Changes are taking the pace I’m going through…

Senior officers have always started on the beat before working their way up, direct entry proposals may end this tradition but should proposals for reform really cause so much controversy?

As things stand, every Chief Constable in England and Wales was once a ‘sprog’. They walked the beat, made the teas, did their time as student officers and made a stop at every police rank before settling upon their perches at the very top.

Under proposals made by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor, suitable candidates would be able to bypass the existing route to the senior ranks. Those with considerable experience at equivalent levels of local government or the military, as examples, could become superintendents in fifteen months rather than the twenty five year average it currently takes.

This hasn’t gone down particularly well with some officers though, particularly those representing the Police Federation who have expressed concerns that the uniqueness, the ‘X Factor’, of policing is under threat.

That the police service can be at times conservative in its outlook isn’t something that will surprise many people familiar with how the service works.

An article in today’s Independent referred to as ‘well known’ the ‘closed nature of the institution and its resistance to new people and new ideas’, going as far as to refer to individual forces as being ‘parochial’.

It’s worth remembering that with 130,000 officers, policing is a broad church under which a wide range of different opinions and positions are represented.

References to policing as being ‘closed’ to outside views is true to an extent I think. That we have powers over others which naturally set us aside from the public at large helps explain this. We refer to our occupation simply as ‘The Job’ to reflect the extent to which it does sit apart from other occupations.

With us being set aside by virtue of the powers conferred upon us, a strong internal culture exists perhaps not easily understood by those looking from the outside in. This culture has merits and disadvantages in equal measure.

From what I’ve seen, part of our culture is that as a default position, change can be seen as a negative influence. First impressions of change is that it will be a change for the worse, arguments in favour of the status quo are the ones that gain the most attention.

Our ‘resistance to new people and new ideas’ was well illustrated by the general discontent at Tom Winsor’s appointment as the first HMIC not to be a police officer, with thousands of officers protesting in London against the reform proposals in the Winsor Report.

As for why this is, why change can be viewed with such suspicion, it’s hard to say although I’ve often thought it may link back to the pride that officers have in the job that they have the privilege of doing.

Officers want to do the very best they can – when a proposal is made for change it is assessed from a cynical position. Potential pitfalls threaten officers’ ability to serve the public and as this is what they value over all else, the default position is preferred.

Coming as a part of this internal ethic is a deep respect for ‘service’, the longer serving officers having earned influence on the basis of their having experienced many changes over the course of their careers.

With many current officers having twenty or more years in the job, reform is looked at through past experience and when it is, the ‘old ways’ of doing things often appear preferable.

That the policing community is tight-knit I don’t see as something to be seen as negative, I would say though that the resistance to change arising from our internal culture isn’t always in our best interests and that without a willingness to adapt, the job that we value so much will likely suffer.

New policies, structures and approaches are sometimes seen as ‘reinventing the wheel’ yet with the world around us constantly evolving, us not moving with it will mean we quickly get left behind, unsuited to new challenges and ill-positioned to take advantages of fresh opportunities.

That you’re reading this blog is a good example of how police forces can benefit from embracing change.

Allowing individual officers to build links with the public rather than leaving the responsibility solely with press offices has been hugely beneficial and yet there are forces still hesitant to let their officers do the same, even with social media now the best part of ten years old.

It’s right that new proposals should be critiqued and tested before they are implemented but the position that change is to be feared appears only to restrict us from making the most of developments benefiting other sectors willing to try something new.

It’s thanks to a willingness to change female officers are no longer issued with handbags for their truncheons, that steps to address ‘institutional’ racism have been made and thanks to change in practices and approach that public confidence in the police has increased year on year.

Change can be for the better too.

This is my investigation, it’s not a public inquiry, I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt…

A Day In The Life – Parading at Bloxwich Police Station, Saturday January 26th 2013, Tour of Duty – 09:00 to 18:00

As you may have noticed from a few mentions here and there on my ‘officially endorsed’ Twitter feed, I have recently left my old response team and taken up a position on one of our newly created Investigation Teams.

It’s our job to interview prisoners, to complete the investigations that are handed to us by response officers and to whiz around the LPU attending scheduled appointments with members of the public who need to report various incidents and occurrences to ourselves.

The day starts with me loading up my emails to see if there are any that I’ll need to action during the shift. I do this with a cup of tea that was very kindly made for me by a colleague and it doesn’t take long before I’ve cleared my inbox, checked to see who’s sitting downstairs in the cells and had a look through my ‘Docutrak’ account to see what investigations I have assigned.

I also have a quick gander at our briefing system, firstly having a look through the ID gallery to see if I can recognise any shoplifters caught on CCTV and then have a look at the general notices which includes one warning from British Transport Police advising us that thieves are targeting magnets used on railway lines and that we need to take care if we find any as we might get stuck to them!

There are a few investigations I have ongoing which are waiting for forensics results etc so I give the victims a quick call to give an update and then get handed over a ‘handover package’ giving an overview of an incident attended by night turn officers on which there are a few enquiries to do.

I’m fortunate enough to get the keys to our brand new Corsa and get confused when it stalls at each set of lights before realising that it’s meant to be doing so and continuing on to complete a few neighbourhood enquiries and checking some CCTV footage.

There’s an outstanding offender to be interviewed as part of the handover package and so I’m able to make contact with him and ask if he’s willing to come to the station voluntarily for an interview under caution. Turns out he is and so no need to get the handcuffs out, we meet at the station, do the interview and I’ll then take the case to the Crown Prosecution Service for their view on whether we can charge.

Running around the LPU investigating the heck out of crime is hungry work and as I’ve only been at Bloxwich Police Station for a few days, I set out to find the mystical tuck shop mentioned in some ancient scrolls I found under a locker. I’m bound to keep its location a secret but I did find it and with a Snickers for 30p, I know I’m in the right place.

The day ends with a me conducting a few intelligence checks using the super computer we have where you can cross reference people’s names with known assassins and instantly pull up building blueprints and flight manifests (okay, this doesn’t exist) and then I’m off home to get some rest ahead of our first of three ‘late’ shifts the following day.

When you try your best but you don’t succeed…

Lance competed in a world where there was a great pressure to take drugs, are there parallels elsewhere? (Image from Hase)

I’m not angry with you, Lance, I’m just disappointed.

Years of refuting allegations of performance enhancing drug use, law suits, lies and yet in the face of near incontrovertible evidence an admission that yes, each of his seven Tour de France victories had been aided by banned substances.

Now I’m a cyclist myself, I own both a road bike and the accompanying lycra and have taken a keen interest in the Armstrong story. I’ve wanted to believe Lance, I’ve read what he’s written about the doping allegations in his books and had really hoped that someone wouldn’t mislead so many people on so many occasions over the better part of a decade.

Even so, the announcement that he was going to do the Oprah interview was of no surprise nor was the subsequent answer of “Yes” in reply to the question “In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?”.

What I’ve found most interesting is the references to the ‘culture’ of competitive cycling at the time by which Lance sought to explain why he had used the banned substances. So many people were supposedly using them that without them, racers had not a realistic chance of winning.

I can see a parallel between the pressure, the ‘culture’, that has resulted in cycling’s drug abuse problems and the reasons that many of the people I meet end up addicted to harder drugs and resorting to crime to support their habits.

Given the grimly predictable course of hard drug abuse – lost teeth, sold possessions, living in dirty squats, the list goes on – I’ve often found it hard to understand why anyone would try injecting heroin or smoking cocaine in the first place, despite a knowledge of where doing so may lead them.

Whilst sitting with a prisoner on a cell watch once, I got to ask this question. The prisoner was a fairly young male accused of burglary and displayed all the obvious signs of being a heavy drug user. Gaunt face, waxy skin, puncture scars, the lot.

“It was through one of the my mates”, he told me. “We used to smoke weed and my mate used to do a little crack on the side. One day he said I should try it and so I thought why not, it all went downhill from there”.

This is a common story often repeated when I enquire how people had first become involved in the drugs that were now causing them to be regular visitors in our cells.

This isn’t to equate the drugs that Lance has admitted using to those in Class A, rather to emphasise that when there’s a culture of drug use, whatever those drugs may be, people will inevitably feel forced to use those substances.

It’s only be tackling this culture, standing up to it, speaking out, that real progress will be made in preventing the criminal, health and social issues that stem from it.

This is why we and partner agencies such as Addaction try so hard to curb drug usage, to get people into treatment and to close down sources of supply.

We’re dependent on public support to achieve these aims and as such, information on drugs supplied to us either directly or anonymously through Crimestoppers is absolutely essential.

As Lance himself said, “I didn’t invent the culture, but I didn’t try to stop the culture, and that’s my mistake, and that’s what I have to be sorry for”. We all have a role to play in stopping the drugs culture, every one of us.

The streets here at home had rapidly filled up with the whitest of snow…

One of our fleet’s older but more important vehicles, especially when the snow flakes are falling. How does the cold weather impact on our work though?

In case you haven’t picked up on it, some snow has happened. Snow has happened in the West Midlands, it’s happened really badly in Wales and in many places it’s still happening. Snow. Snow. Snow.

Snow.

Yes, I’m not really sure how you’re reading this as not even the indestructible pipes and tubes of the internet should be able to withstand the onslaught of Snowmageddon – the worst natural event to have blighted the planet ever since that huge asteroid ended the dinosaurs’ plans to go on not being extinct.

Reading you are though and as you are, this probably means that the few snowflakes that have turned Walsall into a replica of Hoth, the ice planet from Star Wars, haven’t been quite as apocalyptic as it first seemed.

Whilst no one has yet been forced to turn their Tauntaun into a tent using their lightsaber, the conditions have obviously caused some unwanted disruptions making some roads inaccessible and even short journeys of five miles take one hour, twenty minutes and fourteen seconds.

Unfortunately for us, crime doesn’t take a snow day which means there’s no point in our officers listening to the radio in the morning hoping that they’ll announce their station has been shut. Sledges have to be put to one side and we have to come into work despite the weather.

Just as cold weather causes problems for everyone else, we too are presented with many challenges when it comes to working out how we can continue to do our police thing when the roads are doing their best impression of an ice rink.

The first problem is getting us officers in to work in the first place. Most of us are trained drivers so we have an advantage but our cars struggle all the same and so usual solutions involve lift sharing, setting off ridiculously early and badgering anyone on the shift owning a 4X4 until they pick us up.

Just as our own cars can struggle, the police cars aren’t special and so we have to be very careful about how we drive and where we go. We do have 4X4 vehicles available which are a great help, our Astras and Insignias though remain the cars we’ll be using for the most part.

As this is the case, our controllers have to make some hard judgements about how they allocate calls – in the worst conditions only the ‘immediate’ jobs are allocated, the ones where someone is in danger, and officers make towards them very carefully as wrapping a car around someone’s snowman helps no one.

Other calls will be dealt with over the phone if possible or delayed so that officers can be dispatched as soon as it is reasonably safe for them to do so.

Many of the problems associated with cold weather can’t be solved with handcuffs alone though and so we work very closely with the Highways Agency, the local councils and the Environment Agency who can help us out by getting dangerous sections of road gritted, hauling stranded HGVs out of the way and telling our officers where the best place is to take their shields for some sleighing.

As frustrating as the cold weather can be, it isn’t without its advantages though and whilst few officers would like to live in a winter wonderland all year round, there are some perks.

The foremost is obviously footprints – each officer suddenly acquires dog unit-like tracking skills and I’ve been to several jobs where footprints and shoe impressions have led us to a suspect’s front door.

It also tends to be a little quieter when the snow is settling as people don’t fancy going out and what’s more, Walsall Town Centre looks quite pretty when covered in snow which the control room staff up on the fifth floor of the station appreciate no end.

I don’t believe the snow is forecast to hang around for many more days and so soon enough it will be business as usual again – not a totally appropriate phrase as we do our very best to ensure that even in the thickest snow, we keep ‘business as usual’.

P.S. I jest of course about using shields for sledges! Also, if you do need to drive in the snow you may like to check out my blog from last year with some tips and also see this advice from the RAC on the same topic.

Words they meant nothing, so you can’t hurt me…

Should you be convicted for calling a police horse gay? Many think not and the law is a-changing accordingly (Image from Arriva436)

Hello there, stupid. Concord called – it would like its nose back please.

Feeling a little insulted? Perhaps and if you are, allow me to apologise – I am usually an exceptionally polite officer.

Were I not to be so polite though, should I be thrown in the gaol for causing insult? Should it say as much in the law and if it did, should we officers be running around arresting people who speak ahead of thinking?

Many people think not, notably the Reform Section 5 campaign who have been arguing that the inclusion of the word ‘insulting’ in the definition of a Section 5 Public Order Offence isn’t in the spirit of free speech.

Recently joining the voices of those who don’t think that the law should be dealing with insults is the Home Secretary, Teresa May, and as voices go, hers is one that tends to indicate that things are going to change.

This week she announced that she wouldn’t be challenging an amendment made to the Crime and Courts Bill that would see the word ‘insulting’ scrapped from the definition and so dropped out of the law.

I’ve looked at Public Order Offences on this blog before, working through Sections 5 to 1 and explaining a little about how the offences get more severe as you progress towards riot – Section 1 of the 1986 Public Order Act.

Section 5 currently makes it a crime to use ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ with the intention of causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’.

It’s this law that was used to arrest a student who asked a mounted officer if his horse was ‘gay’ and one that hasn’t always sat well with those protective of free speech, causing concern that the ability to arrest someone for causing insult is a restriction on freedom of expression.

As a rozzer, I don’t see that dropping the word from the definition hurts our ability to deal with people who need to be dealt with and I think indicates what the Government and public would prefer that we concentrate on – not arresting people for causing insult but rather helping people who have fallen victim to serious crimes and need our help.

We retain the capability to tackle threats and abuse hurled at people (including ourselves), we appear to lose only an ability to arrest over allegations of insult in which it’s not really appropriate we be involved in the first place.

I read in the papers there are robbers with flashlights that shine in the dark, my love needs a doggie to protect him and scare them away with one bark…

Police dog puppies are amongst the cutest known to man. Do they stay cute though? No they do not. How do they help us officers though?

There’s a good chance that 2013’s batch of police dogs are the cutest ever.

Track those eyeballs upwards of couple of degrees and just look at them – don’t you just want to snuggle them?

Now jump forward a few months. Some of the cuteness has been retained but you probably wouldn’t break down into a jibbering mess if you were to see them in the street. They’ve got a toughened look in their eyes and some serious training under their collars. They’re police dogs.

You may remember last year I went for a shift with our dog units to help give you an insight about what they do to help our officers. Much barking, sniffing and one cute video of police puppies later I came away with a much better understanding of what our K9 colleagues are capable of.

Well, with the latest breeds hot off the production line, some of whom have been named by yourselves in last month’s #nameourpups competition, I thought it might be interesting to look from the other side at what it’s like working alongside the dog units when we’re out on patrol.

We use police dogs because they have many advantages over us humans – they’ve got really long tongues, better noses, more/sharper teeth, are willing to jump into lakes, can bark, are furry – the list goes on.

It’s these features that us officers find really useful when we arrive at incidents, particularly working on the response team the abilities of the dogs to bite things or to sniff things and then maybe bite them later.

For the first ‘skill’, biting and generally being frightening, we’ll often ask for a police dog to join us if there are reports that people are fighting or duelling with sharp objects.

Both the dogs and their handlers have special training to deal with these situations which on a serious note does extend further than ‘bite first, ask questions later’.

The presence of a police dog is often enough to diffuse situations peacefully (barking aside), and whilst police dogs are deployed fairly regularly, few of these deployments end in a suspect having a police dog dangling off his arm.

That dogs are able to bring some of the ‘colourful disagreements’ that we attend to an end without the need for force is much appreciated as it reduces the chances that us officers might come to harm.

This said, the police dogs can’t differentiate between police and suspects and so when we hear the handler yell “DOG ON THE LOOSE” we all become a little nervous…

For the second skill of our dogs, smelling at stuff really well, this comes in handy when someone has decided that rather than having a nice chat with ourselves, they’d rather make good on their legs and exit stage left.

Whilst we do sometimes deal with criminals so unwashed we could track them without a dog, for the most part the dog does a much better job than we can and is able to follow people’s scents over a greater distance.

As this is the case we tend to point the dog handler in the right direction and then he or she is literally dragged down the street by their dog who understands our pointing hand gestures mean, to quote the 1995 Judge Dredd film, ‘meat is back on the menu’.

Competition is tight to get onto the dog unit, both for the humans and the dogs, meaning that only the best handlers and the cleverest dogs with the sharpest noses/teeth make the grade.

This is why our dog unit is such a valuable tool to ourselves and why if someone is ever told to do something by a dog handler, they’d really best do it otherwise their dog will show them just how far they’ve come since being an adorable puppy!

A neighbor’s blessed burden within reason, becomes a burden borne of all and one…

Arresting folk can only achieve so much, hence why working with partner agencies such as the Kickz Football Project is so important to us.

Oh, how I do love arresting people. Apply the cuffs, say “You’re nicked” and off to the jailhouse we go. Simples.

Here’s the thing though – as great as arresting folk is, and it is great, there are many occasions when we get called to incidents at which arresting folk isn’t going to help, nor will using any of our other police powers to stop vehicles, boot doors in or search people’s outer clothing.

The people we’ve been called to see need help, but not help that we as police officers are in a position to offer ourselves – what can we do?

This is where our wide range of partner agencies step in to help us out.

Yes, whilst it’d be nice to think that the police have the tools to make a difference in every situation, we know that there are people in a better position than ourselves to lend members of the public support and this is why we work closely with many specialist agencies and charities.

This is one of the most important parts of the job and one that perhaps goes unnoticed when people see detectives on the TV throwing their badges at people and rolling across rooftops.

We see partnership work as so important that in each Local Policing Unit (there are ten of these in the West Midlands), there are officers dedicated to working with local groups and agencies to ensure that we’re talking to each other, sharing information and working together effectively.

Looking at how we deal with reports of domestic abuse highlights how this partnership approach works.

As a matter of course, we’ll make an internal referral to our Public Protection Unit who are the detectives who specialise in investigating domestic matters.

Not only will they offer their support to the victim, they will, assuming the person making the report is happy for them to so, sit down with members of Social Services, the Health Service and the local domestic abuse support charity and discuss with them what they can do to further help.

This is three external agencies brought in straight away who all may have previous knowledge of similar incidents which they will share and help build up a better picture of the context against which an incident is set.

Victim Support will also likely to notified and their specially trained volunteers will get in touch with the victim with offers of counselling and assistance in applying for compensation.

As a further referral, officers are also likely to advise the victim about the services offered by the National Centre for Domestic Violence who can arrange for the application of court protection orders on behalf of the victim.

The team approach to tackling problems is highlighted well by how we look to address domestic issues, although it’s by no means limited to those issues.

As I’d suggested, there are plenty of calls that we receive at which our police powers are of little use. This is where a little ‘signposting’ is required so that the people who are in a better position than ourselves to aid are notified.

Take the job I’d mentioned on Twitter the other day involving rescuing a disorientated elderly woman from the bus station and helping her find her way back home.

It didn’t take long to find out where she’d come from and deliver her back safely, our involvement didn’t end there though.

We recognised that there were longer term issues that would need addressing to prevent a similar thing happening again – issues that were likely outside the scope of the police force to tackle.

The solution was to make a notification to Social Services who have the training and capability to put in place measures representing that hopefully will prevent similar calls in the future.

As for how we make such referrals to our ‘buddy’ agencies, in Walsall we have access to the rather excellent Walsall Hub which is a one stop shop we can go to when we need to make a notification.

Entering the information that we have collected at a job, we answer a few simple questions on the Hub and then the information is passed straight to the relevant people, be they Social Services, West Midlands Fire Service, Environmental Health or a range of others.

This constant two way flow of information is synergy in action – we work together to achieve a better result than any one agency could manage working alone.

P.S. The topic for this blog was picked on the suggestion of a follower on Twitter. If there’s a topic you’re interested in that you’d like to read about, let me know. I take requests!