still on scene and has blah blah blah” it literally makes my blood boil that I can’t get to help people when they need me. And yes we have a single crewing policy, so even if there was another officer who was standard trained to work with, I couldn’t crew up with them anyway! With all that said, even though morale is rock bottom, and I fear things will get even worse, the shift (including my skipper and response Insp) are amazing- that, and the current job security, are the only thing holding me to the job…stopped being a vocation years ago.

Northamptonshire – Been a police officer now for getting close to ** years, I love my job, I love locking up bad people and helping those who need it most when their lives have for what ever reason spiralled to new lows, whether that be passing on a death message to dealing with those with mental health problems. Morale has been over this time slowly ground down, it improved for a while when we had a new chief appointed, but with the implementation of the Windsor review, the constant attacks that are in the media towards the police and the lack of support that the Fed seem to offer, the heads are dropping. Numbers on the front line are getting less, the work rate is increasing, and we just don’t seem to get any support from the management. The pay freezes are really starting to bite as the cost of everything has gone up but my pay hasn’t and we seem to have a government that is intent on destroying the police service to fill their own political needs. We have been told that we need to save more money, but it makes no sense when you see the PCC spending over and above his budget on recruiting staff.  Makes my blood boil ! However, despite all this I still go to work, as the people that are on my team are a fantastic bunch to work with, my team is the front line, and I know that despite what ever happens, my team will do their utmost best for the time that as I have their back and they have mine

Unnamed Force – You don’t join to be popular , and we don’t whine & whinge it’s not appreciated, we want to be the Police Service the public wants us to be and we try desperately hard to do that – I often wonder what the endgame of our serial detractors in the media and politics actually is ? If they eventually manage to convince everyone that the Police is corrupt and not fit for purpose , where do we go from there …

Surrey – I have been police staff for only 3 years but the morale has plummeted in that time. I speak to officers very often to put crimes on and you can tell that most of them are seriously unhappy with the way things are and the way things are going, no one joined up for what we have at the moment. All anyone wants to do is help the public and do the best we can, but all that is becoming more and more difficult. It’s becoming common-place for new policies and procedures to be piled on top of us, more work for less staff, no overtime but expectation that service levels will remain the same and then when someone complains that they had to wait 10 minutes to get their non-urgent call answered we get an email saying that we need to push harder to meet ‘customer’ demands. As Police staff we have the benefit in our contract of not being called in on rest days when business needs dictate, however, recently our deputy head of contact decided to randomly pick a number of staff who were on rest days to come in and work for a special event. It was explained on an email that these staff members had been picked “out of a hat” and would be required to work. It went on to say that this was approved by the head of HR and the only choice available in this was whether to take the day as overtime or as a RDIL. This is completely against the terms of our contract but staff were told that there was no debate with regards to coming in and, if selected, you were expected to be at work at the time stated. A couple of members of staff kicked off about this and questioned it with UNISON who complained however nothing seemed to be done and staff were basically told “you’re lucky you have a job, you could’ve been made redundant”. Since then we’ve all had further rest days cancelled against the terms of our contract, but when complaints are made we’re told that lucky to have jobs and should show more dedication to the force and the public of Surrey. It seems the “you’re lucky to have a job” line has become to norm.

Unnamed Force – Budget cuts means staffing cuts, which means that those left have to do the extra work. It’s not difficult to understand. Police are constantly hammered in the press, and by the politicians,  often over matters that are nothing to do with the current generation of  officers, (Hillsborough, Lawrence etc), but still we are judged on matters such as these. I’ve worked a football at the local ground where I’ve been called a  murderer, because of the uniform I wear, and of events that happened long before I joined. Apart from the facts that our pay has been frozen, pension contributions risen by 1.5%, pension scheme changed without our consent, CRTP being reduced and phased out, and now being given a 1% pay rise (which doesn’t even cover the cost of the increased pension contribution), cost of living rising by god knows how much, having to work longer for a reduced pension, dealing with non-police related incidents etc etc, the thing that really gets me wound up is the fact that the politicians continually beat us around the head with a big stick. Oh, we keep getting told “You’re doing well. Crime is down” etc, but we all know that it isn’t. And we’re being run into the ground to keep the figures down to make it look like we’re coping. We are not coping. We are sinking. And we’re nowhere near the bottom yet. The feeling amongst those at the sharp end is that the Command Teams are only looking out for their own future interests, and are so far detached from reality, that they might as well be Tory politicians. Every week it seems as though we’re being asked to give up something else, while the PCCs and politicians who they represent can get away with fraudulent expense claims and generally blaming the police for all that is wrong with the country.
How can we provide a service to the public when we turn out five bobbies on a shift to cover 40,000 members of the public? We mark up CID vehicles to give the impression that there are more uniformed officers on the streets than is actually the case. How desperate have we become? The public need to know the truth. We are in a desperate state. Morale? What morale?

Thames Valley – We had our own example of ‘Fresh Paint & Flowers’ just the other week.  Our PCC came to visit and decided to go out with the team policing the Night Time Economy to see what it was like.  Rather than resourcing it the usual way (6-8 over-stretched PCs dealing with 2-3000 members of the public), the neighbourhood team did a “spontaneous” operation and threw 10 more PCs and a glut of PCSOs onto the streets.  Also, the NHPT Inspector was out on the streets – certainly the first time I had ever seen her out there at night.  As a result, the PCC got a completely erroneous impression of the difficulties faced by front-line officers.  Oh, and they all buggered off home at 2am…which is just when the clubs start to kick out, leaving the remaining 6 of us to deal with all the usual rubbish.

West Mercia – The recent merger (yes it is don’t fool yourself) with Warwickshire has been an added nightmare on top of everything else for us for a long time. Rumour after rumour that officers  would be sent from one end of the two counties to the other and no one from the top brass would give a straight answer either yes or no. We were promised the changes would mean more people on the streets as office bods were put back on shifts but it hasn’t happened. Last weekend our shift strength was 1/3 of what it is on paper.  The new order has seen stations effectively closed with colleagues literally driving past where they work and were stationed till a few weeks ago, to carry on a further 20 or 30 miles to book on, collect a police car and drive back to where they worked before – then do the exact reverse at the end of their shift. Can you imagine for one minute any head of a major successful company suggesting that as a progressive move ? We were all summoned down to our HQ to be told how things were going to be and in no uncertain terms told by a senior officer “this is what’s happening, if you don’t like it there’s the door”. I may be radical but i think the frontline would benefit enormously from private business leaders taking control of planning and management of the police, they would certainly throw out a lot of the crazy procedures we have to put up with now.

Unnamed Force – My son is in College and thinking of following my footsteps and joining the Police but to be honest I’d rather he didn’t. I wouldn’t tell him to his face because I want to be supportive. My dad was a Bobby as well and he cried with pride at my Passing Out Parade …. so what has gone wrong ?

Avon & Somerset – I should be astounded by my Chief Constable’s remarks on the radio that he thinks his officers are a happy bunch but I’m not. I’m embarrassed that he is so out of touch with his own workforce. If he doesn’t know what it’s like for us in the job, how can he know what its like for all the people he is in charge of protecting. I’ve never seen him or any of the senior officers out on a Saturday night fighting drunks in Bristol or knocking a door in the early hours to tell someone their wife has died on the M5 … the stuff we have to do every week. All we get are endless monotonous emails telling us everything that we are doing is wrong followed by some new policy or form to add to the endless pile we already have. I thought they were supposed to be cutting paperwork not giving us more. Most of our shifts are at half strength or below and thats before they take some away for one or other operation or whatever the whim of the moment is. Morale, what morale ?

Unnamed Force – I listen to so much negative spin on TV and by the Government it genuinely gets me down. The worst of it is that none of our ‘leaders’ speaks up for us , why don’t they ? . I wish we could speak for ourselves but we’re forbidden to do so by our own organisation – I really believe its because they don’t want to hear what we’ve got to say.

Wiltshire – EVERYTHING you and others have written about is a 100% true and accurate reflection on my beloved job. I have taken to telling many that I am proud to wear the uniform, proud to serve my Queen for her Country in the office of Constable and Proud to do my job. I no longer care about the organisation as the management are full of “management speak” with beautiful flowing bar graphs and Pie charts. I no longer care about the press or media, as I am afraid Jimmy SAVILLE will never face prosecution, HILLSBOROUGH and G20 is nothing to do with my “FORCE” Plebgate is not my fight to have, all the Spin Government put on Police showing how bad we are – getting us to arrest Journalists making them hate us (hence the bad news/press we get) and as a PC I will never be heard, appreciated or expected to make any difference to these “breaking” stories some of 20+ years ago. With the £millions taken from our budget, our front line numbers now include anyone that is “customer facing” which means, control room staff at Devizes, Enquiry Officers, Local Crime Investigators, CSI, Divisional Drivers (all I am sure are trained to take out a 18 stone drunken/drugged idiot on a Saturday night after ‘his missus is avin a laff’ and reports a Domestic). How can a Response team of 12 be expected to cover the “north hub” with roughly over 150 square miles, covering large towns and rural communities, as these are the only customer facing officers left after 5pm? Now I can sit and complain about WINDSOR, but it is all too late, it has happened and this will never be reversed. Police Federation have no power to resist this onslaught as we are not allowed to strike, as this as it seems is the only way to get the Government to listen but what can we do – work to rule? I am sorry I will never do this as I swore my oath and I still to this day take it seriously. I have seen (and will probably continue to see) friends and colleagues leave the job, ones who have put 5 years of their life into it and are still paid the same as someone who is just coming out of a probation period? how can this be fair, right or humane? So many people have been Temporarily promoted (some over 4 years), all are about to be busted back as they have been used, abused and no longer needed as the number of posts are reduced. So my dilemma and one that I know reflects almost all of my colleagues beliefs (except those on HPDS or are trying to climb the greasy pole) what job is out there that pays the same?

Unnamed Force – I love being in the Police, for most it’s vocation -not just a job , I could earn more driving a bus and I wouldn’t have to wear a stab vest for work. The Police take stick constantly , we accept that , there are dozens of ‘fly on the wall’ programmes on TV that show what we face. It’s not pretty , but it comes with the territory and we get on with it. We’re regularly hurt and physically and verbally abused but we try to front those that want to hurt us because we feel that we’re protecting something. What we can’t take much more of , is the back-stabbing – it makes us feels like the society we’re trying to protect is turning on us. This can’t be the case can it ?

Warwickshire – We were all called into meetings one morning and told ‘from today you are doing this, you are doing that’ – no consultation, no warning and told if we didn’t like it to leave. The job stopped being a vocation for most of us on that day. You had time served experience detectives suddenly doing neighbourhood bobby roles and our OSU back out driving pandas – what a waste of their training and experience and the money it all cost. Then came the alliance and we repeatedly get told how terrible we are and how much better West Mercia are at doing absolutely everything. Which is funny because when talking to WM officers they say they are being told exactly the same but the other way round.

Avon & Somerset – Things are at rock bottom at this moment in time, as we are going tri force ( or farce) as its known , but the best of it all is , no one knows what is happening .. Shifts.. they are s**t .. 5 day shifts from 7am to 6pm for example .. Poor dog handlers are being left in limbo as most don’t know if they will still have a dog, management have no idea what they are doing or how many dog handlers they actually want ! They are going to close a base station on the East of the Force, which covers one of the most accident prone areas the A303/A37 send the whole Ops Dept traffic and dogs over 30 miles to Bridgewater and then no doubt send them back to patrol the East, talk about short sightedness.. But this closure will leave many officers having to do an extra 60 miles a day round trip The majority of us wonder what is happening as there is no clear plan.. Its a fudge unhappy officers/sgts on the Ops Dept who some may end up back to district … We all know . leave it to the Sgts and Pc`s and it all works

Essex – We paraded with 15 officers ten years ago and now parade with 4 in an environment where we now deal with more than ever before. Some days there will be literally nobody to go to calls and the only response on the radio to a violent domestic graded as an emergency will be that of the duty sergeant acknowledging he has been told (for the log) and asking that when a unit becomes available it is assigned. I could go on and on, but suffice to say our good will is now zero. I do a good job by the public I am sworn to serve but I refuse to ‘play the game’ to keep the bosses happy. In Essex TJIF but I know it is no different anywhere else.

Unnamed Force – I’m a Dog Handler with 12yrs service , I’ve now found out I’ve got to do another 20yrs to do , I’m 40 now and I’m knackered now to be honest , my knees and back are bad -all through injuries in work , I worry I’ll dip a fitness test one year and I’ll get binned on compulsory severance – I couldn’t do this role anyway when I’m pushing 60 ! what will I do in the Police in my late 50’s operationally at least – I’m not gonna make it that far …I know .

West Midlands – Morale in our force, pretty much echo’s what everyone else has said so far. Cancelled rest days, duty changes badged as exigency of duty, no opportunities for changes of roles, massive lack of resources, no buy in from SMT’s who are so removed from what’s actually going on on the frontline they think resourcing is fine or it’s simply because it may affect their future promotions. Pay freeze, pension contribution increase with reduced pay outs, extension in working service. I’m not particularly mathematically minded but we’re paying in more, working longer for the privilege and getting less back. Is it any wonder hoards of officers are withdrawing from the police pension and buying property. The current governments pathological hatred of the service and it’s attempts to ruin our already fragile reputation even though a certain individual has admitted what boils down to a public order offence in anyone’s language, excuse the pun, no-one actually cares about the word ‘pleb’, it’s a childish word, I’m more concerned that any member of the public (or MP) can eff n jeff at officers in such a way and then demand an apology for the mess he caused himself. I joined to be a career PC and have been very lucky in the varied roles that I have had but even I would leave tomorrow given the opportunity, which I never thought I’d here myself say. Everyone keeps uttering the immortal words ‘they’ll only do something when one of us is seriously hurt or killed’ which is terrifying.  I’ve never seen Morale so bad.

Devon & Cornwall – I work in a busy coastal town,  we are run ragged,  there should be a Sarge & 5 covering. Most times these days it’s just two. I have gone to incidents where matey is self harming & threatening public single crewed as there was no back up within 60 miles. Me & one other have taken on 12 blokes scrapping,  nearest back up 20 mins away. One night we had several I grades,  public desperate for help that could not be resourced as no units were free in a whole County. How do we explain that to Mrs who has just had a kicking off drunk hubby? We are constantly being changed, line managers change monthly,  departments come & go. All the while front line officers get cut & asked to do more with less. We are given the cheapest kit,  waterproof coats that aren’t,  underpowered cars. We deal with numerous jobs while some senior rank then checks to see we have completed every form,  on most of which we write the same information over & over. The politicians take away our pay, make us work longer & harder. In real terms my pay has gone down. The federation are useless,  good intentions but useless.  Morale is rock bottom,  the cops on the street have lost faith in anyone above inspector,  the media hate us,  the politicians want to put us down,  together they are turning the public against us. Everyone makes mistakes,  we do, & the punishment is far worse than any other job. But we front line cops stand side by side,  we rely on each other,  we know if we press that button calling for help our colleagues will run through fire to get to us. That & the rare moments when you know you have made a difference to the good in someone’s life.

Avon & Somerset – I’m one of those A&S officers CC Nick Gargan didn’t ask if my morale was low. After David Cameron and his rich mates lessened my salary by around £3,500 over the last few years, I can tell you my morale isn’t high and I don’t go to work any more feeling full of enthusiasm. After 25 years, I feel the police are being given a good kicking at Cameron’s behest in a revenge attack after he was shown up in the Sheehy report.

Unnamed Force – Fresh Paint and Flowers you call it. We have our own version of that here every couple of months. The Superintendent will go out on patrol but never with the response teams. He always goes out with the SNTs to some school or fete – basically anywhere where there might be a camera from the local paper. And its always in the middle of the day in the week as well. Anyone would think he was afraid of the dark.  We keep getting shift changes at the last minute and at the beginning of the season we all had an email listing Rest Days cancelled for football matches – we all thought they could only do that for an exigency of duty nor for something known months in advance. I tried complaining via the Fed but they are worse than useless nowadays

Kent – Quite simply apart from the self made morale within our response teams there is no morale! Personally I feel we have no support from SMT level with them just hiding their heads in the sand pretending everything is ok. We now seem to be going to more calls which aren’t police issues and the belief is that this is so again we can pretend all is good and that we have enough resources to deal with even the smallest issue. Response teams are run ragged regularly working through without any kind of refs break. We are at breaking point and can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel !

Unnamed Force – Morale at an all time low. Constantly attacked & vilified by politicians, lawyers, our own management. Allowed no discretion. Run ragged & exhausted. Not allowed to tell the truth about what is happening. Genuinely saddened by what we see as the destruction of British policing … The skills learnt on the street not understood or valued. We still keep the peace without guns. We still make our prisoners cups of tea. We still feel sadness for our victims & get a kick out of a decent guilty finding. For how much longer? Most people want to leave. Only the personally ambitious look bright eyed to the future. Most of us are just walking along the beach throwing the starfish back in & hoping somehow someone realises what is being lost.

Hampshire – We can’t keep making these cuts and expect crime to go down. My shift are abstracted on a daily basis for the numerous operations often at short notice. Promotion!! Hampshire interviewed 96 officers for PS 10 jobs at one stage they were told it was 7 jobs. I’m glad I didn’t put myself threw that process as the candidates were given a few low ballers and once again the ”good talkers” got promoted whilst the force is still  run on temporary and actings. Apparently we have too many supervisors compared to other forces e.g Surrey – Our new DCC ex-Surrey has plans to transform Hampshire to Surrey. We are not the same force! I’m currently looking for a new job after many years given to the service.

Avon & Somerset – Well my Chief Constable certainly didn’t come to our station and ask if we were all happy in our jobs and I dont recognise the force he was talking about on the radio from the one I work for. Every single day is the same, less of us on the shifts and more jobs piling up because the shift before had even less officers to deal. The only godsend are our Sgts and Inspectors who are fantastic and keep telling us it’s their job to take the flak from upstairs and to try and not worry ourselves but just do our best with what we have. the problem is just how many of our Sgts and Inspectors keep going off sick maybe due to the pressure being put on them ?

Unnamed Force – I’ve got A levels and a Degree with Honours so I must be just what the Government wants for ‘future cop’. Let me tell you now, none of them are the slightest bit of use in this job, they wont stop me getting kicked, punched, bitten or spat at, they won’t stop me having to fill in the same information four times because someone in an office can’t be bothered to turn two pieces of paper over themselves, and they won’t stop the continual barrage of what in any other industry would amount to abuse and bullying that comes down from above. What my degree does do is give me a sound solid base from which to challenge rationally and reasonably some of the things being asked of us but then be quickly ignored because I don’t ‘understand the bigger picture’. Actually I do – better than most of the people who are coming up with the ideas in the first place. That’s why I didn’t last long in an Acting Sgt role – my principles won’t let me toe the wrong line when my colleagues and friends are being abused from above.

Northumbria – The morale In our force has hit an all time low, I’ve been with this force since 2004 and I’ve always been on a response shift, once upon a time we saw numbers of around 20 on our shift! In a major city centre we are now In single figures! We are constantly relying on the special constabulary, which simply isn’t an answer!  Front line not effected they say? Who prepares court files 24/7 ?  who types letters 24/7  ? who performs goaling duties? 24/7 whom provides public order serials 24/7 ? who provides search teams? 24/7 ? It’s all well and good saying the front line will not be affected!!! This is simply not true it has been and it is being done more and more almost daily!!  I love my job and I love that on some occasions we make a difference, however now due to numbers all we can do is simply respond to incidents there is simply not the time or resource to pro actively target and disrupt criminals!!

The Met – I’m a copper’s wife. Police morale is a bit of a non topic lately. Its been overtaken by issues that mostly happened before a lot of PCs were born, and the press and MPs like it that way after having been dragged out in the open over some insidious stuff. It’s all too frightening. And yet we aren’t allowed to complain or tell anyone what’s happening for fear of that cover all ‘ bringing the force into disrepute’. Ironically that is happening anyway. If i could find him another job i would MAKE him go, despite having burst with pride watching him pass out of Hendon.And in spite of the fact he loves his job and takes pride in the fact he jails horrendous and dangerous people. He is the kind of man who comes home and tells me of his triumphs, and I watch his face glow as he tells of a job well done yet I know this job he loves is wearing our family down to the bone. The worst part is living in borderline poverty and me not being able to get a job because we can’t accommodate the fact he is never off a shift remotely on time and we couldn’t get childcare on that basis. We could live on the wage he was paid when we had our son, we even could afford Christmas thanks to his annual bonus. Now the money is so tight I live in fear of literally any bill. I dont get my hair cut and i walk everywhere, i never spend on myself.And remarkably enough, in the face of losing thousands of pounds of income, we are told that debt would mean dismissal as the force couldn’t trust the integrity of an officer in debt. This is before compulsory severance has even arrived. I have sold sentimental jewellery for cash, I have gone without food (even while pregnant) and I spend my days trying to mend clothes or sell things secondhand. Where is the silver lining we are promised for hearing tales of death and harm, wondering where your spouse is as he can’t get to the phone, throwing out the food I can barely afford as he is once again late and didn’t get time to eat? And I comfort his children as they cry out in the night as they haven’t seen Daddy all week because he has arrived home after bedtime. Uniformdating.com must be killing themselves laughing. The police is killing our dreams. I had hoped for some time with my husband when he retired and our children grown to reward us for being society’s gatekeepers. Now I worry I will be a widow with half a pension before my kids get to Uni. Who on earth would be a copper’s wife?

Unnamed Force – I don’t think the public realise just how the cuts have bitten – because on the face of it they still see the Police out and about. I wish we could tell them there’s only 4 of us on duty, they think there’s dozens of us and they understandably feel let down when it takes us hours or even days to respond to their call – and we can’t tell them why.

Warwickshire – I’m a Special Constable with Warwickshire Police, a force who it seems in recent years have increased their intake by hundreds of specials, while taking on fewer than twenty regular constables. Working in the force, and closely with regulars, I see a lot of low morale. Shifts which had a dozen members only eight years ago are now down to half of that at best. On a recent occasion I turned up to find that the entirety of the response shift was me, a SGT and an Inspector – all due to the frankly bizarre planning of shift patterns meaning not even SGTs know who will be on. The workforce is further thinned by the early retirement of many long-serving officers, I guess to save their more-expensive salaries. These factors give the regulars a lot of cause for complaint. What staggers me the most, though, is the inefficiencies and bureaucracies I see on every shift. I can see the need for thoroughness from a legal standpoint, and it’s to be expected that an organisation like the Police is less efficient than a profit-focussed company. But there exist many archaic and mind-boggling processes and procedures that tie up officers’ time and sap their enthusiasm. Most administrative work is still done by hand, on paper. Updating someone about a case requires finding the physical paper file. Procedures seem to change every few months, but never to become more efficient. Officers are bombarded with new information and told to work in new ways, but allowed no time to accustom themselves to these. All in all, though, it must be said that the officers carry on nonetheless and do an amazing job. The Police force still makes a positive difference to the lives of many people every day.

GMP – Morale in GMP…..I had to look up the word as I forgotten what it meant.

Unnamed Force – There is no morale left in the job. Mates on shift still do their best to look after one another but thats it. None of the bosses give two monkeys about us as long as we don’t bring bother knocking on their door. It’s the sergeants I feel sorry for, they are stuck in the middle taking all sorts of s**t from above, whatever the fancy of the day is, but trying to protect us from the worst of it. After 12 years I’ve had enough and already quit, gone back into industry where I was before. The pay is less but I see my wife and kids every evening and they don’t worry about me being shot or stabbed but its not the same I really really wanted to help people. I miss my colleagues and feel sorry for them. Would I let one of my kids join my dream job ? would I hell !

Nottinghamshire – Been in the job nearly 20 years but the last year or so for the first time I have actually not enjoyed getting up for work. The last few months have been the worst with all the cutbacks. Protected frontline my arse, numbers on teams are well down – below half in most cases, yet the paperwork mountain gets bigger and every day some civvy or other is hounding us for something or other. They are supposed to be supporting us but they call the shots. I laughed when I read your piece about Senior Officers being told to get out on the weekends and work with the teams, I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone above rank of Sgt out and about flying the flag.

Unnamed Force – I’m a Tutor Constable and my probationer who’s 24 yrs old has asked me about a taking career break – I asked why and he said “I really don’t want to lose any of the other skills I’ve got from outside of the Police because I don’t know what’s going to happen with us”

Unnamed Force – I’ve got BSc in Genetics and speak German & Spanish I’m a uniformed PC and I’m happy to be doing this role. Yes I’d like to progress and maybe one day attain some rank but its vital that I know what to do, even if its for my own self respect. Now I’m told the Government thinks I’m not good enough and it needs to bring ‘talent’ in.

Police Service of Scotland – It’s just the same north of the border. Since the eight forces becoming one happy family on 1st April (make your own comments), things have gone from okay to very poor. There seems to be more admin for the same old stuff, which in turn keeps us indoors writing for longer. Many guys (Sgts, bosses etc) have jumped ship and many others are still looking (myself included). Our new CC ‘visits’ stations on a marked Police motorcycle without any fanfare and has been known to phone any random station at changeover to ask the poor cop who answers for the Force Priorities, and God help them if they don’t know! Mind you, with our area’s Traffic motorcycle section being almost non existent, (as is the road safety unit by the way), it’s easy seeing him coming because we (almost) don’t have bikes anymore so no prizes for guessing who in coming to the station…..Like every other force, we all suffer the pension changes, no wage rise etc etc, and this is without Winsor! We currently get double time if we work into a rest day AND after a certain time. (which in my service has happened so few times that I could count them on both hands with fingers to spare) I have been present when cops have been told by their sergeants (obviously they have been told by their bosses to do this) that you will have to finish the report by ‘then’ as you’re not getting the overtime! Great, you send us to the calls, put the nasty people to court, do the writing but can’t have the time to do it. We need to adopt the practice of some English and Welsh forces to hand over the package at changeover. It’s bad enough doing the first 30 minutes overtime for free, imagine asking the old school miners or ship building to work for free, you’d have a riot on your hands. All cops have been told that we can’t apply for a/l in 2014 between 5 July and 6 August because of the Commonwealth Games. Imagine the bun fight for the rest of the year, not forgetting the grief cops with kids have with taking them out of school during term time to salvage a holiday with your family. If you have pips and or crowns then I would think you are safe with creating as many operations as possible to take the already thin blue line away from their stations to crew elsewhere in an attempt to keep the bean counters happy. Some of the ‘old forces’ have ski centres to Police in the winter months. Normally one cop is sent up just in time to see 5000+ skiers arrive over the morning. That’s not the kind of ratio you would expect at a sporting event, but it just continues, obviously until it goes t**s up and the nearest cover is a hour away. Morale? as low as I’ve ever seen in my double figure service and the new starts haven’t a clue what lies ahead. We will no doubt be measured on performance, either by FPN’s, stop searches, pub checks or anything else that is quantifiable. I fear for the public response when this inevitably kicks in, when at the end of the month, with lower figures than anyone of us would like, every ‘stop’ now becomes a ticket or somebody will be lifted just to put a tick in a box. It may be just as well that the public is blissfully unaware of the circus we now work in because if the ‘lunatics ever decided to overtake the asylum’ then the job would be properly f***** because there aren’t enough of us to go round to stop it.

Unnamed Force – Morale.. what morale!?  Mine along with the majority of my hard working.. stressed out colleagues has flown the coup.. i recently had the audacity to voice my opinions to a senior officer.. having put him on the spot he could give me no reasonable reply.. i had just come into work for an afternoon shift having worked 2 and half hours o/t from shift before.. having already worked 11 hours.. he wanted to know why no updates had been placed on a log.. so for asking him questions i was called to a performance meeting with him and the chief insp.. He wanted me to apologise for what he deemed as me dressing him down in the presence of junior officers..  no back up no support apart from our over burdened sgts..  we all do the same job but the smt seem to be oblivious to this.. stand up for us back us up..  we are slowly crumbling and its the worst i have seen in my 17yrs service..

If you would like to add your thoughts about the state of morale in the British Police at the moment, good or bad, please email them to constablechaos@hotmail.co.uk – names not needed but Force name would be a bonus for inclusion.

Anyone reading this and wanting to reproduce the content / comments or requiring more information / quotes / interviews etc, please contact Mike Pannett who kindly helped obtain the info for this article – email mikepannett@msn.com or @MikePannett on Twitter

Now here’s a thing. Police Officer and staff numbers are falling. With regard to staff, quite a lot actually. Leaving warranted officers to carry out the humungous number of tasks and swathes of paperwork previously carried out by support staff / civilian staff / police staff – whatever your force wants to call them today. Either way, a practical, viable, most under-appreciated part of the police ‘family’ has more or less gone; been ‘streamlined’; been cut; been slashed more efficiently than if Sweeny Todd had done it with a brand new razor.

On top of that, police control rooms are being cut, centralised, merged, whatever todays fancy buzzword is, reducing that one piece of the vital link you can’t rent down at Pertemps – local knowledge. Leaving dispatchers staring at a map screen sometimes woefully out of date, trying to guide an officer, also not familiar with the area because the local nick has been closed, as has the next nearest one, to a new estate that’s not actually on the maps yet because they haven’t been updated, where goodness knows what terrible crime is occurring as nothing can be deciphered above the screaming and shouting on the end of the very patchy mobile phone line.

From a frontline officers point of view, many will say crime is not falling, and they are busier than ever. No doubt some of this will be because fewer officers are attending a larger number of incidents, so on an individual basis, they do have an increased workload – some officers say their numbers on response teams have been halved (or even worse) in recent times.

But hang on, the figures show that ‘frontline officer numbers’ have not been cut. in some cases they have allegedly gone up. This amounts to no more than interpretation of that word ‘frontline’ again.

From the guy or girl in the streets perspective, ‘frontline’ tends to mean the number of police available to respond when they call for help, in an emergency or otherwise.

From a ‘police management’ perspective ‘frontline’ also includes other departments that also have a public facing role. Are CID frontline ? Yes …. and No. Are Local Policing Teams frontline ? Yes … and No. Are specialist units (what’s left of them) frontline ? Yes …. and No. It’s all very fudgy. What is clear is that a number of officers from whichever department you select, are spending an increasing amount of time sinking under paperwork and enquiries that previously were carried out by the ever-helpful support staff who are no longer there … but they are still ‘frontline’.

But here’s another thing. Crime IS falling. Despite all this. Despite all the cuts. The Office of National Statistics says so, by an average 7% as well (more here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23354168). And many excited journalists form a variety of newspapers and news websites are happily tippy typing away to spread the good news.

So all is rosy under the apple tree.

Or is it ?

The thing about statistics is this; if you ask the right questions, you get to determine the answers. If you ask the right questions of the right people, you get the right answers. Many moons ago when I worked out there in the real world, I was involved in Marketing for a period, and statistics, or rather, the manipulation of statistics, were a very important part of the role. It was our job to come up with the results that supported whatever argument was being presented. But without of course doing anything underhand.

Say for example, (and this is of course completely hypothetical) you wanted to know if peoples pet cats preferred Brand A or Brand B cat food.

Now what you are not going to do is ask the cats – chances are whichever options you give the answer would be ‘they both taste yuk, give me a mouse or a sparrow any day’. But that won’t give your client the answer they wanted to be able to boldly proclaim their product is the best of the best of the best !

So you have to look for different approaches …. and that tends to involve asking real life members of the public for their views. Now quite what Billy Bloggs knows about the palatable habits of Minky the pet moggie is beyond me and is most likely beyond the capability of the said interviewee (unless of course he has recently been in some sort of erotic encounter with CatWoman and as a result now has the ability to converse in all feline dialects (never say never) !! The cat, for its part, will eat whatever you put in front of it if it’s hungry.

The simplest, proper, scientific way to answer the question would be to carry out taste test on the entire cat population of the UK, (which if you are interested by the way, is estimated at around 8 million) over a period of time to allow for natural fluctuation in feeding habits etc. That approach however, is slightly impractical, if not a tad over the miniscule budget we were given to come up with the right answer … or rather the ‘preferred’ answer, so you have to go to plan B … which involves asking the cat owners.

So you sent some people out onto the High Street with clipboards to stop and harass a large number of poor innocent members of the public going about their daily basis to quiz them on their pets eating habits. of course you don’t !! We can’t waste time and money on anything so random. What you do is have people with clipboards stood outside supermarkets and pet shops, actively (for that read selectively) pouncing on people exiting the said store with boxes/tins of cat food – a credible targeted approach you may say – what’s wrong with that ?

But what if for the four week period before and during the market research, the manufacturer of ‘Brand A’ has been running a national advertising promotion and discounting on their products thereby ensuring sales are increasing and customers are more aware of their brand. Statistically therefore, a large percentage of the buying public will have already purchased their product, AND be in a more positive frame of mind because they’ve seen the happy cat pictures on the telly AND they’ve saved a considerable amount of money on an essential purchase.

Now you ask that person whether their cat prefers Brand A or Brand B – what do you think the answers will be ?

Not very accurate is the correct answer … but on paper Brand A is the bees knees.

But what does that have to do with policing. Well, not a lot directly. But it demonstrates in a clear and simple fashion how statistics cannot be replied on one little bit. There is a very famous phrase, attributed to the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Further, in a letter to the National Observer published June 13, 1891, p. 93(-94) regarding a debate on pensions (now there’s a thing), the writer says: “Sir,–It has been wittily remarked that there are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a ‘fib,’ the second is a downright lie, and the third and most aggravated is statistics. It is on statistics and on the absence of statistics that the advocate of national pensions relies…..”

It seems that things haven’t really changed with the passage of time. The only people who believe statistics are those that stand to benefit from them.

I digress. back to policing. Yesterday I tweeted “Remember, if you don’t have the staff,you dont do the raid,you don’t find the drugs factory,nothing recorded,so less staff means less crime!”. That got retweeted quite a lot – a heck of a lot actually ! It may be a bit basic or simplistic, but in essence it’s a simple fact – if you don’t know it’s there, it hasn’t happened.

There are all sorts of stories bounding about all over the country about pressures being put on police officers to ‘carefully consider’ the way incidents are dealt with. Now I can’t vouch for the accuracy of any of the comments and I’m sure a lot of officers would not put their head above the parapets for fear of retribution, so let’s just refer to these suggestions as wild, speculative, uncorroborated, unconfirmed rumours :

The Friday/Saturday night drunks, shouting, swearing and being an absolute pain threatening all and sundry, refusing to go home and behave. Locked up Section 5, Public Order Act. EEEEKK !! hang on, that’s recordable as a violent crime. Bad for the figures you know ! In the morning when they are sober, give ‘em a ticket or caution for Drunk & Disorderly. there’s a detection there so the good figures have gone up. AND D&D is not a recordable offence, so the bad figures have gone down at the same time – everyone’s a winner – aren’t they ??

There are some suggesting problems trying to record Attempted Burglaries … “How can you be sure it’s not just a criminal damage to the door/window ?” …. “well they used a flipping lock snapping device for a start !” – “Could it have been kids playing football and the ball has gone through a window ?” … “it’s a ninth floor flat” – and so they go on.

Criminal damage to motor vehicles – “How do we know it isn’t RTC damage from a passing vehicle ?” (again not recordable) …. “erm, the footprints over the bonnet, roof and boot perhaps ?”

There are many, many other examples I’ve been given but again, nothing can be proved – its all rumour, but statistically speaking, what are the chances of all of it being made up ?

So, what have we learnt ? Well, if you want to run a  good news story, or a bad news story, you just need some statistics. The same ones will do – it just depends on how you word it to meet your particular needs. It may well be the case for Brand Y that 54% of people ‘preferred their product’ of the two but if you are marketing Brand Z it’s just as positive to say ‘statistics prove almost half of all people prefer our brand’

By the way, if you are ill or injured, best to go home because statistically speaking you are more likely to die in hospital than anywhere else …. and if its Christmas Day, Boxing Day or New Years day, the statistics say your chances of survival are even lower !!

And here’s a good question for you – why don’t we all drive round in bright yellow cars ?? Statistically they are they safest colour to drive !! (or is it just because there’s less of them about ?) … ohh and don’t buy a red car – statistically you’re more likely to get a speeding ticket ! (but then red is one of the most common colours) (more here http://www.arnoldclark.com/newsroom/124-revealed-britain-s-most-popular-car-colours)

I shall leave you with a quote by another equally famous person “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.” – Homer J Simpson.

Below is a re-blog of a post by Carl Eve, reporter for the Plymouth Herald newspaper (@CarlEve on Twitter); originally published on his own blog in December 2012 and reproduced here with his full permission and awareness.

When we think of, talk about, and have a big push on highlighting Domestic Violence, it always seems to be very centric on the two main parties involved. The adults. The grown ups. The ones who the kids look up to.

Yes, and I’m not afraid to say it for fear of being called ‘politically incorrect’ or ‘stereotyping’, primarily an abusive male partner attacking (physically / mentally / emotionally) a female ‘other half’. Before someone jumps up and down on me, I know this is not always the scenario, but it is by far and away the most common.

The point here is, what often gets missed / cast aside / ignored are the child victims – the ones who, if not also being attacked themselves, often have to sit back in silence and see one or other of their parents, their guardians, their role models, being attacked in the most horrible ways possible by someone they should rightly be able to think of as their protector.

So anyway, these are Carl’s words below, not mine. There is nothing I could add. Nothing.

Domestic Abuse Awareness Weeks has been and gone and I didn’t really write anything for my patch. I say this as every year I try to do something to highlight the issue. But as I (repeatedly) say to my contacts in this field, particularly the Plymouth Domestic Abuse Service, “domestic abuse isn’t just for domestic abuse awareness week”.

No-one seems to get my joke, mainly because I say it through clenched teeth. In my old patch of Basildon, I’d be down at the Women’s Refuge, chatting with the manager, staff and current guests about how they are, what they need, what they’re planning, who they’re teaching about DV and how it needs to be countered, which court cases I need to know about and which bigot in the council is trying to give them a hard time.

Here? I’m person non grata, being a) a man and b) a bloody journalist. A combination which assures the view that I’m not to be trusted. So I don’t write as many stories about DV as I’d like.

The irony for me being the Basildon Women’s Aid group had me tagged from the first second. The manager there and outreach workers (most of whom were ‘survivors’ themselves) sussed my background before I’d opened my big gob.

I still recall hearing my mum’s screams. I recall her black eyes, split lip, her fear as the door went and Dad’d come home in one of “those moods” which meant we should all run for cover unless we wanted a piece.

I can’t find any pleasure in playing with Matchbox toys because the metre long track, usually orange, but occasionally the more stiff and unyielding yellow tracks, were not something of fun for me and my brothers. Kept on a little ledge above the fridge, we’d know that if Dad headed towards it, we’d be nursing welts for the rest of the night. I remember almost proudly being able to breathe through an ear after receiving a clout around the ear. I say clout, but that’s rather a quaint old fashioned description. I was playing cricket with a tennis ball with my friend in our garden. The ball hit our back outhouse. Nothing broke, but I was hit around the ear so hard I couldn’t hear the rest of the day and found if I held my nose I could push air out my ear. Strange really.

I had a regular nightmare (at least once a week for several years) of a steaming monster racing up the stairs if I dared venture out of the bedroom to go to the toilet. Only years later I clicked it was about my Dad who, if you heard him stomping up the stairs because me and my younger brother made a noise at night we’d cop a walloping. I remember lying in bed one night, listening to him getting hit and hit and hit, screaming “no, no, no” thinking to myself “if I call out, tell him to stop, I’ll get it too” and hating myself for being a coward.

I got the same feeling of cowardice when I’d hear my mum, in the next room at night, making the same pointless appeal. She’d cry out, begging him to stop. I’d lie there, feeling sick, wondering how breakfast time would be, and whether school would be a kind of freedom.

Like I said, it’s hearing your mum’s screams which I’ll recall for a long while yet.

This went on for years. I didn’t even know it was wrong for a lot of it. I do recall sitting on my bed, in the room I shared with my younger brother. I was about 10, sitting there sobbing after being hit several times. Mum, who’d tried to protect me before I ran, came in and was sitting next to me, also in tears. She’d been hit after she’d stood between me and Dad. She sat, I sat, both crying. I eventually asked her in all sincerity “why can’t we just leave him”. She hugged me closer and after a long pause said: “where can we go? There’s nowhere we can go… I’m sorry”.

Here’s the thing. I know full well it’s all relative and I got off very very light. Since becoming a reporter I’ve made it a kind of point to do stories on domestic violence, or to give it it’s current name, domestic abuse. I’ve heard far, far worse straight from the horses mouth as it were, cases in court, or from officers who’ve attended scenes. Some will make your jaw drop and shake your head. Like the one where the wife is kicked on the ground for daring to answer back, and then the guy got his seven-year-old son to keep kicking mum, so he learned that “that’s what you do to a woman who answers you back”.

One or two have made me well up, particularly when it’s kids because I think back to the fear you feel, all the bloody time. The dread you feel on your way home from school, dawdling so you don’t get home early, hoping he’ll come home in a good mood or there will be Morecombe and Wise or Les Dawson on telly so he’ll laugh in his chair, and we can watch and laugh and we can sit and act like a normal family for half an hour.

I had one of those moments today. I’ve heard this woman’s story from a couple of other people in Plymouth. It was only a few seconds of conversation. I don’t know her name. I was with Kerry Whincup, the co-ordinator for the Plymouth SEEDS (Survivors Empowering and Educating Domestic Abuse Services) for a meeting. Round table, different ages of women, different styles of hair, different outfits, different stories.

She’d come back in after a ciggie and a wee.

She’d left an 11 year relationship on New Years Day. She’d suffered lots of beatings. “After 11 years you leave with what you stand up in”. She has two children. To get at her, to make her suffer, he took a pair of pliers to the children’s teeth.

He’s dead now, and – I am not surprised – she is pretty happy about that.

“You get so used to the daily beatings and everything which goes with it. I didn’t even know what a Refuge was…”

I’ve thought for a while about writing this. About some of my past, why I want to write stories about domestic abuse, why I keep banging my head against some organisations to ensure the message gets out not just one week a year, but as many times as possible.

Meeting her today made my mind up. So bloody brave… and now joined with other victims (okay, survivors for the PC brigade) to help other women, to educate the authorities, the police, the magistrates, the judges, the lawyers, the councillors, the public about why it’s so damned important that this – domestic abuse, domestic violence, ‘another bloody domestic’ as jaded cops sometimes say – should be dealt with, taken seriously, acted upon, spoken about out loud.

Pliers.

I f***ing ask you! Pliers!

And you know the worst thing?

That’s not even the worst story I’ve heard so far, after 13 years as a reporter. Not by a mile. But it still makes me go very, very cold inside.

And also reminds me to call my mum and tell her that I love her because she took a lot of punches for me. So bloody brave…

If you, friends, family, or anyone you know, is suffering from domestic violence, please, please, please contact your local police or one of the very many support groups out there. You are NOT alone. If you can’t face making that step yet, contact me via Twitter, Facebook or email – I’ll do my best to put you in touch with someone that can help, and more importantly support you.

As a footnote, here’s a video clip from someone else, talking about the violence he witnessed his mother suffering as a child

In one of those random Friday evening Twitter ‘moments’ a few of us managed to convince ourselves it would be a great way to raise bit more money for #SuperJosh by pledging cash for followers.

Don’t panic, this isn’t some dodgy Parliament influencing attempt at buying favour (or questions …. or duck houses)– it’s simply this :

1. Set yourself a target for the number of followers you would like on Twitter
2. When you reach that target, make a donation (amount is down to you) to the #SuperJosh charity
3. Set yourself another target and start again !

So please, spread the word to everyone you know; on Twitter, Facebook and other means of Social Media. Tell your friends, families, hamsters and platypuses on ‘Twitter to follow you, join in themselves and raise as much as we can for a very worthy cause.

Find out more about @JourneyJoshuas and @SuperJCharity at http://www.joshwilsoncharity.org.uk/