Where you’ll find me now…

Eight suspects connected with last year’s Walsall EDL protests were arrested this morning, can you help us identify others though?

Police – “Knock knock”
Suspect – “Who’s there?”
Police – “It’s the 5-0, we’ve come to arrest you in connection with the protests in Walsall last September”
Suspect – “I’ll get my coat…”

I wasn’t there but this is likely the sort of conversation that took place at eight addresses this morning with suspects as officers investigating the disorder at last year’s English Defence League (EDL) demonstration in Walsall swooped by for an early morning ‘chat’.

On Saturday 29th September 2012, Walsall Town Centre hosted a demonstration by the EDL and an accompanying counter demonstration, drawing over a thousand participants and necessitating an accompanying police operation with officers available to ensure that the day passed safely.

Whilst the majority of those there on the day caused no issues, there unfortunately was a small group of people who thought that they might ‘start some drama’ attempting to break through police cordons and throwing debris around.

Thirty people were arrested on the day, twenty seven of them ended up being charged with a variety of offences including one found in possession of an offensive weapon and finding himself handed a twenty five week prison sentence.

Since the protest, officers have been busily studying the CCTV footage and identifying further offenders to be arrested in connection with the disorder.

Eight were arrested this morning, officers have released mugshots of another ten people they’re looking to trace and are encouraging anyone with knowledge that may lead to their identification to come forward.

If you know who any of the featured suspects are, please give us a call on 101 or approach Crimestoppers with your tip so that we can pay them an early morning visit too.

All around the world…

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If you were mooching around the interwebs last Friday and happened to stumble upon Twitter in between endless videos of kittens being hilarious, you may have noticed that several of our official police accounts were using the hashtag #poltwt to accompany their tweets.

Arranged by Lauri Stevens at ConnectedCOPS, the #poltwt event was the first ever global ‘tweetathon’ during which police officers and forces from around the world contributed in excess of thirty five thousand tweets over a twenty four hour period to help raise awareness of the work that they do.

You can still read the tweets from the event by following the #poltwt link direct to the stream, you can also see some of the photos that were uploaded as part of the event and even some videos too.

It was great to see that officers from around the world have embraced social media to communicate with the public and I found it very interesting to see what my counterparts in other countries were getting up to during their shifts.

As you can see from the above, there are obvious differences in the sort of kit we use but at the end of the day, we’re all doing the same job and it would appear that our interest in coffee and doughnuts is universal!

As a coincidence, this post on the excellent use of police social media is my two hundredth and only a couple of weeks ago I passed ten thousand tweets on my own Twitter account.

Milestones such as these help emphasise how useful social media has proven to be in helping us inform, update and reassure the public and that officers around the world routinely use the medium as an integral part of their job suggest it is going from strength to strength.

Where do you go my lovely?

‘Desertion’ may be a bit strong, come April though we’ll be differentiating between ‘missing’ and ‘absent’ when it comes to reports of missing persons.

When is a person ‘missing’ and when is someone simply not where they were expected to be? What difference does it make to the police? What am I going on about?

Earlier this week, the Association of Chief Police Officers announced that following a successful trial of a new approach to how police forces deal with missing person reports, come April it will no longer be a blanket policy that every person reported missing to the police prompts a full investigation.

This may sound odd at first glance and without a little further explanation I can see why it would, it is though hugely significant in determining how we spend our time and how we put to use the resources available at our disposal.

As it stands, missing person enquiries take up a large amount of our time. I was surprised at quite how much time they account for when I first joined – it’d be rare that there’d be a shift where there wasn’t at least one person reported missing on the system, more common that there’d be three or four.

These enquiries would necessitate a unit for the whole of the shift out making enquiries to locate said persons, this would continue over every shift until the person reappeared.

Not only was it surprising how much time was spent on said enquiries, also that for the most part we’d be looking for the same people shift in, shift out.

These commonly would be young people in care homes who simply hadn’t returned in time for their curfew, had to be reported missing to the police according to the care home’s policy and so ended up as ‘mispers’ each and every time they went absent.

Cases such as these challenged the definition of ‘missing’ as more often than not we’d know exactly where they were, know who they were with and would know that they were in no danger.

To give some examples of such cases, the below are all ones that I’d dealt with over the past twelve months:

• A person being reported missing and then reappearing before officers have arrived, officers are still required to attend despite the person’s whereabouts being known and take the details all the same so that they can be recorded as missing and then taken off the system straight afterwards.
• Parents reporting teenage children as ‘missing’ despite knowing where the child is, simply because they want the child returned for not being in when they’ve been told to be.
• Spending two hours driving across the region to collect a missing person late at night, only for the person to absent themselves again about five minutes after being dropped off.

Officers being committed for shifts looking for people for whom there was no immediate reason to have concerns for was a frustrating situation, especially as it meant that there were fewer officers to attend 999 calls.

Under the new system, people will be classified as either missing or absent depending on the circumstances of the report.

The difference between the two is that those who are ‘absent’ are simply not where they are expected to be whereas those cases classed as ‘missing’ are the ones where there’s a genuine concern about the circumstances of the report.

This isn’t to say that absent persons are simply ignored, rather the case will be monitored by control room staff and reviewed as appropriate.

The advantage here is that the persons only ‘technically’ missing by virtue of having broken a curfew or similar, a large proportion of our current workload, will no longer require officers spending shifts searching for them.

The time saved can then be used to resource other more pressing jobs and the reports of missing people where there’s a concern that some harm may come to a person if they’re not found soon.

The sort of cases you might think as being more traditional missing persons, young children, disorientated older persons and the like, will still be treated as such with us launching appropriate investigations to ensure that they’re located promptly.

It might not seem a big change to have made and odd to think that the police won’t attend each and every report of missing persons but as changes go, I think this is hugely significant in terms of how much police time it will free up.

Cases in which people are genuinely missing will get the sort of attention that they deserve, ones where persons aren’t ‘missing’ by any traditional definition will be sensibly monitored and officers only dispatched if necessary.

P.S. For more information on missing person enquiries, have a look at this blog I’d written in September 2011 about them. Also it’s worth taking a look at this article from the BBC on the same topic and for info on the new policy, this release from ACPO.

I don’t think I ever seen so many headlights…

Seen the helicopter up overhead and five police cars dashing off in the same direction? A sign of a huge incident perhaps? Not necessarily, how we allocate resources to jobs depends on a variety of factors as you’ll see below.

Fairly frequently I receive the following tweet from a curious member of the public – ‘There are six police cars blocking off such and such street and I’ve just seen the helicopter drop a police dog down somebody’s chimney, do you know what’s happening?’.

Often I’m off duty when I get these messages so am in no better position than anyone else to say, sometimes if I am in and have heard what’s occurring on the radio I may be able to give a general idea, although the best place to look for information is usually our official departmental social media feeds.

As it is, the sight of police car after police car zooming by usually gives the impression that something big is going down nearby, ‘big’ as in headlines of the news at six and front page material.

Curiously though it isn’t necessarily true that the more the officers, the more serious the incident they’re on their way to. How we allocate resources to jobs depends a range of factors extending beyond simply that Godzilla is kicking down bits of Streetly.

Some jobs require as many officers to attend as possible in the first instance as without ‘flooding the area’ as we call it, we determine it’s likely that we won’t get the outcome we’re looking for.

Young missing children would be a good example of this – the usual response when we get a report of a toddler having wondered off in the Saddlers Centre is to ask anyone available to make the location straight away and help with the search.

The longer we leave it, the further an inquisitive young explorer can crawl and so with each passing minute, our search area grows.

The same logic applies to other incidents too – a robbery for example will (literally) attract every man and his dog as we want to maximise our chance of catching suspects.

Sometimes you may see large number of vehicles at an incident because we have some information that we might need a large number of officers for safety or perhaps to stop someone slipping out the back door.

Prior to arrest attempts, for example, we’ll check what we know about the person we’re after and if there are suggestions that he or she has been violent in the past or has a tendency not to stick around, we’ll then ensure we have enough pairs of boots to prevent issues.

Deciding who goes to what is largely the job of the control room who will allocate cars to incidents as soon as they’re sent across from the 999 operators.

Jobs involving violence or some other disturbance will usually attract pairs of officers, as some of those responding may well be patrolling single crewed then you may see the cars stacking up outside a neighbouring house giving the impression that something huge is happening whereas in reality, it’s simply down to the fact that officers have brought a car each.

When it comes to deploying the helicopter, probably our most visible bit of kit, its presence doesn’t necessarily mean there’s been a Holby City-style disaster, rather that officers on the ground have determined that asking for a flyover would likely help them spot something not visible at street level.

Metal thieves laying low on rooftops, criminals running off down footpaths or vulnerable people wondering through large open areas are all the sort of situations that may well involve us calling up the chopper.

As for who comes out to jobs, sometimes who might find that the type of unit arriving isn’t quite what you might expect.

I’ve heard recently firearms officers arriving at car accidents and police vans checking out trouble causing drunks in the town centre – this isn’t because they were specifically asked for, rather because the officers will have overheard jobs on the radio and volunteered to attend in the first instance because they may have been close by and are willing to help out until a more appropriate unit arrives.

So in short, the number of officers arriving at an incident doesn’t necessarily indicate that something major has happened and nor does the type of vehicle or officer that we send.

It’s all down to what’s happening on the day – it could be Godzilla on a rampage, equally so though it could be that another officer or two is needed to help with some traffic control.

The jobs where there has been a major incident with us calling in officers from far and wide – the bomb scares, large fires and serious road accidents as examples – usually attract a tweet or two from @WMPolice or one of the local feeds so if you’re ever curious to know what’s happening, check them out as they’re your best source of information.

Mr. Writer, why don’t you tell it like it really is?

It goes without saying that Bergerac was one of the best police shows, does watching police dramas as a real cop spoil them though? (Image from Jersey Tourism)

Midweek at 11:00 and assuming I’m not at work, it’s not unlikely that you’ll find me tuned into Yesterday to watch the exploits of TV detective Bergerac as he dashes around Jersey trying to sort out one of the island’s three crimes – smuggling, art theft or a kidnap.

Police dramas have always been popular and whilst they’re not all quite as good as Bergerac, millions of people tune in each week to see jumper wearing officers solving grim murders through using forensics techniques that have apparently been borrowed from Star Wars.

I know I’ll not be the only officer amongst these viewers who enjoys a bit of Morse, The Bill or Silent Witness but gets frustrated (and frustrates anyone else within earshot) with the little procedural inaccuracies that seem to crop up across the dramas.

Yes, cries of “They can’t do that!” and “Ooooh, that would never happen in real life!” can probably be heard from the living rooms of officers up and down the country every time they tune in to any drama in which the Old Bill make an appearance.

What are the most common errors then?

Allow me to present (pens at the ready, TV execs) some of the things that I often notice that cause me to leap up from my arm chair in a shower of biscuits and fury:

• Inappropriate interviewing – Suspect Farmer Bishop of murdering Mrs. Brown with his combine harvester? Arrest him and interview him on tape at the station, don’t illegally question him in his barn as he milks some cows.
• Crowded interview rooms – On the off chance the suspect has been brought to the station, it’s very rare that there’d be more than two officers asking the questions. Seven angry officers storming around the inexplicably large interview room, coming and going at random just wouldn’t happen.
• Prisoners wearing their finest jewellery – TV detectives bust some upmarket cocktail party and arrest the heiress, at the station she’s sat in interview still wearing her hair up and her finest diamond necklace. Said diamonds and hair bands should really be in a sealed property bag – we search and remove loose items from everyone who comes into custody.
• Randomly assigned ranks – Sometimes it appears that ranks are assigned at random and when this happens, you end up with some very odd occurrences. A superintendent taking a statement? Really?
• Lack of paperwork – We’ve done a lot to cut down on the bureaucracy but even so, we do need to get out our pens every now and again to fill in a form or two. When was the last time you saw Bergerac filling in a search book?
• No respect for crime scenes – Murder scenes usually look pretty good in detective shows with fluttering police tape and uniformed officers standing around with their radios buzzing. The point of a crime scene is to secure forensic evidence – Morse ducking under the tape, picking up the murder weapon and then searching the body is probably one of the least useful things he could do.
• One man shows – Fine, a show called Morse has to be about Morse but the impression is sometimes given that Morse is one a one man crime fighting machine. In reality complicated investigations, especially murders, are resourced by teams of officers working together rather than by one awesome inspector driving a Jaguar Mark 2 on a jolly around the countryside.

So there we have it, the bugbears that usually have me throwing custard creams at the television but by no means an extensive list – please feel free to leave any others you’ve noticed in the comments section and we can work towards a definitive list that we can send to ITV.

“You’re not supposed to do that, Frost! It’s a breach of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act!”…

Darkness descends…

I don’t usually repost our witness appeals as the relevant section on the force’s website does the job well enough without me, having noticed though that quite a few people are finding my blog after searching for information on yesterday’s tragic murder of Christina Edkins, a few words here would seem useful.

The best sources of up to date information on the incident remains our website and official Twitter feed, @WMPolice, and so that’s where you need to look first and foremost.

Going from today’s press release, detectives investigating the attack are keen to trace the movements of the suspect before and after the stabbing itself which occurred on the number nine bus on Hagley Road, Birmingham, at around 07:30 yesterday morning.

A male was arrested under suspicion of murder shortly afterwards, he has been described as black, in his early twenties, carrying a white bag and wearing a distinctive ‘tiger print’ jacket as pictured above.

Officers are not looking for anyone else in connection with the stabbing, however the weapon used in the attack is yet to be located and members of the public providing officers with possible sightings may well narrow down the search for this very important piece of evidence.

If you recall seeing a male matching the above description, were on the number nine bus or can provide any other information on the incident then please don’t hesitate to call us on 101.

First time ever I saw your face…

We can’t guarantee the faces you’ll see will be pretty but still, Facewatch will be a very useful tool in helping us identify villains caught on CCTV.

Follow our force Twitter accounts and on any given day you’re almost certainly going to notice officers mentioning that they’re out making some ‘CCTV enquiries’ at local shops, pubs and clubs.

Being one of our strongest sources of evidence, CCTV is usually the first thing that we check for after some crime has happened and the images captured by the cameras are often the evidence that help convince juries of someone’s guilt.

Important as CCTV is though, it may surprise you how tricky and time consuming it can be to get our sticky hands on those few crucial frames.

As a general rule, it is mandatory that every CCTV system uses its own obscure file format, that every manufacturer has their own complicated viewing software and that neither the files nor the software will be compatible with our own computers.

Not helpful enough?

Throw into the mix that in the CCTV industry, instruction booklets are generally frowned upon and even when we turn up at an incident and find that the world’s most awesome CCTV system was installed only yesterday, its owner will almost certainly not have a clue how to work it.

Sorry, still not helpful enough you say?

I forgot to mention we also have to spend many unhappy hours travelling around the West Midlands seizing discs/USB sticks/VHS cassettes, scribbling out production statements and booking all of this lot into the property store.

Surely there must be an easier way of doing things? Well, turns out there is…

Facewatch is an online system now used in the West Midlands and by other police forces and businesses up and down the country to help make employing CCTV evidence a whole lot quicker, easier and more effective for everyone.

Rather than us rozzers having to go and faff around with discs, unknown CCTV pin codes and ‘.pvr format unrecognised, please upgrade gigabubble codec and reintegrate with matrix’ error messages, everything can be done via the tubes of the interweb.

Using the Facewatch site, a business can both report a crime and upload the relevant CCTV footage straight to the net so that us officers can then pull an evidential package off at the station and commence enquiries without having to do everything manually.

Sound good? It gets better!

Not only are the images shared with ourselves, they can also be uploaded to an online gallery so that other businesses and members of the public can look at them and identify trouble causers.

The public galleries I can see being especially useful as for most offences, we only circulate offender images internally to see if other officers can pick out faces. Having more eyes on the pictures increases the chances that someone will be able to put names to the faces.

This builds on the success of our own galleries on the Wanted and Operation View sections of our website through which members of the public have helped us locate outstanding suspects from the riots.

If you’re a business interested in saving time by using the Facewatch system or a member of the public wanting to help punch crime in its scowling face, you can find out more about the service on their website, their Twitter account or Facebook page.

It’s still in early stages and more images are being added daily, but take a look at the Facewatch ID site to see some of the images already uploaded and check out the mobile app too for some ‘on the move’ crime fighting.

CCTV footage can be a very effective, damning form of evidence. Facewatch makes it even more effective for us and even more inconvenient for the criminals, tipping the balance further in our favour. Hurrah!