Memories are made of this…

What were my highlights of 2012? The below blog tells you, this caption doesn’t.

There we go then, 2012 is pretty much out the way. The Queen ‘Jubileed’, the Olympics were brilliant and to top it all off, the world didn’t come to an end.

As is the tradition at this time of year, I thought I’d take a sporadic look back at what were a few of the highlights from the past twelve months.

They are, in no particular order, as follows:

Arrest of the year:

Responding to a report of an assault back in July, we suspected our suspect was hiding in a nearby house as a bike matching the description of the one he was riding was parked right outside.

The occupant let us in and I thought I heard something from a bedroom upstairs so went to investigate but found it empty, other than the cloth covering of one of the wardrobes flapping gently.

On closer inspection I noticed a pair of feet sticking out and so gave our wardrobe monster a few minutes to think he was invisible whilst I motioned for my partner to join me before pulling back the covering and saying “Come along sir, we’d probably best go sort this out at the station”.

Best tweet of the year:

Okay, maybe I can’t narrow it down to one specific tweet as I like to think they’re all of the same quality (interpret that as you like!), but being able to use social media as a part of my role continues to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the job and this year I’ve been able to reach more people than ever.

The feedback continues to be positive and I think some of the best memories of the year coming from the tweeting and blogging have resulted from meeting several of my lovely followers face to face.

It’s always nice to put a face to a name and I think it’s a valuable reminder that whilst we spend our time dealing with Walsall’s worst 1%, the other 99% are a thoroughly lovely bunch who I am proud to be serving.

Doughnut of the year:

We police officers eat foods other than doughnuts. Honest, we do.

This said, they’re obviously an important ‘food group’ and there’s nothing better for topping up the sugar levels towards the end of a long shift than a glazed, preferably cream filled, fried doughnut.

As a tradition officers bring in cakes when there’s a birthday, sometime around August one of the lads on my shift won the Sports Club lottery and so treated us to a pack of Sainsbury’s finest doughnuts. Delicious was not the word!

Sporting achievement of the year:

Contrary to the impression you might get from the above paragraph and occasional mentions of Creme Eggs on my Twitter feed, I do like to do my best to keep fit.

Whilst I was proud that I completed the Birmingham Half Marathon in under an hour and a half, I think the Walsall Police Walking Club’s attempt on the Yorkshire Three Peaks was probably the better effort as we worked together to achieve it.

It was back in May and pretty warm but we made it round in one piece, no one died and as I wrote at the time, that’s my benchmark for success so a success it was.

Charity event of the year:

When not out arresting folk, many officers dabble in charity fund-raising and subject themselves to various ordeals all in the name of raising a few pennies for their chosen cause.

You may remember I’d mentioned PC Emma Smith’s fund-raising efforts for the sailors of her son’s navy squadron back in October, as so many local people got behind the campaign I think it’s got to be one of the highlights of the year for me.

Through a dedicated campaign of badgering local businesses, she amassed a hoard of goods to be sent out to Afghan for 857 Squadron which included shower gels, a DAB radio and also a healthy donation for their welfare fund.

Overall highlight of the year:

The best week and a half of the year for me was probably spent down in London helping out at the big sports day.

It was fantastic to be involved, especially as the enthusiasm of everyone in the capital made for a delightful atmosphere in which to police and I’m confident that over the next thirty years or so there’ll be few opportunities that’ll come close to matching the chance to work at the Olympics.

I’d say the best part of the trip was the few hours we spent on Westminster Bridge for the torch relay – being right at the centre of the capital in front of Big Ben and surrounded by tourists may be wearing for officers who do it all the time but for us Brummies it was a novel, memorable experience.

Now as I’ve written about before, 2013 is going to see some pretty big changes for us police here in Walsall. We’ll be going through a structural ‘rejiggle’ at the end of January and as part of it I’ll be leaving my response team and concentrating on investigation.

I’m really looking forward to the move and the chance to pick up some new skills, the blogs and tweets will be continuing and so I’ll be sharing the new role with you and will be available to answer any questions you may have.

I hope everyone has had a good Christmas and will enjoy a happy new year!

Rich

P.S. At the request of @rougefever, here is a link to a particularly good photo of a macaw. She didn’t think that this blog featured enough macaws. I had to agree.

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout – I’m telling you why…

Christmas is just around the corner, are you prepared for a ‘reverse burglary’ by Santa Clause though? Read on!

Christmas time is here. Check out www.isitchristmas.com tomorrow and it’ll confirm as much – December 25th is only hours away and with it will almost certainly come a massive rise in strange ‘reverse burglaries’.

What exactly is a ‘reverse burglary’ you ask? Well, you may recall last year I featured several posts from Force CID’s DS Kimo on our attempts to capture a suspect known to us as ‘Santa Clause’.

First of all there was our appeal for witnesses which was followed by the arrest of Clause the very next day. We thought we had the case nailed but then on Christmas Eve there was shocking news – our suspect turned out to be an imposter and the real Clause was still at large.

We’d failed and the consequence was that Clause broke into millions of houses around the world over the next few hours, stealing small amounts of brandy but leaving behind high value goods under people’s Christmas trees.

One year on and whilst the operation to capture Clause is ongoing, it’s looking unlikely that he’ll be located before he strikes again this evening.

As this is the case, the best I can offer is a few Christmas crime prevention tips from DS Kimo on how you can best safeguard your house against a strike by Clause himself.

Here’s the advice from the man in the know:

• Hide the mince pies – Never leave small plates of mince pies and a glass of brandy on open display. We know that Clause pretty much lives off these and they’re as good as an invitation for him to come in and wreak havoc.
• Block your chimney – Any hardware store should be able to supply the tools you’ll need to ensure that the chimney is not accessible. This is essential as 99% of the time Clause gains access to properties by the chimney.
• Throw away your ‘Santa Stop Here’ sign – At any other time of year would you put up a sign welcoming burglars? Of course not, don’t encourage the jolly fat man!
• Obstruct his landing strip – All available intel suggests that Santa reaches rooftops by using a magical sleigh drawn by reindeer. Litter your rooftop with barriers to frustrate his landing and maybe slop a little anti-vandal paint around too.
• Know what to look for – We believe Clause usually wears a bright red suit with white fur lining and heavy boots, he shouldn’t be hard to spot.
• Listen out – As well as wearing a bright red suit, Santa seems to have trouble keeping the noise down. If he’s nearby you will probably be able to hear him laughing loudly and encouraging his reindeer to take flight.
• Don’t write to him – Clause operates in a strange way, he seems to receive letters sent to him up the chimney and then a few weeks later arrives with many of the requested items. Don’t make it easy for him, if he doesn’t know what you want he may not come in the first place.

Now I’m on duty this evening on a special ‘Santa watch’ team so we’ll be keeping our eyes open for any Clause-related activity in the Walsall area and we’ll need you to do the same.

If you do suspect that you’ve seen Clause, please get in touch with me via Twitter and I’ll see what I can do about sending a car or two over.

Beyond this stay safe and have a very merry Christmas!

Rich

Communications breakdown…

Another excellent bit of twittering from Solihull Police. How are the CPS advising decisions be made when social media is misused though? What would be a realistic approach?

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of these here words, the police use of social media is a subject that is of great interest to me and so one that I periodically return to whenever a relevant story pops up in the news.

I believe the last time I visited the subject was when I resorted to using Cher Lloyd lyrics for a blog in August shortly after Tom Daley suffered some ‘trolling’ on his Twitter account.

Reflecting my own experience using social media as a member of the 5-0, I’d suggested that the police can’t be expected to police people’s usage of social media.

Rather, social media sites themselves have a responsibility for offering tools to block and flag inappropriate content so that misuse is addressed before it gets out of hand and that care needs to be taken ‘offensive’ content be evaluated in its proper context.

This wasn’t to argue that offences can’t be committed using social media, nor that there aren’t occasions when the police might need to intervene, but simply to say that in many cases it’s neither appropriate, practical or necessary to do so.

Today the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, has published interim advice for prosecutors on how they should make decisions on whether suspects ought to be charged in relation to an allegation that they have misused social media. This advice can be summed up as follows:

• Communications that may constitute credible threats of violence, harassment or a breach of a court order ought be ‘prosecuted robustly’
• Communications that don’t meet the above criteria, for example offensive posts, will be subject to a tough ‘Full Code‘ test, this is whether there is a substantial offence and it is in the public interest to prosecute
• For the first part of the test, the threshold for ‘grossly’ offensive content will be that it is more than simply shocking, satirical or unpopular
• For the second part of the test relating to the public interest, it’d unlikely to be right to prosecute if the suspect had swiftly moved to remove the content in question, if they hadn’t intended the content to reach a wider audience or if the content could be seen as ‘tolerable or acceptable in an open and diverse society’

I think this is some very sensible advice which helps address the concerns I’d expressed previously that if social media isn’t properly understood and misuse tackled in a manner appropriate to the medium, the criminal justice system would quickly find itself inundated with cases that shouldn’t really be finding their way to court in the first place.

Taking the above tweet from @SolihullPolice as an example, it was quickly forwarded on by 22,000 other users. That’s 22,000 people who went on to republish the content through their own Twitter accounts, not to mention on other sites and networks.

Imagine now that rather than being a witty update, the same tweet was offensive in tone. Take this tweet from the BNP with the headline ‘Savage Muslim jailed for life‘ as an example.

I like most people find this content absolutely abhorrent, some may approach the police saying as much.

A tough decision then would have to be made as to whether the legal system represents the right tool for addressing the offence caused.

I’m confident that the tweet is indeed offensive but is it ‘grossly’ offensive, particularly considering the publisher and its intended audience? Unfortunately not.

Again, in terms of it being in the public interest to prosecute people for publishing such unpopular sentiments, it’s unlikely that an argument could be made that it is.

Furthermore, were it to be the case that 22,000 people were to forward on the same tweet it obviously wouldn’t be any sort of realistic prospect to be looking at 22,000 separate crime reports with 22,000 offenders to be arrested, interviewed and charged.

An extreme example admittedly but it goes to show how unless there are some tough tests for which cases are appropriate for trial, investigations could quickly spiral out of all sensible proportion.

As impractical as such an occurrence may seem, it was only last month when during the Lord McAlpine scandal, there were suggestions that the police look at investigating over one thousand Twitter users who had wrongly named him as connected to a sex abuse allegation, alongside a further nine thousand who had retweeted the same messages.

I think it’s fair to say that social media and the way it is used is always going to evolve faster than the law can keep up with it. The amount of people using it though and the related potential for issues to arise likely to involve criminal law mean that social media will always have to be kept under review so that the application of the law is appropriate to the medium.

With half a billion tweets being sent daily, the DPP’s advice is a timely reminder that if we don’t try and tailor the law to circumstance then the consequence can be that it is quickly rendered unsuitable for protecting the public it is designed to serve.

For a little more on the application of the law in relation to the Tom Daley case, have a look at this interesting Guardian article from July by Joshua Rozenberg.

All I want for Christmas…

Stuck for Christmas present ideas for friends and family? How about giving a copy of our fraud book? It’s what every seven year old dreams for!

A modern classic. Harry Potter meets Fifty Shades of Grey meets War & Peace – The Times
A must read. The plot is out of this world with a killer twist at the end, I couldn’t put it down – The Metro
Terrific characters, uncanny prose and so addictive you’ll be reading and re-reading this one for years to come – Richard & Judy’s Book Club*

So long as you’ve not been hiding under a rock in the middle of the desert since the end of October, you’re probably aware that at some point soon Christmas Day is going to arrive**.

I tend to rely on the ‘Is It Christmas’ website to tell exactly when the big day is here, but simply knowing that the 25th is fast approaching I’ve been busily sorting out exciting Christmas presents for the PC Stanley family.

This isn’t easy as I’m a pretty bad shopper at the best of times and things weren’t helped by me trying to buy a CD from a furniture shop which once had been a HMV and in my mind still should have been. The staff were very insistent they didn’t have the album I wanted and eventually I left in a huff.

Anyhoo, my Christmas shopping woes aside, I wanted to take a moment to make a gift suggestion to anyone still looking for special last minute gifts but unsure what to get.

The present I’m going to suggest probably won’t have crossed many of your minds, it’s not one of the sought after toys of the year and it doesn’t fire foam rockets at gran whilst she’s asleep.

What it does to though is light up the eyes of anyone lucky enough to receive it, be they an over excited five year old, the dad who has everything or the aunt for whom you got a rubber plant for last year which she said she loved although you know that secretly she hated because when you visited her house in March it was nowhere to be seen.

What is this mystery present, perfect for boys and girls of all ages?

Why it’s the West Midlands Police Little Book Of Big Scams of course!

Yes, I know you may not think it at first but whilst your seven year old daughter may have asked for Justin Bieber on a pony, what she actually aches to find under the tree on Christmas morning is a compact and informative pamphlet on fraud complete with an introduction by her hero, Esther Rantzen.

Granddad too will appreciate the sound advice offered by this little tome, the read being so gripping that it’ll be enough to keep him away from a brandy induced sleep that will have him out for the count for most of the afternoon.

Likewise, I can’t think of an uncle in the land who’d not prefer The Little Book Of Big Scams over a set of new golf clubs or perhaps golfing trousers that were obviously designed in a room with neither windows nor light bulbs.

As for how to best to give this popular gift, you could print it off if you so wished or alternatively, load it straight onto one of those new fangled firewood eBooks. It’s in PDF format so you could even send it to the recipient’s mobile telephone if you so wished, it should be openable on any handset that doesn’t have Snake on it.

What you’re going to find inside The Little Book Of Big Scams is reams of excellent advice on phone scams, confidence tricksters, bogus callers and more. By ‘and more’, I mean scams that you may well never had heard of and all the guidance you’ll need to report scammers before they get so much as a penny of your hard earned pounds.

Given the quality of the product, I’m sure you’d assume that The Little Book Of Big Scams won’t be cheap. Well, put that titanium credit card away. It’s 100% free. Yes, it can be yours for the grand total of £0.00.

So, a free Christmas present that all the family will love and one that could well save the recipient thousands of pounds through a dramatic increase in their fraud streetsmarts.

What’s not to love? Word of warning though – be ready for an extra wet kiss from gran!

* ‘Predicted’ reviews for The Little Book Of Big Scams from said sources based on the book’s overall quality should said sources actually review the book
** WordPress gives some pretty interesting stats about where readers of this blog are coming from. Few, if any, are listed as being ‘under a rock in the middle of the desert’.

Every word handwritten…

Statement taking has moved on a long way since the Middle Ages. We rarely use quills for one, what does it mean to give a statement to the police though?

For us police officers with our uniformly excellent handwriting and superior grasp of the written word, statement taking is one of the most important jobs that we do.

Statements are our bread and butter, our coffee and doughnuts if you will – we spend a lot of time on them as we know the detail we put into these legal documents will strongly influence how a case turns our further down the line.

Statements are indeed a big part of the criminal justice process, this doesn’t mean though that it’s commonly understood why we ask people if they are willing to provide them, nor is it always clear to people what might happen once they have signed on the dotted line.

As we do get a lot of questions about statements, it’d probably be handy to look at them in a little more detail.

As I’ve already mentioned, a statement is a legal document. As statements are designed to be admitted as evidence in court, they’re one of the most legal documents that we produce. They’re really legal.

A statement is a written account from someone of what they heard, saw or did. Or didn’t do.

For a statement to be admissible 1967’s Criminal Justice Act asks that the statement be signed by the person making it, that it includes a declaration that the content is true to the best of that person’s knowledge and that all parties in the case have the chance to see it in advance and do not object to its admission.

The declaration is particularly important as were someone to provide a false statement, they’d be liable for prosecution for the offence of, yes, providing a false statement.

A statement is likely to be taken on a person’s behalf by a police officer who will guide them through the process and ask question after question to build in the detail.

If they’re a little slow on the uptake like I am, this can involve going over the same bits a few times which can require patience but is important to ensure that the content is right.

Alongside an account of what has happened, the statement will also likely contain a few bits and pieces that the person giving it might not have added if they’d written the account themselves.

These bits and pieces may include the legal ‘points to prove’ and a detailed description of the conditions under which an event was witnessed.

For the ‘points to prove’, this means the bits of a legal definition that we have to prove to show that an offence has happened.

For theft as an example, you can’t steal your own property and so if you were to provide a statement following having something stolen, that statement may well contain a line to the effect of ‘The Leonardo Dicaprio poster collection was my property, I had not given anyone permission to take it and no one had any reason to think otherwise‘.

This helps show that the stolen items belonged to you and should someone be arrested with them in their possession, they couldn’t claim that they owned them or that you’d lent them.

As for the circumstances surrounding an observation of an offender, an officer will probably ask questions including how far away you were, whether anything was obstructing your view, what the viability was like etc.

These points are all relevant should it come to court and the defence question your account on the grounds that you couldn’t possibly have seen the accused clearly as you were watching them through frosted glass.

Once a statement is signed, there will always be a possibility that you might have to attend court a few months down the line.

This is only likely to be a prospect if an offender is charged to appear at court and on appearing at court, he or she decides to plea not guilty and a full trial results.

If this happens represents from both sides of the case will sit down and look at the statements to decide whether to accept your statement as is or whether they are going to ask you to come along in person and answer a few questions about what you’d seen.

You’d be notified well in advance if you were going to be asked to attend, it’s important to remember though that once a statement is signed the court can effectively force you to attend – issuing an arrest warrant in extreme circumstances – so if you’re unsure about going to court, you should discuss your concerns with the officer taking the statement before putting pen to paper.

Because it is a possibility that you’ll have to go and see the people with the funny wigs, you need to make sure that you’re absolutely happy that what is in your statement reflects your opinions of what you heard, did or saw.

This is because you might get asked questions about the account and if you sign when something isn’t completely right, the defence might try to portray you as unreliable even though your ‘unreliability’ extends no further than a couple of misinterpretations in your statement.

Now I’m hoping that none of the above puts anyone off providing a statement and as I’ve said, statements are such an important part of the evidence gathering process and we’re reliant on people being willing to come forward and help us build cases.

In a funny way, that the public do continue to provide crucial statements is one of the main motivations for the writing of this here blog – I’m looking to strengthen links between police and public and build confidence in the police as we do our policing by consent meaning the public consent to our work, will approach us and assist us.

If this relationship were to break down, with it could go our ability to do our job effectively.

So there we have it, a quick run down on the practicalities of giving a statement to the rozzers. Any questions, please get it touch!

I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak, and they’re talking it to me…

It can be hard to follow us police officers sometimes. What are we talking about, over?

The other day I was out pushing a panda around my default patrol area. The RADS at WS saw from ARLS that I wasn’t too far from a recently reported incident and so dispatched me, telling me to make towards as it was an early.

I was about to code six when an all out came in over the Airwaves and so I whipped the car around, hit the blues and twos and joined in with an area search.

Alpha Oscar One joined us too as did Alpha Delta, it didn’t take too long to locate a couple of CROs in the locality and as they matched the descriptions passed, they were taken into custody.

I pulled up next to someone who turned out to be a sig wit and so obtained an MG11 before heading back to the station for some code four.

What am I talking about?

Well, if you followed even a quarter of that incomprehensible smattering of police jargon then you did rather well. Those two paragraphs contained just a small proportion of the bewildering number of acronyms and abbreviations that us officers love to confuse each other with.

Yes, I reckon one of the things I found hardest when I first joined was not getting my head around the law, but instead understanding what people were talking about when they were ‘talking job’.

Some of it I imagine comes from the fact that when we talk on the radio, we need to be concise to avoid tying up the airwaves. The key is ‘accuracy, brevity and clarity’ with the emphasis obviously on brevity over clarity!

As it is, this means that even simple things are awarded their own special terms. A call make from a ‘TK’ is a telephone kiosk, ‘RTC’ means someone’s crashed their car and ‘KIV’ means we need to ‘keep in view’ some risk or other that the control room have flagged up.

Needing to keep things short doesn’t fully explain why we sometimes end up talking in code though. There are also a range of terms that are so commonly used we have abandoned their actual names and resorted to ‘easier’ terminology.

Take ‘updating the EDL’ as an example. This is a particularly confusing one as quite rightly so you might assume it’s a reference to the English Defence League and us policing a demonstration.

This it could be, but actually the ‘EDL’ referred to here is the ‘Electronic Detention Log’ which is the record we keep of prisoner activity whilst they’re in custody in our station cells.

As it is the case that police speak is so prevalent between officers, it can be very easy for us to slip into using the same terminology when speaking with the public which often leads to nothing but confusion and blank faces.

I actually try to ‘scan’ what I’m about to say when talking to members of the public to ensure that I’ve filtered out all of the acronyms, although as I say they’re so prevalent that sometimes I don’t always manage it.

Take filling in a ‘392’ or informing someone that a ‘NFA’ decision has been made as examples – both contain important information but when disguised with in our mysterious police tongue, they are pretty much meaningless.

As it is, if you find yourself struggling to understand a police officer when we’re talking about ‘mainline burglaries’ or ‘FSI’, please don’t hesitate to stop us and ask for some clarification.

You could even drop in a little ‘Airwaves speak’ yourself – use the phrase ‘say again’ and they should get the picture!

P.S. We’ve got a handy list of 5% of the abbreviations we use over on our website. Get in touch if there are any not listed that you’re curious about, I’ll do my best to figure them out.

The near and the dear ones, the old and the young…

We’re now four days into our annual Christmas drink and drug drive campaign and with every patrol car in Walsall and across the West Midlands carrying freshly calibrated breathalyser kits, our officers have been keeping the pressure on people considering driving after drinking with regular stop checks and operations.

I know that in the past few days there have been at least three arrests made by my shift alone for drink driving with one motorist found to be three times over the legal limit when he was tested at the station.

Sadly alcohol remains the primary factor in a quarter of all fatal road accidents and last year, males in their early twenties were the most likely to either fail or refuse a breath test following a traffic accident.

It can take many hours for alcohol levels to fall to safe levels following a night out and many people are caught the morning after – the only reliable way to avoid the risk is not to drink at all.

The above video only hints at how horrific the consequences of driving after drink of drugs can be – please, please don’t risk it.

Rich

All the things I should’ve said that I never said, all the things we should’ve done that we never did…

Christmas can be a busy period for our Family Liaison Officers but what exactly is their role?

In this specially written article marking the start of our Christmas Drink Drive Campaign, WMP Family Liaison Officer Mick Jennings gives an overview of a role that I believe is one of the hardest an officer can hold. Following a fatal road accident or similar, Family Liaison Officers are sent out to make contact with the families of the deceased. Tragically Christmas can be a busy time for them.

“Police said Family Liaison Officers had been appointed to support the families of those involved.”

You may have heard this, or similar, in relation to road deaths or murders, but what does it mean? Who are these Family Liaison Officers and what exactly do they do?

Well firstly, it’s a misnomer to say Family Liaison Officers (FLO) ‘support’ a family. FLOs, as they are commonly referred as, are not counsellors and it is not their role to provide emotional support to a grieving family.

The concept of family liaison has been in existence for many years, but it was events during the 90s that really galvanised the role into something that we can identify with today.

One of the main drivers for effective family liaison was the MacPherson Report into the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 which made several recommendations in relation to the training and deployment of Family Liaison Officers.

The primary role of any FLO is an investigator, tasked by the Senior Investigating Officer to develop a professional working relationship with the victim’s family. All enquiries and communication with the family will be made through the FLO, thereby minimising as much as possible the intrusion into the family at this traumatic time.

The FLO should aim to develop a relationship through trust and honesty but, especially in the early days of a deployment, their role will be very challenging, particularly where there maybe a mistrust of the police, or where police involvement may have been a factor in the death. Whatever the situation, one overriding principal is that the police will never close the door on contact with a victim’s family.

The role of FLO is voluntary and there is no expectation that any officer must become one. Those that do undertake the training can, at any time, decide that the role is not for them after all and even a trained FLO can turn down a deployment if they feel that they cannot give it the commitment that it deserves. This might be for a variety of reasons, for example, if the FLO was already heavily committed with another investigation or was due to go on leave in the next few days.

The Family Liaison Officer Training Course lasts for five days but is designed to draw upon the officers’ previously acquired skills in their area of business and it is not recommended that they volunteer too early in their career.

The content of the course is compatible with the national training programme and features a variety of topics to test the suitability of the officer for this role. Once an officer has completed the training, it is expected that they will be first deployed with an experienced FLO to act as mentor.

In any investigation the aim should be to deploy FLOs in pairs or as part of a team, dependant on the circumstances of the incident under investigation. That way should anything happen that necessitates a new FLO being deployed, the continuity with the family, and therefore the relationship, is maintained.

In addition, in the early days of an investigation the FLO maybe spending several hours at the family home and may need the support of a colleague, even if its just an extra pair of hands. Anyone in this family environment, even if just assisting the lead FLO, should be trained and know what to expect.

Before meeting a family, the Family Liaison Officer can expect to receive a full briefing about the incident under investigation as it is essential that they know exactly what has happened, where it happened, to whom and what is expected of them by the Senior Investigating Officer. Where possible, it is recommended that the FLO visit the crime or collision scene to familiarise themselves with it should family members wish to go there themselves.

When first meeting the family, it may not always be possible to answer all the questions they have, either because of operational reasons or purely because the FLO doesn’t know at that time. Other than for those reasons, the FLO will never intentionally keep the truth from the family, no matter how upsetting it may be. The art of effective family liaison is honesty, tactfully delivered.

Every investigation will have standard tasks for the FLO such as arranging a formal identification of the deceased and taking lifestyle statements, but he/she should not become complacent as every investigation is dealing with the untimely, and often unlawful, death of a loved one, and every deployment should be as professional as the last, treating families with respect and dignity.

Over time the demands on the FLO in the investigative sense may subside but he/she will remain in contact with the family for as long as the Senior Investigating Officer requires, updating and informing at key stages, even accompanying them to any subsequent court hearings.

Eventually, though, the time will come when the FLO deployment will come to an end. Known as an Exit Strategy, the FLO will have been preparing the family for this final visit, after which, as the investigation has ended, there will be no further contact. Some families may become very attached to what they see as ‘their FLO’ but, whatever the case, it is important that the family are allowed to move forward and the FLO will be deployed to another family who have lost a loved one in tragic circumstances.

Ever day, dozens of Family Liaison Officers are being deployed around England and Wales as part of investigations into unlawful killings, suspicious deaths and child abuse, to name but a few.

The officers are proud to perform the role, often without any additional remuneration, and are proud of the difference their professional behaviour can make to a family at such a dark hour. But above all a Family Liaison Officer is proud to be an investigator seeking the truth of what happened.

About Mick:

Mick Jennings has featured on this blog before and is a trained Family Liaison Officer in both Crime and Roads Policing. As well as teaching new to role FLOs in his own force, Mick has trained officers from across the country. In 2008 he assisted the National Policing Improvement Agency in devising the National FLO Development Programme and has spoken at several conferences in relation to Family Liaison. To follow the life of a traffic cops trainer, or to just ask a question, he can be found @PCJenningsWMP.