I’m a survivor…

The WMP Casualty Bureau – this is where we take calls when things go all Holby City on us.

This week I’ve been training for a role that I really hope I never actually have to fill, at a place whose name I struggled to spell.

The role? Taking calls from concerned relatives in the wake of a major incident.

The word? Bureaua. No, Burauro. No, Bureau. Casualty Bureau.

What does the West Midlands Police Casualty Bureau do then and why do we have one?

If you follow my Twitter feed you may have time to time heard me referring to a worst case scenario where things go all ‘Holby City’ on us. This isn’t police speak as such, but I think it sums up fairly well the worst case disaster that we all hope will never happen.

By things going Holby City, I mean the plane plunging out of the sky, the huge pile up on the motorway or the train full of nuclear waist derailing just outside Bescot.

These are all what us police are likely to refer to (actual term this time) as ‘major incidents’ – ones that are likely to require the involvement of multiple agencies, cause emergency action to swing into place and attract the calls of many concerned friends or relatives fearfully calling us asking whether their relatives have been affected.

It’s the taking of these calls where the Casualty Bureau comes in. As a Casualty Bureau volunteer I am, along with several hundred other officers around the force, on standby to come into HQ at short notice and take details from these calls.

The system is fairly straightforward – we’ll take a call from, say, a relative of a passenger on board the fallen airliner and we’ll enter all of the passenger’s details onto our computer system, CasWeb.

At the same time emergency services at the scene will be taking the details of any survivors or evacuees and feeding these details back to us. We enter this information onto the system and look to match up the records.

In the unfortunate event that there have been fatalities, the same process is followed with details of the deceased sent to the Casualty Bureau and then if matched with a missing person record, a specially trained Family Liaison Officer dispatched to support the family.

Each force has a Casualty Bureau and we all run on the same system meaning we can support each other and take calls on each other’s behalf.

This theme of working together is crucial as major incidents almost inevitably attract the attention of all three emergency services as well as local council’s emergency planning departments (find out about Walsall MBC’s here), so training exercises are usually a joint effort.

A Casualty Bureau activation is thankfully a rare occasion. The Riots, London Bombings and 2005 Asian Tsunami all caused activations with the latter example showing how it’s not only regional disasters that the Casualty Bureau helps out with.

As for what working in the Casualty Bureau would be like during a real incident, I can only guess. I’m assured that there will be a ready supply of cake but then I imagine this is the least I’d need to steady my nerves ahead of the first call.

Even the practice calls we took were quite intimate – taking details from someone convinced their relative may have died isn’t going to be an easy thing to do and the work in the Casualty Bureau I’m sure will be as tough as it is rewarding.

If you’d like to learn a little more about the role of the Casualty Bureau, have a look at this article from Birmingham Resilience on our own Bureau. You can find out more about emergency planning in general on the Directgov website and pick up some practical tips too.

Finally, a big thanks to Casualty Bureau managers and my trainers for the course, Lisa and Tracey, who delivered a very interesting course and continually encouraged me to ‘have another doughnut’, something that as a cop I was more than happy to do!

P.S. I do not believe that our bureau has anything in common with The Bureau from The Day Today. This makes me sad/reassures me greatly.

Rubin could take a man out with just one punch, but he never did like to talk about it all that much…

Assaults: Fine if you’re in a boxing ring with a moustache but what if you’re elsewhere? What does the law say?

A few weeks ago I’d been forwarded a question on Twitter from someone curious to know what the difference is between the various levels of assault set out by our good friend the law.

Whilst I’ve written a couple of blogs previously about assault in reference to specific incidents, namely spitting and those happening on the sports field, I realised that I’ve not yet written anything explaining what separates one assault from another in any particular detail.

As assaults are one of the most common reports that we come to investigate, here we go then – a whistle stop tour of the four main types of assault that you might here the news presenters talk about from time to time.

Starting off with the least severe form of assault, we have common assault which comes from S. 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.

As you may have gathered if you’ve read my blog on how spitting could be considered an assault, for a S. 39 assault you don’t even need to have made contact with your victim. That you have caused them to ‘apprehend the immediate infliction of unlawful force’ is enough.

Had contact been made, a S. 39 assault would still be appropriate to record if the victim hasn’t suffered any pain or injury, for example they’d been pushed.

You’ll begin to see that the main factors that separate the different offences covering assault are level of injury and then, as the assaults become more serious, the intent of the offender.

The second form of assault we refer to is S. 47 of one of my favourite old, old laws – 1861’s Offences Against The Person Act.

This one is usually referred to as ‘actual bodily harm’ and means just that, that the victim suffers some physical injury as a result of an assault. This injury can be psychological and doesn’t have to be permanent so that a victim has experienced pain then we have a S. 47 assault.

Getting more serious now, we move up to grievous bodily harm without intent which comes from S. 20 of the Offences Against The Person Act.

The difference between S. 47 and S. 20 is the level of injury caused. The S. 47 we might be looking at unsightly bruises, grazes and red marks but for a S. 20 it’s more likely that we’ll be facing cuts, broken bones and other gory disfigurements.

Beyond S. 20 we have the worst type of assault, the S. 18 which refers to grievous bodily harm with intent. It’s the intent of the offender that makes the difference between S. 20 and S. 18 and as such it’s what we call a crime of ‘specific’ intent.

The difference between S. 20 and S. 18 is that in a S. 18 the offender is believed to have intended to cause grievous bodily harm – they’ve not only caused someone to suffer a serious injury but they’ve specifically meant to do so.

The intent may be proven during an interview or from the circumstances under which the assault has taken place. Was, for example, a weapon used, were there prior threats or was it a sustained assault? All of these factors point towards some intention to seriously injure.

As a slight curve ball, the ‘intent’ can also be to resist or prevent an arrest so if an officer was to, say, suffer a broken arm because he has been kicked by someone he is trying to lawfully arrest then that person has added a S. 18 assault to whatever offence they were already accused of.

So the above of the four levels of assault that we commonly deal with, now to confuse things slightly by mentioning CPS Charging Standards.

Certainly for the more serious levels of assault but also in any lower level of assault that is domestic related, it is the Crown Prosecution Service that makes the decision of whether there is sufficient evidence to charge a person and if there is, what they should be charged with.

To help prosecutors make a decision, the CPS publishes Charging Standards which set out the signposts that point towards it being more appropriate to charge one level of assault over another.

The Standards sometimes confuse police officers as much as they do anyone else but help ensure that when people are charged, they are charged in a proportionate way.

What does this mean? Well, take the definition of a S. 20 assault as an example. If you somehow gave an annoying colleague a paper cut then technically you’d have inflicted grievous bodily harm as a cut, no matter how minor, is the result.

The word ‘grievous’ though implies that the wound is serious, whilst any wound is serious to the victim, to the law it wouldn’t be sensible to charge someone for grievous bodily harm if the harm is a paper cut, hence the Charging Standards adjust things slightly.

According to the Charging Standards then, common assault can include grazes, scratches, bruising, superficial cuts and swelling. Actual bodily harm refers to ‘serious’ harm so cuts requiring stitches, minor fractures and lost teeth whilst grievous bodily harm is seen as meaning broken bones, blood transfusions and permanent disability.

So there we have it, the four types of assaults and what stands between each one. If this has interested you, you’ll be thrilled to know that there are further laws covering assaults on police officers, on emergency workers and the reasonably frequent ‘assault with intent to resist arrest’ which villains sometimes fall foul of when they lash out at us.

Whilst it isn’t uncommon for assaults to be reported, thankfully the most serious types of assault are relatively rare.

Being assaulted isn’t a nice thing to happen to anyone but when it does happen the law has provided us with a decent toolbox to ensure that we can bring offenders to justice.

As further proof that the Offences Against The Person Act 1861 is one of the best, it also includes offences of ‘Impeding a person endeavouring to save himself from shipwreck’, ‘Assaults with intent to obstruct the sale of grain, or its free passage’ and ‘Not providing apprentices or servants with food etc. whereby life is endangered’.

No one dared to ask his business, no one dared to make a slip for the stranger there among them had a big iron on his hip…

Should we be given guns? I’m not so sure…

The below article was written early last year but never published. With the tragic shooting of two police officers in Manchester and the subsequent debate on arming police officers now seems an appropriate time to look at the issue and so I’ve edited it to bring it up to date. As for the incident itself I don’t think I can add anything to the words of DCC Thompson over on his blog, take a look if you’ve not done so already.

Should I be given a gun? My immediate answers would be no, I probably shouldn’t be (I’d quickly run out of toes) but should British police officers in general be routinely armed?

In this post, inspired by some of the interest in the subject shown during our Tweet & Greet, I consider whether arming us officers would be beneficial.

The tradition in Britain is that we police by consent. Robert Peel, founder of the Met, stated how important this is to the effectiveness of the police when he included it as part of his ‘Peelian Principles‘.

We are able to police the population because the majority of the public readily support what we are doing and are willing to help us.

The opposite to consent would be coercion. Routinely carrying a firearm I think suggests that there’s no confidence we are able to police by consent alone, something we’ve done successfully for nearly two centuries.

Further to this, having a handgun strapped to the hip represents a huge barrier between the officer and a member of the public. The presence of a firearm is unnerving and it’s not part of our tradition that the option exists at all to readily deploy lethal force.

As Peel thought, ‘the police are the public and the public are the police‘ – issuing us firearms would be a step away from this very important principle.

Speaking to an armed officer is a different interaction to that with a regular bobby and I would argue people would feel less at ease when doing so.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a job when I’ve thought I might want to be carrying a firearm, nor one that I thought the use of a gun might help things. There are situations when the threat is such that we’ll need access to a higher level of force but this is what our armed response units are there to provide.

The majority of the jobs that we deal with, certainly in Walsall, do not necessitate us carrying guns and incidents in which we encounter guns on the streets are very, very rare.

Guns simply aren’t relevant to our role the majority of the time and across the hundreds of thousands of daily interactions between police and public have no part to play.

I think it’s not only that guns don’t seem relevant to my day to day role, it’s also that I joined the police under conditions such that a lethal option was not put at my immediate disposal.

I’m hesitant to use force at the best of times – I’ve not used my CS Spray and have never even drawn my baton. I’d have real reservations about being given a gun.

Currently officers have the option of putting themselves in a position in which one day they might have to take a life, a huge responsibility in itself. Arming every officer takes this choice away – I’d be carrying something that might end someone else’s life and change mine forever.

Debate about arming police officers will always be present, brought to the fore periodically by incidents such as the shooting of PC Sharon Beshenivsky in 2005, Derrick Bird’s rampage in Cumbria the year before last and now the horrific incident in Manchester.

In a 2006 Police Federation survey, over 80% of the 47,000 members asked stated that they did not wish to see officers routinely armed on duty.

Until I see something to address the above concerns about giving us guns, I’ll remain in this 80%.

Everything’s not lost…

Computers are smaller than they were in 1999 but this means they’re easier to steal too. Backing up your data is essential!

The other day I’d been thinking about how I could possibly top my blog about lions (I can’t) and had a brief notion that I might try and write something about how important it is to back up your computer, lest it gets nicked and you lose all your data.

Today I’d been sent to a burglary in Walsall and after the victim realised their laptop was missing, the first thing they then said – as many people I’ve met in the past have done – is that all of their holiday photos were gone.

As such I resolved to sit down that very evening and give a few tips on how to back up your computer to ensure that if worst comes to worst and it does get stolen, or even meet a sticky end with a glass of Tizer, that you’re not at a sentimental loss.

Here we are then – the fruit of my typing, a blog post all about just that very subject!

First things first though, your house should be nice and secure because you’ve followed the tips on our Safer Homes website and made sure that you’re not an easy target for the thieves. Your laptop isn’t left in view, you close the curtains when you’re out and you might even have put up a dummy CCTV camera or two.

Furthermore you’ve registered the most valuable of your possessions on Immobilse. You have a record of serial numbers etc so that if we need to we can record them on our crimes computer and identify recovered goods as your own.

Assuming then that having take these steps, some desperate burglar still climbs into your home with a swag bag and does take your computer, what can you do to ensure that they don’t take your data too?

Your operating system likely has options to back up the data automatically to an external source. Here’s how to do it on Windows XP, Vista/Windows 7 and for all you counter culture free thinkers, OS X.

There are also a variety of free and not so free programs that can be downloaded through the interweb tubes that do similar things but in different ways, giving you more control over what is saved and when the back up takes place.

Backing up doesn’t have to be done through a special program though – the most straightforward way is simply to insert a disc, USB stick or external hard drive and copy any files you need to.

Once you’ve done so you need to do what I do – hide said device or disc somewhere that no one would ever think of looking so that you know it’s safe.

Cursed burial grounds, magical lands found in wardrobes and Walsall Police FC’s trophy cabinet are all good places to hide your back up, in the middle of the floor, under the cat or in the kettle are not.

Getting into the habit of backing up your data regularly is always a good idea and as I’ve mentioned, many of the programs available can be scheduled to run automatically so that you don’t even have to remember to do it yourself.

If physical computer dongles aren’t your thing but clouds are, another good option is to use a service such as Dropbox or Norton 360, both of which allow you to upload data to their servers where it is safe by virtue of being stored in an air conditioned bunker somewhere three thousand miles away.

Burglaries are one of the worst call outs that we get and it’s horrible to see people when they realise that they’ve lost all of the photos they’ve taken of their children over the past three years.

Don’t let it happen to you – please back it up!

P.S. There won’t be any new posts over the next few weeks as I’m off on my jolly holidays, usual service will resume upon my return. In the meantime please keep yourselves entertained by checking out one of my favourite websites, Cats For Gold.