You know my name, look up the number…

What’s the difference between an emergency and a non-emergency call? 898!

Remember what you were doing back in November 2011?

I don’t, although I do recall the 101 national non-emergency police number being launched and me writing a short blog to promote its existence and encourage its use as an easy alternative to jumping on ‘the nines’ when we police are needed.

Well, after more than a year of being a number, we’re getting more and more people using 101 as an easily memorable way to contact their local force.

Looking at how it’s grown, that November a grand total of 4945 people dialled 101 to get through to us. By the following May that number had grown to over 28,000 and this January stood at nearly 44,000.

We’ve helped spread the word about the numbers 101 through our Flickr competition, the winning entry of which is above, during which people were encouraged to submit their 101 themed photos for display in our online gallery.

Alongside these efforts, we’ve also been keen to show how many of the calls received through the 999 system still do not relate to the genuine emergencies that the number is exclusively reserved for.

This included running a twenty four hour ‘tweet-a-thon’ from our call centres during which we published some of the stranger calls taken, including famously one from someone who’d phoned 999 to complain McDonalds wouldn’t serve him.

Seriously.

So, we have 101 for non-urgent calls and 999 only for calls where police assistance is needed straight away.

As someone who spends much of their time attending the calls that find their way through whatever route to our operators, it’s always useful offering a reminder as to what separates a 999 call from one that’d be better suited to 101 and then both of these from calls better taken by other agencies.

As I’ve said, 999 is really only there for the sort of emergencies that you’d expect police to drop their doughnuts, spit our their coffee and hit the blue lights to be with you as soon as possible.

If someone’s at immediate risk, there’s a crime happening there and then, a vulnerable young child missing, something posing a real danger to the public then these are all good examples of 999 calls.

Calls that aren’t as time crucial as the above then are better reserved for the non-emergency number.

This isn’t to imply they’re less important, only that you’d not want to block a line phoning us about a window broken overnight if there was someone trying to get through at the same time to say someone’s rampaging around with a kitchen knife.

A third category and one that’d equally as important are the calls that we receive that really have nothing to do with the police and that are far better suited to agencies such as the local council.

These include environmental issues, noise complaints, civil disputes and a range of other concerns that may well need attention but not that which the police can help with.

So deciding whether a call is a genuine emergency or not and too whether it truly is a police matter is important, so to is picking the most appropriate method for getting in touch.

Phoning us is only one option, non-urgent enquiries can also be emailed, you could contact your local officers directly through the www.police.uk website or even drop into a beat surgery and speak to them face to face.

Servicing calls from the public is the reason that each and every one of us officers and staff are there – it’s our job and one we want to do as well as we can.

It’s clear that we’re better able to do this job when we’re receiving the right kinds of calls through the appropriate numbers and not when we’re fielding customer service enquiries on behalf of Ronald McDonald!

Seemed a good idea to drop a bomb on the wasteland…

Road closures in force after the bomb scare in Brownhills earlier today – A huge waste of the police and the public’s time if it was a hoax (Image from @Rich_Rawlinson)

If you happened to be a forty six foot tall stainless steel miner standing on the roundabout at the end of Brownhills High Street earlier this lunchtime, you may have noticed that there was a strange lull in the traffic.

Even if weren’t a forty six foot tall stainless steel miner, you may have noticed that at the same sort of time you were turned away from Brownhills by police officers waving their hands and saying things like “I’m sorry, we’ve had to shut the road”.

Why did they have to do that?

Well, as has been well covered over on Brownhills Bob’s Brownhills Blog, there had been a call made to police reporting a suspicious package sitting suspiciously by the side of the road.

As per our usual procedure, followed in the interests of public safety, we swung into action establishing a cordon and checked it out, verifying soon after that it wasn’t anything to be concerned about and so re-opening the roads.

Now not being on duty myself, I couldn’t say whether the call was the result of someone genuinely concerned about the package, whether it had been placed maliciously or if there was some other motivation for the passing of said information to ourselves.

Were it to be the case that it was a hoax, the consequences are very serious for both the person responsible and for everyone else who finds their day disrupted by road closures and being evacuated from cordoned off areas.

Cordon distances vary according to the size of the device, from around one hundred meters for a small package up to four hundred for a vehicle.

Keeping such large exclusion areas is resource intensive and if local units can’t rule out a package as being a genuine device, the army has to come out, often from a considerable distance so stretching out the inconvenience for everyone.

We do our best to minimise the disruption, baring in mind my previous blog about roads not being designed to be closed, but it’s never easy. Train services have to be stopped short, buses rerouted and so the problems can spread far further than the location of the incident itself.

The offence of causing a bomb hoax comes from Section 51 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 which makes it an offence for a person to leave a package or make a call with the intention of giving someone the impression that a bomb is likely to go off.

Due to the disruption that a bomb hoax causes, the courts tend to take a dim view of those responsible and with telephone companies being all too happy to help police with bomb hoax investigations, there’s a good chance that the people making the calls find they are arrested.

So, hoax bomb calls are an incredibly effective way of wasting everyone’s time and earning a potential custodial sentence for the person responsible.

Phoning 999 is always the right thing to do if you notice a package that you really think is out of place and gives rise to concern, likewise 101 is the right number to phone if you know anything about persons making hoax calls.

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

I’ve decided to write this post for two reasons. One, I’m a cyclist and don’t much fancy getting knocked off my bike. Two, I like dancing gorillas.

First of all then, point one. The whole not getting mangled by trucks when I’m out showing off my Lycra collection thing.

With almost no exception, cyclists don’t like it when they find that the piece of the road they’re gently cycling upon is suddenly also occupied by someone driving a big metal box at forty miles an hour. It just doesn’t work and usually it’s the cyclist who ends up worse off.

This is why when we’re out pretending to be Bradley Wiggins, we’re cautious around junctions as whilst it may be the case that we have the right of way, we know all too well that if we haven’t been seen, our having had the right of way is irrelevant.

Being alert, wearing something reflective and being lit up like a Christmas tree all help increase the chances that we’ll be seen by those pulling out at junctions who should be following their Highway Code and checking for dangers before pressing down the ‘go’ pedal.

What dangers are you checking for at junctions though? Enter the dancing gorilla.

As reinforced by this recent study from eggheads at Harvard, we tend to look only for what we’re conditioned to look for, meaning we may not see other things that we really ought to have noticed.

The Harvard experiment involved radiologists being asked to examine a CT scan for signs of lung cancer. They were not told there was an image of a dancing gorilla embedded in the scan and as a result, over 80% of them did not notice the misplaced gorilla, even though they had looked directly at it.

This echoes the test conducted in the above video, again where having been asked to look for something in particular, the conditioning means that many people completely miss the ‘extra player’ walking right into their field of vision and dancing a neat little jig.

Transport for London picked up on the experiment for good reason – if you can miss and dancing gorilla simply because you’re not looking for him, could you also miss someone on a bike whilst out motoring?

The answer of course is yes, you could.

The reality of this happening was reinforced recently when a judge warned motorists that they have a ‘responsibility’ towards cyclists following a fatal collision involving a cyclist in Wales.

In this incident, the cyclist had been near the curb, was wearing high visibility clothing and was using lights. He would have been clearly visible to the driver for at least twenty seconds prior to the collision and yet as the prosecution stated, “for reasons unknown, despite the time and distance available to him, the defendant simply failed to observe him”, driving straight into him.

The judge rightly characterised the death as “wholly unnecessary and avoidable”, sentencing the driver to fourteen months in prison.

Now I don’t like dividing cyclists and motorists into opposing camps as I think it’s an unhelpful message, ‘cyclists are at fault here because of X’ and ‘drivers should do Y’ and so on.

Rather the suggestion here is that when we’re using the roads, on whatever form of transport we choose, we always do so with as an open mind as we are able.

P.S. It’s interesting applying selective attention to situations other than motoring, police searches or investigations for instance. If officers are conducting a fraud investigation for example, they’ll be looking for evidence indicating fraud but might they miss evidence pointing towards other offences as a result? I think it’s certainly a possibility.

In it for the money…

None for you, pimps! The lovely Proceeds of Crime Act enables us to seize back criminals’ ill-gotten gains and it’s the Payback Team that makes it all happen.

Pimps. Things they like: Big hats, diamond encrusted canes, fur coats, monster trucks, rubies.

Things they don’t like: The Proceeds of Crime Act and the good people at the West Midlands Police Force Payback Team.

Yes, there are few things little criminals like less than being told by a wig-wearing judge that they now owe several hundred thousand pounds following a calculation of a ‘benefit figure’ indicating ‘this is is what we reckon you’ve made from crime and so this is the amount we want back’.

I’ve written about the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 before, focusing on the legal side of what we can and can’t do when we’re looking to seize a drug dealer’s pet tiger from their rear garden in Goscote.

As for who are the people who makes the POCA wheels turn, allows me to introduce the Force Payback Team who are a specialist group of officers and support staff dedicated to ensuring that crime does not pay.

Working as part of a centrally based team, the Force Payback Team tend to become involved when as part of their investigations, officers out on the street come across people living the kind of lifestyles that their benefits payments probably wouldn’t cover.

Cash over a certain value can be seized and forfeited by the courts regardless of whether they are accompanied by a criminal prosecution.

The Force Payback Team can also apply for confiscation orders through the courts following a criminal conviction and includes a calculation as to how much someone has profited from their illegitimate pursuits.

Should the criminals ignore orders made against them, they can be sent to prison for up to 10 years and still have to pay the money back.  If not paid the courts can get receivers in to gather up all the Bugattis, cash, houses and anything else of value and haul them off to sell.

So far this financial year the Force Payback Team have been responsible for recovering over £3 million in cash and nearly £2.5 million in assets.

Of the recovered bounty, 50% is returned to the force and 50% finds its way to the Home Office whilst for assets, the force receives 18.5% of the total reflecting the work and greater number of agencies involved in recovering assets.

So then, we’ve done the hard work and one day an anonymous civil servant from the Home Office turns up at Force HQ with a suitcase of cash. What are we going to do with it? Where does it go?

Well, whilst I have had my eye on those voice activated Apple iHandcuffs with the built-in wifi, the true benefit of the cash is really in enabling us to reinvest in some very important community projects.

Local examples of where POCA cash has ended up include a £750 to the Sea Cadets and funding Walsall’s futuristic Cyberbus which floats around the LPU addressing ASB issues.

Many of the successful seizures to have come from the Payback Team’s work will have started off with a phone call from a member of the public to their local officers suggesting that someone on their street seems to be managing the income from their paper round remarkably well as they’ve just picked up a new BMW.

As such if you suspect that someone’s income isn’t entirely legitimate, please give us a call on 101 or approach Crimestoppers anonymously.

Criminals only stand to lose and the community stands to gain – this is the way things should be!

Idiot, slow down…

Just a quick post this and one I’ve decided to pick up on for two reasons.

Firstly, the video is part of a witness appeal that we’re making to identify the driver of the black Audi.

The collision happened just before 7.30pm on Friday December 7th last year on King William Street, Hillfields, Coventry. A partial registration for the Audi was taken by a witness as ‘EN57’, we’re asking for anyone with knowledge of the vehicle or incident to contact us directly on 101 or anonymously via Crimestoppers to let tell us what they can.

Secondly, even if you can’t help us with the appeal itself, the video is a valuable reminder to other road users that the consequences of letting driving standards slip, even momentarily, can be very sudden and very severe indeed.

That the woman and toddler hit came away with only minor injuries is rightly described as a ‘miracle escape’, it could have been much, much worse.

There’s always another point of view, a better way to do the things we do…

Heroin addiction can be a horrible affliction, a little understanding can go a long way to helping address the issue. (Image from Psychonaught)

It was one of the strangest prisoner interviews I’ve done in a while. Just me and a shoplifter who had already admitted taking spirits from a shop and was now telling me all about why she had done it.

For the interview itself, the confession was what I’d needed.

Yes, she’d taken the goods. No, she hadn’t any reason to think that she could take whiskey and vodka from the shelves without paying for them and yes, had she have got away with it she would have quickly sold the bottles.

Points to prove for a theft covered.

It’s at this point that the interview would usually finish but as I’d asked whether there was anything else she wanted to tell me, it being her interview, she’d propped herself up and opened up about not what she had done but why.

There’s a heroin habit that needs to be fed. A methadone prescription helps to an extent but it doesn’t see her through the whole day. Drinking her prescription in the morning under supervision of a pharmacist, come the afternoon the ‘rattling’ sensation returns leaving her with a gap that she has little choice but to fill by scoring.

The alternative is a crippling sickness as withdrawal symptoms take over, compelling her to find another fix and not letting her think about anything else until she has done so.

This means stealing although as she has suggested, as have many others to me whilst in similar interviews, she doesn’t want to be out running the risk of getting arrested for theft. She doesn’t want the hours spent in police cells, the drugs are the sole reason that she’s here.

The alternative she tells me is prostitution and the sexual abuse at the hands of rough, uncaring punters that inevitably follows. The shops closed, this is sometimes her only option and the sad stories she tells me about life on the streets I know are repeated across the country night on night.

She shows me her arms and the collapsed veins faintly visible under her needle scarred skin. Only the worn look in her eyes offer any real explanation for the premature ageing of her body, the unpleasant realities of having to inject heroin reinforced when she contorts her arm around to demonstrate how she reaches her few remaining useful veins.

The story starts six years prior being handed a drug by a ‘friend’ which she had thought was more innocent than the heroin that it turned out to be.

Addiction quickly took hold and took over, the years that followed were marked by consistent dependence on the drug, largely untroubled by spells in rehab.

It can be very difficult in our job to know what to think about some of the people we come into contact with. Addiction, poverty and unfortunate circumstances push people to do some terrible things. It’s easy to label someone as a ‘junkie’ or a ‘drunk’ and slam the cell door.

From time to time we are presented with timely reminders that the question of why is just as important as what and that there’s always room for understanding, for compassion.

Having listened to the girl’s account and her acknowledgement that people think she’s ‘just another junkie’, it was clear to me that there’s no such thing.

I see a darkness…

Via West Midlands Police Appeals for Help –

Police officer dies after being assaulted while off-duty

A POLICE officer has died in hospital after he was assaulted while he was on a night out off-duty in Wolverhampton.

The 33-year-old victim was walking past Divine Bar in Darlington Street at around 4.30am on Monday (Jan 28) when he became embroiled in a row with a black man and two white women who’d just left the club.

During a scuffle the victim was punched and left unconscious in the road with a serious head injury; he was taken to hospital and died last night (Thursday 7 February).

A post mortem will be carried out in due course to determine the exact cause of death.

West Midlands Police Detective Inspector Phil Asquith, said: “They got into a scuffle moments after leaving Divine Bar…I’d appeal for anyone who was in the club that night and may have seen them to contact police.

“Similarly I’m keen to hear from anyone who was driving along Darlington Street in the early hours of that morning, heading home after a night out or perhaps taxi drivers, as they may have witnessed it.

“At the time they may have written it off as a low-level disorder but it’s a very serious assault which has resulted in a man dying.”

An 18-year-old man and two women have been arrested by police and bailed until a date next month pending further enquiries.

Det Insp Asquith, added: “If anyone has any information that could assist the inquiry, who’s possibly heard someone since talking about the incident, I’d ask them to call us on the 101 number as their information could prove vital.”

Anyone with information is asked to contact West Midlands Police Force CID on the 101 number or the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.