“Tiredness can kill, Take a break”

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the police are being stripped to the bone and we’re at breaking point. I suspect one day soon something is going to snap and I fear that when it happens it’ll be a constable who was trying to do his best for the public and the job who will end up being sacked or worse. I was having a conversation on Twitter a few days ago about emergency service drivers and how some are doing 200 miles, most of it on blue light runs, in a single shift whilst being single crewed, having had no break for a whole shift. This may not seem like a serious issue to some, but tiredness seriously affects your concentration and your ability to deal with things.

 

When you drive along the motorway there are always signs saying ‘Tiredness can kill, take a break’, and lorry drivers follow very strict working practices, having a tachograph which monitors how long they drive for and rest for, and this is regulated by law. Yet emergency service drivers are expected to drive hundreds of miles on blue lights without so much as a toilet break. We don’t do an ordinary job, and work in exceptional circumstances, I understand that, but there is a bit of a conflict here. On one hand you’re told to take a break when you feel tired, yet on the other hand you have 999 drivers travelling great distances, risking their own lives in order to help others whilst being tired.

 

Let me give you a brief example of how it might affect you; An officer has been working for 6 hours on a night shift, he’s not had time to take a break and eat anything because the numbers have been stripped down and the team have been so busy they’ve all been going call-to-call-to-call all night. Suddenly police receive an emergency call to a ‘suspects on’ (that is a burglary where the suspects are still inside the premises), or a sexual assault or any call where someone is in danger and it warrants an emergency response. He can’t turn around to the sergeant and say ‘Sorry Serg, I’m too tired so I’m not gonna take that call’, there’s no-one else to take it as the other few members of the team are tucked up dealing with other incidents, so it’ll have to be him, the whole team are knackered so they just have to deal with it. Imagine how it would look if it got out in the press that police officers didn’t take an emergency call because they were too tired to drive there?! As we always do, we try to do our best for the job and for the public, so he accepts the call, taking the risks because he knows that someone needs his help and that’s why he became a police officer. Whilst he’s driving to the call on blue lights he falls asleep, hits a car and kills someone. That’s his responsibility, he’s done that and he would have to live with that for the rest of his life but my point is, he would be disciplined and probably charged with criminal offences, and when it gets to court I somehow don’t think “I was tired your honour” would carry much weight.

 

I honestly don’t know the right answer here so I’d be interested in your thoughts, do you not make your way because you’re tired but risk that persons safety who needs us, or do you go, knowing the dangers of driving whilst being so tired. Before you decide, just remember, I’m not talking about being tired because you went out the night before, or because you got up early to go to the gym. I’m talking about being so tired because your team has been cut of it’s officers so there aren’t enough of us to deal with the calls and the ‘awaiting to be assigned’ emergency calls are backing up meaning as soon as you’re finished with one, you’re off to another call. Because of this rushing around you haven’t even managed to take 5 minutes to eat so you’re hungry as well which also affects your ability to concentrate.

 

Make no mistake, I’m not here asking for sympathy, I’m genuinely interested in your views and how you think we should deal with something which might seem minor but has the possibility of changing lives forever.

 

I think the phrase dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t springs to mind.

 

 

Are we fighting a losing battle?

Wow, I’ve just looked at my blog site and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t blogged since the 16^th February, that’s terrible! Lot’s of things have happened, my personal life has been busy, and, of course, we’ve had the Olympics, so that was a crazy four months for us in London! Any hoo, no excuses but I’m back, and hopefully this will be me getting back on the blogging bandwagon.

 

The idea for this blog first came about when I was on a carrier of officers working in a part of London that I don’t normally work in, we were assisting some borough officers in South London with stopping and searching a group of young lads late one afternoon over Notting Hill Carnival weekend.

As most of you will know, Notting Hill Carnival is renowned for gangs from all over London converging at carnival and fighting with each other. This day in particular we were asked over our radio channel to go to an estate in South London (I forget which borough it was), where officers had seen members of a known gang hanging around, possibly getting ready to go to carnival. We were then told that this group had been searched an hour ago, and a number of knives and weapons were recovered from close to where they were sitting. These were all seized by police.

 

So, we then arrive to help the officers search the group again, needless to say their grounds for wanting to search the group were very present and we were justified in doing so. Straight away the group were confrontational, trying to walk behind us and surround us, saying all the usual ‘this is our area’ etc… etc… as we always get. The group were searched and nothing was found, however just across from where they were and hidden in the bushes were some very large knives and an assortment of other weapons. Remember that this area was cleared out of it’s weapons an hour ago, so somehow more weapons had suddenly appeared as if David Blaine had put them there himself! Even though we were pretty sure that this group had put the weapons there, it was one of these situations that ‘It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove’ (the eagle eyed among you will recognise that as a quote from the legendary ‘Training Day’). We had nothing to link these weapons to the boys so they were seized and the group was sent on their way. Just before they left, I did ask a few them if they were in a gang, to which I was told ‘No, but this is our area’, I knew they were annoyed that we were being searched, so I tried to explain why we did it, and that we were there to help rid their community of knives and guns so it’s safer for them, but they didn’t care about and it was falling on deaf ears.

 

Where my issue comes from, is that whilst we were dealing with these lads, a female, in her 40’s, came out of a house in her dressing gown, and started shouting abuse at us ‘So they fuck you up if you go to carnival, now they’re coming to your home to fuck you up’. Our job is hard enough on the street trying to earn the respect of members of the public, especially in certain parts of London where hating the police is so deeply entrenched in their attitudes and lives that nothing I saw will ever change that. These young lads, some of them only 14 or 15, I think are still at an age where we can talk to them and hopefully change their attitude towards us, showing them that we’re trying to do a good job and protect them in their local communities, however naïve that might sound. How are we supposed to do this when said woman is shouting abuse at us in front of these impressionable young guys?

 

I am fully aware that 30 or 40 years ago when she may have been growing up in that area the police probably treated people very differently, so that probably influenced her opinions of the police, and no doubt she was influenced by the older people around her as she grew up, but what I’m trying to say is that police culture has changed so much in the past 3 decades that it’s not like it used to be. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the attitudes of some parts of the community. It makes me wonder whether it’s not always the police’s actions that makes people so anti-police, but how they are influenced by the older people in their own community and how that nurtures their hatred towards us.

 

I hear stories of how it used to be in the 70’s and into the 80’s and it’s unbelievable. I couldn’t have imagined working in a police force like that, but it’s now 2012 not the 80’s, we have moved forward and changed the way we work. Can someone suggest how we now go forward and attempt to show local people that it’s not like it used to be.

I’m worried that todays youth are going to grow up being influenced by their elders around them, so they will have that hatred engrained into them right from a young age, then they are going to have children and push that same attitude onto their children and nothing will ever change, this hatred of the police will continue throughout generations to come unless we can do something about it.

 

At the moment I feel like we are fighting a losing battle and I honestly don’t know what we can do to change the attitudes of the next generation.

I do however, think one option may rest with education. We should be going into schools and interacting with them a little bit more. Not out on the street, where passers-by are eyeing them up and down, but in a class room environment where they don’t have to feel threatened and outnumbered by people in a uniform. A chance for them to ask questions and get their opinion over in a constructive way. We should be finding out what it is that they hate about it, is there a way that the police could do it better and ensuring they understand the reasons behind why it’s such an important tool. And then maybe, just maybe these kids might not grow up being so anti-police and passing on their hatred to the next generation.

 

I don’t have the answers, so as always, I’m interested to hear your views. Remember, these are just my opinions and how I see it from my point of view.

 

As a side note….I’m not so naïve to think that we’re there to be liked by everyone, and that not everyone will always support us, that’s just the nature of our work, but I do think it could be a lot better than it presently is.

The Thinning Blue Line

As we all know these are tough times for policing with numbers being cut left, right and centre (even though the government refuse to believe that) and with certain crimes being on the up. With the governments review of police conditions the next few years are certainly going to define the police for the 21st century.

There are many changes happening within the service, some, I believe so that a senior officer can gain the evidence they need for a promotion and then 5 years later another officer comes along in need of evidence and changes it back to how it was in the first place! This reinventing the wheel is something that constantly happens and leaves us lower ranking officers confused about why it changed in the first place!

With officer numbers being spread very thin on the ground the deployment of those officers is a crucial element to ensure they are not ‘tucked up’ dealing with an unnecessary job and not able to respond to emergency calls. In this blog I want to focus on ‘MetCall’ (Also known as Central Communication Command), which is our communications centre facilitating calls from the public and the dispatching of officers to these calls.

When a member of the public phones 999 (or the new non-emergency 101), the call is answered by the operators at MetCall in what they call ‘First Contact’. They take the information from the caller and place it onto the CAD system. CAD is basically a log, so each incident has it’s own individual CAD number. This is then passed though the system to a dispatcher. Each borough in London has its own ‘pod’, or small area of desks where the dispatchers work. A couple of operators who see the incoming cads, perform intelligence checks and then dispatch units as necessary. The operator in First Contact grades the call depending on how they judge it, this can be based on threat to life, danger to a person or property and so on. The three main types of gradings are: an ‘i’ call (immediate) means we have twelve minutes to arrive at the scene, an ‘s’ grade (standard) means we have one hour and an ‘e’ grade gives us up to 24 hours. I have no problem with these response times, even though I question some of the things that seem to be graded as ‘i’ nowadays, what I’m trying to talk about here is two things, having civilians with no police knowledge has an effect on our availability and secondly how a target driven culture is having consequences for officers on the streets and causing unnecessary delays.

I think I should start by saying that I’ve never worked at MetCall, but I know people who have/do, so things I’ll be talking about are from experiences I’ve had at the other end of the radio or from colleagues who have told me what it’s like.

First I’ll talk a little about targets and how I’m told that the operators in First Contact have strict times in which they have to answer the call, ask the information, hang up and then move on to the next call. This stance of quantity over quality is quite obvious for us on the streets because the quality of information coming through to us on the CAD’s is usually terrible. I would estimate that in over 50% of calls we attend we have to ask the dispatcher to phone the informant back to glean some more information. I don’t know the exact times they have to deal with that initial call, but surely it would be better to spend an extra 30 seconds on the phone in the first place asking a few extra questions, rather than having to get a dispatcher, when it’s really busy to spend 2 or 3 minutes having to call the informant back. This also causes an inconvenience for that member of the public who called us in the first place!

I think another reason why we don’t always get the right information is because some of the operators don’t think like police officers, so some of the questions that I might ask to gauge whether a call needed police to respond isn’t being asked by some. On the back of that, I’m not sure if operators get given any legal training, but recently I received a CAD which was tagged as ‘Burglary’, I read the first two lines which said someone has climbed onto a garden gate and onto the roof to try and steal some lead but didn’t get away with any. This is clearly not a burglary, but an attempted theft. It doesn’t matter to me because I still turn up and report it in the same way, but I am worried about the statistics. I would imagine a senior officer at MetCall must looked at how many calls are tagged burglary, robbery, etc… so this is giving a false picture of what we are actually attending. Although it is important to note that official statistics for offences come from the crime reporting system, not CAD, so when we say crime is rising, it truly is rising not that CADs are being counted when they shouldn’t be.

I know that people want to see more police officers on the streets, but by having police officers (or employing retired officers to come back as staff) at MetCall would directly lead to more availability of the limited resources that we have on the streets. I’ll give you an example, one of the lads on my team was forced to go to MetCall for a short while, and he was pulled in to the supervisor’s office because his call handling time was too high. What they didn’t take in to account was the fact that by him spending a few more minutes on the phone was stopping many CAD’s having to go through to a dispatcher because he was dealing with the issue over the phone. This prevents a unit having to attend which takes valuable resources away from more important calls.

This sort of takes me on to my second point, I get the impression now that many operators seem to think that just because someone has phoned the police that it then warrants a unit to attend. This is not the case, many of the calls we are being asked to attend do not warrant a police response at all. One recent call I can think of is when a woman phone police because she was walking her dog down the road, and another dog barked at her dog which meant that her dog got scared. I kid you not this actually happened, and we had to drive to the other side of the borough to talk to her. As far as I’m concerned there is no way a police unit needs to be attending that. This tied us up for about 40 minutes by the time we had to drive there and deal with it. It would have made much more sense for her to be given words of advice over the phone. This goes on all the time, and the amount of time wasted by police officers having to attend needless calls must be huge.

The point I’m trying to get across is that by having police officers answer the 999 calls we can be sure that the police are only going to be attending the calls that need a police response and all the other stuff is weeded out at the source. I know that in the current climate we don’t have an abundant of officers to do this, but then again do we? If you added up all the injured officers and those on light duties is there a reason that during their recoup period where they have to stay inside they couldn’t be doing this? I don’t know if this would work in reality, but worth looking in to!

Something else that changed at MetCall a while back, was dispatchers moving around to different pods. It used to be that each operator would work with the same team, on the same shifts on the same borough. This was good because they started to learn the borough and get local knowledge, they would on occasions come out with team in the back of cars to experience it, and the officers built up a good rapport and working relationship with the operators. This really helped everyone working together and gave everyone a sense of team work, now however, it’s all changed. Operators could be moved to any pod meaning they could be working on a different borough. When they arrive at work they are told which borough they re going to be dispatching for so they then have no local knowledge and do not know the officers. I know I’m probably not seeing the wider picture, and that it was probably implemented to give greater resilience or something, but from my point of view working at the other end of the radio it’s made our lives much harder!

It might just be that more training has to be given to civilians rather than getting officers to staff it up, possibly part of the training could be to send them out for a couple of shifts in the back of a response car so they can see first hand how they do with a call has knock on effects further down the line. I know that throughout this blog I’ve repeatedly said about having police officers answer calls is the answer, but on reflection, I don’t think it is, I know there are some great operators up there, you recognise some voices and know it’s going to be an easier shift and I know that these operators would be a lot better than some police officers I know so I don’t think that police officers are the be-all and end-all to every part of the job, but having that extra knowledge and insight may help the inefficiency that we have. I also know that there are already some police officers that work there, so it might be that often when I blame the call time or non-police staff, it’s actually a police officer who’s taken the call anyway! I think the main thing we need to do is get rid of the call time targets, this would then free up the staff to get more information and give a more personal service to the callers, which is victim focused….which coincidently is one of the Met’s priorities at the minute!

I worked in a call centre for quite a few years and I know that I would hate to have to work there, it’s not why I joined the job, I think this would actually be an opinion shared by many police officers.

I really hope that this blog doesn’t offend any ‘civvies’ working in the comms rooms. This is not an attack on you guys, but the procedures and policies that are in place. I’m sure some of you guys find it just as frustrating as we do, but if I have inadvertently slagged you off, when it’s not your fault but you’re following some ridiculous SOP, please tell me. I’ve just tried to explain it from how some officers see it on the other end of the radio.

Anonymous Blogging

In the wake of PC Nick Manning and his tweeting being under the microscope I thought I would write a blog. Although I’m not going to comment on that particular case because it’s an ongoing investigation I hope by the end of this you’ll see my position on the whole matter. After this news story I began to see tweets and blogs discussing anonymous bloggers so I thought that being one of them it’s only fair that I add my views and reasons on the matter. As far I can tell, there appears to be two matters here, police officers using twitter/social media(SM), and secondly those that do it anonymously. So where to start? It’s probably best to start by saying why I tweet, then move on to the issue of anonymity.

I wanted to use Twitter to help the public understand the police service, so that they may view us in a better light and understand some of our thought processes and our procedures so they can see what we actually do in day-to-day policing, it’s a side that’s often not seen and rarely shown on any of the police program’s on TV. I hoped by tweeting and blogging that I would be able to engage with public, not just in an attempt to help the police/public relationship, but more importantly on a personal level I wanted to improve my understanding of how the public view the police and how I could improve as a police officer to make things better for members of the public. I think that there is a high probability that I could learn something from others and become a better officer.

The problem is, I often feel like police officers aren’t allowed to have opinion for fear of receiving disciplinary action, as I spoke about in one of my earlier blogs, people often forget that we are also human beings, we have opinions, feelings and when we take the uniform off we are just the same as anyone else, let’s not forget one of the founding principles of the police from Sir Robert Peel – ‘The police are the public and the public are the police.’ I think that the public have a right to know, and with everyone talking about accountability and transparency I honestly believe that I’m helping the public to understand some of the challenges that we face every day. I’m by no means ‘taking the law into my own hands’, but just trying to help do my bit. Just as if as I would talk to a member of the public on the street to help our image, I will happily have a conversation about policing on Twitter (within reason) for the same gain.
Following on from this is something that is regularly discussed in the media…Human Rights. Human rights are regularly cited in court and the media but what about Article 10? This is the right to freedom of expression, so I wonder does this apply to police officers?

A lot of what I say is my own personal opinion, but i think just as its important for officers to see it from someone else’s point of view, sometimes it’s just as important for someone to see from a police officers point of view.

Moving on to anonymity. Well, there a few different reasons why I choose to tweet and blog behind the facade of @laptop_cop, one of these reasons (in no particular order), is the safety of my family. We deal with some horrible, unscrupulous people, and occasionally they make threats towards us. (Only yesterday a colleague of mine got told by someone he’d arrested that they were going to find his daughter and wife so he could rape them). Now I know that most of the time they are just comments said in the heat of the moment through anger/frustration and nothing will ever happen, but all it takes is one of these people to actually carry out a threat and I don’t think that’s worth the risk.

In the 21st century, with all the technology available and the Internet, it’s not hard to track people down. I know the job advises us against using social media, but other people in my family might still use it, and I can hardly get them to stop.
I regularly help to police events and protests in central London and it’s becoming common place that we are filmed by members of the public (usually so called ‘legal advisers’), I.e. they walk along the cordons, taking officers names and filming them so that I assume in the event something happens later on in the day they can say what officers were where and who might have been involved. Whilst I can understand this, and it may even be a good thing in some situations
, if that information is published on the Internet it is then available to anyone, forever (which could also have consequences if you want a future career in covert policing). All it takes is one person to publish your name, or a photo and it’s out there in the ether forever. Maybe I’m being over the top but is it worth risking?

Rightly or wrongly I always assumed that the police were given shoulder/collar numbers to not only identify us within the job, but also so that we didn’t give our names out to members of the public, you shoulder number was your identification. Only now for some reason we all have to wear name badges, possibly so it makes us more accountable? I don’t know the real reason, but in my opinion we shouldn’t have to wear name badges, after all if someone wishes to make a complaint they can give my shoulder number to the inspector, it’s still me. I just don’t think anything can be gained from officers wearing their names. Maybe someone can enlighten me on this?

I know people reading this will say that this is extreme that someone would genuinely threaten a police officers family, but unfortunately in our job we often deal with worst case scenarios, and a saying that I live by is “prepare for the worst, hope for the best”, this way I can’t be caught out.

It’s fair to say I spend quite a lot of my life living in fear of being summoned to the Superintendent’s office, or getting a knock at my door because the DPS (the professional standards office) have investigated Laptop_cop and found out who I am. However, in relation to the content of my tweets, I never tweet about anything operational and never tweet anything that could compromise active cases or operations. In fact, I rarely tweet about actual stuff that happens at work it’s mostly my opinions. As far as I can recall, I never tweeted anything that I wouldn’t say to a member of the public in the street. This is something that appears to be very blurred at the moment, if I bump into someone whilst out on foot patrol and talk to them about policing cuts or a general chat about the police I’m seen to be engaging with the community, yet if I tweet the very same things I worry that I could face disciplinary action. Is there a difference? I’m not sure there is, yes there is a much wider audience on Twitter and I may have journalists that follow me (I can’t control who follows me or not), but it’s still the same information. I know there is obviously a line, it’s not like I would call my local paper and give them a juicy storey about the police but how are blogs regarded? I could be wrong and if someone could tell me the distinction I’d be grateful.

Anonymity, in my opinion is key for openness in such serious and thought provoking matters. Someone, especially a police officer is much more likely to be open and give an honest view if they can do so without fear of reprisals (I mean from the professional standards people). Much like when business meetings are held under ‘The Chatham House Rule’ (Chatham House website )to encourage free speaking and openness, I think the same could be said for blogging/tweeting.

I’ve looked through our guidelines for officers wishing to use social media in their own time, and as far as I’m aware I stick to them. Although I’ve told people who I work for, no one actually knows who I am. So from what I can tell, the only thing which seems to be a catch-all is the point which talks about bringing the MPS into disrepute or compromising its effectiveness.

I’ve looked up ‘disrepute’ in the dictionary and it’s defined as ‘The state of being held in low esteem by the public’. Something I wanted to achieve when I set up this blog was to highlight to the public some of the processes and things that the police have to deal with which they otherwise wouldn’t ever know about. By doing this I don’t believe that the public will hold the MPS in low esteem, if anything I believe it would be quite the opposite, it can only help to gain greater support for the police in the face of the cuts by highlighting to the public the daily challenges that we face.

In summary, I think that as long as officers aren’t tweeting about live operations or jobs (unless its something the public could help with, e.g. Missing person, recently stolen car) then is there really a problem? Do the public have a right to know what it’s actually like, from the officers themselves, not what the media want to the public to know?
I do think there needs to be better guidelines on blogging/tweeting and the possible consequences of it however I understand it’s still a very new concept, something that professional standards need to do though is to educate the officers! God knows we love a powerpoint presentation, or NCALT package (computer based learning) in the police, so why not include social media into our mandatory training. Rather than trying to prevent officers from using social media, why not help them to do it in a way that can benefit the service and the public.

I’d love to hear your views, for or against so please comment….

Stop and Search

I’ve been reading a lot in the media recently about the police use of stop and search, I’m not sure what sort impression people are getting but as always, I thought I’d address a few points as I see them. You may or may not agree with them, and if you have a counter point, please share it with me, you never know you might enlighten me and change my mind. Just to be clear I’m not talking about Section 60 CJPOA searches on this blog.

 

I think the first thing to say is that contrary to popular belief the police do not just randomly pick a member of the public to search them, I wasn’t a police officer in the 70’s or 80’s so I can’t comment on what things were like, I can only go on what I’ve been told and since those times things are done very very differently!

 

Before I get into the nitty-gritty bits, as I did with my taser blog I’ll start by explaining a stop and search so that those of you who have never been searched understand the process.

 

In order for an officer to search someone, we must have grounds, or a justification for the search, this doesn’t mean simply that a person looks ‘suspicious’ or an officer just gets a gut feeling. Some of you would be forgiven for thinking that if an officer recognises someone to be a well known local drug dealer or a prolific local burglar then we can search them, but that’s not the case, that may add to the grounds but that in itself is not enough. A few examples of the kinds of things that officers might be that a person matched the description given by a member of the public, someone who is clearly trying avoid police, a strong smell of cannabis on a person, an individual been seen trying to conceal something about their person, they are in a well known high crime area, trying to avoid answering certain questions, seen walking in and out of gardens in an area that they can’t explain why they’re there etc…. This list isn’t exhaustive and there usually has to be more than one reason. There could be many reasons giving an officer a reason to search, but the main point here is, just like with use of force, an officer has to justify their reasons and that officer is fully accountable for why they are searching someone.

 

Before a search takes place an officer has to explain a number of things, this is commonly referred to as GOWISELY (does not have to be said in this order).

G – Grounds for the search

O – The object that the officer is looking for

W – Show their warrant card (only if not in uniform)

I – The officer has to identify themselves, telling the individual their name

S – Station to which the officer is attached

E – Entitlement to a copy of the stop and search form

L – The legal power in which to search (i.e. Section 23 Misuse of drugs act, Section 1 PACE)

Y – Tell them ‘You are now detained for a search’

 

Once all this has been a done the search can take place, and even though officers can only search a persons outer layers, it is possible for a strip search if you have reason to believe a person may be concealing something beneath this (not done in public obviously). A stop and search form is then completed with all the details of the search, including the officers name and the reason for the search. It is then handed to the person, along with separate bit of paper detailing how a person may complain to the police if they want to.

 

The phrase ‘you’re more likely to be searched if you’re black’ needs to be given some perspective. If the police are in an area where predominantly black youths, or Asian youths or anyone from an ethnic minority hang around on the streets or on an estate, then of course if the police are there for a particular reason, they are more likely to be searched. Certainly where I work you are far less likely to see groups of white teenagers congregating in some of the estate stairwells than other ethnic groups, this is simply because of the diverse culture we live in and less white people live in that particular area. This goes back to something I saw on twitter the other day where apparently you’re more likely to be tasered if you’re from an ethnic minority…we can’t then start tasering (or searching in this case) other people just to balance up the figures!

It’s really important to remember that statistics can be manipulated to say whatever someone wants, if you take this country as a whole then this phrase probably isn’t true for someone who lives in Cornwall or some of the counties, but in south east London and some parts of east London where the population is a lot more diverse then it may be true. For that phrase to mean anything you need to look at the make-up of the population in a particular area and not only colour but it also needs to broken down into age groups. Without that it’s just another meaningless statistic that can be banded about and cause unnecessary tension against the police.

 

If police are stop and searching the wrong people or searching people unnecessarily then why aren’t more complaints substantiated? Surely if that many searches were resented and complaints were made where the officers were found to be wrong then wouldn’t we have heard about it? That to me suggests that people may argue on the street about why they are being stop and searched, but it’s not because the police aren’t justified, but because people just simply don’t like being stop and searched! I saw a comment on twitter (sorry I can’t find the link) that a kid said he didn’t like being stop and searched because the police keep confiscating his knives, I think that says it all really.

 

I’ve seen a few comments about how the riots were a response to the police use of stop and search, I honestly believe that it’s all too easy to say part of the cause was down to stop and search, surely this was just mindless vandalism and rioting, are they honestly saying that as they were smashing in to JD to pick up some new trainers the looters were thinking ‘this’ll teach the police for searching me’? I don’t think so, but this a whole separate discussion.

 

I completely agree that individual officers don’t always explain themselves properly and this often winds up members of the public, I’ve witnessed that myself and had to step in and calm the situation down. I freely admit that a few police officers don’t know how to talk to people and their communication skills are shocking but somehow they managed to get into the job, I think it’s these officers that need to be careful with stop and search. Often taking the time to explain the reasons does help people who don’t agree with it to understand, as @MattDelito’s blog explains. I’ve frequently found this to be the case, that when someone objects initially once it’s been explained from our point of view then they understand. Luckily, I seem to have been pretty good so far at talking to people and by the end of most searches people tend to accept my reasons and agree they probably would have done the same thing in my shoes but there are also people who just won’t listen no matter what you are trying to say and won’t agree with you simply because you are the police and they hate the police.

 

Something else I’ve been wondering, has anyone asked all these people why they don’t like stop and search? I don’t understand the reason for just saying ‘I don’t like being searched’. I agree, it is a very personal thing, and can be an invasion of privacy, but I don’t know about you, if it meant that the police were out there catching robbers, burglars and drug dealers (who are the real scum of our society and who really bring down our communities) I don’t mind being searched, after all, if I matched the description of a local robber I’d hope to be searched so the police might catch that person who’s robbed ten people in the past week. If the problem is with how they are being searched then I fully agree with them and this is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately and rectified.

 

Certainly part of the discussion that we need to be having is not WHO is being stop and searched but WHY, if the same person is stop and searched three times in the same week, we should be asking ourselves, bearing in mind the search criteria, what is this person doing to be searched so much? In addition to this as @Peter_Kirkham just tweeted, ‘its not always (often) the WHAT but the HOW it is done!’

 

It’s very obvious that stop and search is needed and is a vital tool for police to combat crime. It’s something that we must not abuse, it’s too easy to forget that although it may be the tenth person that you’re searching that shift it could be their first encounter with the police and that will be their lasting impression of the police. Without proactive policing and intelligence led policing we will only become reactive, which would be a terrible thing for the police. Stop and search is something we must not lose the ability to do!

 

Quick question, if stop and search was to be abolished, how would you deal with the following scenario?

 

Police receive a call from a member of the local community stating that they’ve seen a fight take place and there is a male (they give a full description) carrying a knife in his trousers. You then go to the area and see the described male.
Without stop and search police wouldn’t be able to do anything about that individual carrying a knife.

 

To sum up, I believe the most important issues we need to be looking at with regards to stop and search is not who is being searched, but why and how people are being searched. There could be underlying causes in some of our communities which need addressing, just one example could be down to unemployment, meaning some youths could be hanging around in gangs and on the street a lot more, which may or may not lead to more criminal behaviour (or anti-social behaviour at least). There are many socio-economic factors that could eventually lead down this path, and I think our society and communities need to be looked at a lot more to help address some of these issues before going straight to attacking stop and search.

 

Finally, although I’ve tried to give a balanced view (I hope I have), we as police officers need to remember Stop and Search needs to be done right EVERYTIME, even if we have grounds and the search is legitimate, manners cost nothing! There’s nothing wrong with being professional and courteous that way people will have no cause for incivility complaints and they are a lot more likely to cooperate with us and respect the job that we’re doing. Anyone not being polite and respectful is just giving the rest of us a bad name and making the job that much harder to do.

 

Stay safe.

 

Sophie Khan’s article

This isn’t really a blog post, this is actually a response to Sophie Khans article on The Solicitors Journal, so before you read this please read her article here first otherwise it won’t make any sense: http://bit.ly/uS9IvA

 

I do apologise for posting it on here instead of a comment on the article, but I tried 3 times to add comment and it wouldn’t let me, so this was the next best thing.

Once you’ve read Sophie’s article and then my reposnse I’d be really appreciative if you could comment, especially if you’re not in the police as I’d like to know what peoples feelings are on the matter.

 
I thought that I would write a lengthy comment on this article as there are a few things need addressing and a few things that need to be put into perspective a little bit. I’ll attempt to work my way thought paragraph at a time, a sort of critique if you will.

 

Firstly ‘backdoor militarisation of our unarmed police force’, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! Lets put this into perspective, what we are talking about is equipping a modern day, 21st century police service with a modern day, 21st century piece of personal protective equipment. I’m not going to go round in circles as I’ve said much of this before, you can all read my blog on what Taser is really about. Taser is not a weapon that kills when it is used correctly, it is one of the most effective ways to protect police officers and members of the public in dangerous situations.

 

‘Those arrested will be routinely subjected to 50,000 volts of electric shock.’ What kind of wild acqusation is this? Sophie, are you suggesting that when arresting, officers are just going to taser people unnecessarily? I go back to my previous comment that it is only used in dangerous situations where it is needed to protect lives.

 

Of course there is going to be a rise in the number of taser deployments, if it is becoming more widely available then it will be used more. If I’m correct then these statistics also include where a Taser was used in ‘red-dotting’ situations and the barbs were not actually deployed, hence no-one actualy being shot.These statistics also do not take into account how many less people were hit with a baton (essentially a metal bar), and how many less people were CS’d because Taser was a much safer option in the circumstances. They also do not account for how many extra officers have been issued with a Taser, so even though you say there has been a 130% increase in the use of Taser, how do you know that there hasn’t been a 500% increase in the number of officers carrying a Taser? So there would be a disproportionate number of uses compared to the amount of officers.

 

You quite rightly quote ACPO’s guidelines for when a Taser should deployed, ‘when officers would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they need to use force to protect the public, themselves or the subject’, now form what I’ve seen of your opinion you seem to think that this scenario is very rare indeed. I can actually tell you that I find myself in that position at least a few times a week, multiply that by the thousands of police officers and it is very common place. I can say with confidence that the only reason we do not use a taser in many of these situations at the moment is because we don’t have one, we just have to make do with the inadequte baton, or dangerous CS spray (see my blog again for why it is dangerous).

 

You go on to talk about torture and how ‘he intentionally inflicts severe pain or suffering on another in the performance or purported performance of his official duties’, now I agree that could apply to a taser, but what do you think happens when I hit someone with my baton, I am intentionally trying to inflict pain to them, and when you CS someone it is intentionally causing them suffering, so this argument is completely pointless because our current uses of forces fall into this category and a taser is no different.

 

There should never EVER be a definitive list of circumstances in which taser can be deployed. It should be exactly the same as all other uses of forces and it is down to an individual officer to justify his/her actions. It is not for someone else to say what situations it can be used in, as there is no definitive list of situations that an officer could find themselves in, anything can happen at a call! I see you start talking about Human Rights, I’m surprised though because you forget to mention some other articles that might apply, a persons right to life, would you not agree that officers who have fight with a knife wielding man deserve some level of protection? I would be quite confident in saying that if an officer was stabbed and died, the family would have a very good case under This article that should they have been equipped with a taser they would not have died.

 

Moving on to ‘fatal consequences’ in both the examples you gave over people sadly being killed after being exposed to taser, they were exposed to extended shocks i.e more than 30 seconds, and the main fact is that this was in the USA. In our country, the training and style of policing is dramatically different, so it is very naïve of you to compare our use of taser with that of our american counterparts. As far as I’m aware, in the 8 years that taser has been used in this country there is not one single report of someone dying as a direct result of a taser, there maybe secondary injuries, i.e. falling over and banging their head, but no-one has died as a result of the electric current, do you agree?.

 

I would argue that it is not worrying that the home office have labelled it a ‘tool that protects the public’, you’re very quick to run to the statistics about how it’s use has increased, but you don’t talk about how many lives that the increase may have saved. Yes there maybe a 130% increase in it’s use, but it may have saved 130% more lives, and it’s still important to note that of that 130% increase, we have not been made aware of anyone dying! Can you share the evidence that shows that ‘in the past year tasers have been used on the eldery and on children’? You cannot judge tasers use in these situations because you do not know the indivdual circumstances in which it is used. You also fail to mention that just like any use of force that the police use, it has to be justified under law, either common law, section 3 criminal law act, or section 117 PACE, just because an officer is given a taser it does not mean that they are allowed to randomly taser people. I would also suggest that in the current climate where people like yourself exist, i.e. people who specialise in sueing the police, officers are a lot more careful and hesitant with using force for the fear of being sued and potentially losing their job and in the worst cases going to prison.

 

I’ve also heard you mention training, lets not forget that officers still have to meet the required standard as set out by ACPO, and if an officer fails to meet the required standard then they are not given a taser. Also, it does not matter whether you are on TSG or on a response team or a safer neighbourhood officer, if you attend the ACPO training and you successfully complete the course, you then become highly trained and proficient in it’s use!

 

I really hope that you do not find yourself in a situation where you are being held at knife point or someone is threatening to use a syringe of their own infected blood against you, and when the officers arrive to protect you and attempt to save your life they can’t act quickly enough because they have 20 minutes for a ‘specially trained unit’ to arrive with a taser.

 

I’d just like to finish with a question, I wonder how you would deal with this situation without a taser… Police receive a call from an ambulance crew that they are at the scene of a suicidal male who has already slashed his own wrists, is very drunk and he is now refusing to go to hospital, all the while still saying that he wants to kill himself. Police arrive at the address and the male is sitting on his sofa saying he wants to end his life, his address is a third floor flat and his sofa is right next to the door that leads out onto the balcony, and cannot be locked because you don’t know where the key is. Physically he is about 6 feet 4inches, and very well built, he’s about twice the size of the two officers there (meaning a physical fight is out of the question), you spend about 45 minutes talking to him trying to convince him that he doesn’t want to hurt himself and going to hospital is the best possible option. He starts to become more agitated and aggressive and communication is just breaking down, now remember you have to consider that he is inside his own flat, we’ve never been there before so we don’t know where he keeps his knives and where he keeps his razor blades, but he does! All of a sudden he loses it, he starts looking at the 3rd floor balcony and then at the kitchen (which is full of knives). What would your thought process be?

 

I’ll help you out a little, as I said we can’t physically fight him because he would certainly over power us, CS isn’t an option because we know from previous experience that it incapacatates us both instantly and we don’t know if it would even affect him (plus the ambulance crew are in the small room). That leaves the only option to be our batons, but he’s still drunk (numbing his senses), and very big so a baton might not have any effect at all. So what do you do now? I know that if I had a taser it would be a tactical option to consider, to prevent him from taking his own life and assaulting us in the process, but now I have to call another unit who is taser trained and this could take 20 minutes, by this time he probably would have jumped off the balcony having managed to overpower us officers.

This is a real life situation (although we actually eventually managed to calm him down and he voluntarily walked to the ambulance, but it could have just easily gone the other way.) I agree this might not be the perfect example and there are issues surrounding using a taser on mental health patients, but if it prevents him from jumping from the 3rd floor and trying to kill himself it’s certainly worth considering!

 

I’d appreciate it of you could reply to this comment with your thoughts.

 

Paperwork in the police

Paperwork is a real issue for many of us, on the police shows like ‘Road Wars’ you don’t see all the paperwork that the officers have to complete, they only ever show the car pursuit followed by the foot chase, and then the suspect being nicked, chances are they will then have about 2-3 hours worth of work after that, which I bet a lot of it is needless. The government have been saying for a while that they are cutting police paperwork, I’ve not seen a single shred of evidence to back that up, infact I’d say we have to do more now than ever before for the simple fact of CYA. CYA means ‘Cover your Arse’, due to the blame culture we live in, everything we do now we have to cover our arse to make sure that in the future it can’t come back to bite us, which is fair enough, I understand we all have to be accountable but I’d like the home sec to show me where they have cut down our paperwork.

I’ll give you one example where the cuts have led to hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours where police officers could be on the streets but they’re not….

Where I work it is force policy that officers have to handwrite our statements, (not statements from the public, just our own ones). A few people have spent months typing statements instead of handwriting them, and they have never had any come back in court as to why they didn’t handwrite them, but nevertheless, we were told this week that if we don’t handwrite them it will be a disciplinary matter. I’ve never understood the reason for this.

Due to the fact that the typing unit are short staffed and overworked, we then have to type and print our statement straight away to put in the case file, I can only imagine that this is because people can’t read our handwriting. I’m not a fast writer and I write a lot in my notes, so an arrest book can easily take me over an hour to handwrite, I then have to type it straight up which could take a further 30 minutes, meanwhile if I had typed my statement in the first place it would have taken me less than 30 minutes because I can type a hec of a lot faster than I can write. In this digital age I’m sure there is software than can digitally time stamp the statement on the computer so it can’t be altered after, so why can’t we use that? This would save well over an hours worth of work, and scale that up to how many officers do it, and how many more hours officers would be able to be out on the streets, surely it’s common sense to implement a process to allow it? I’ve been to court a fair few times, and I’ve never been shown my original hand written notes, they’ve always given me the typed version of my statement, so where is the original? This whole issue really annoys every officer, and is a huge waste of police time, simple things like this will help morale and boost our confidence in ‘the job’, which will make us a lot more productive and as the government want, you will end up getting more for less!

I’ve also been reading that soon all our hand over files will be electronic and we will not have any paperwork files for the CPS (this might mean paperwork will stop getting lost), so what’s going to happen to all our handwritten notes then? Maybe someone reading this can enlighten me as to if there is a genuine reason why we have to handwrite statements that I am unaware about?

 

 

UPDATE:

Sorry I forgot to add, it’s important that an arresting makes ‘notes at scene’ which the officer should make at the time of arrest which he can refer to when making the full statement later on when back at the station. In my force we use a small book called an EAB (evidence and actions book) which is what we hand write our statement in, and it has many sections to it including one for ‘notes at scene’, in addition to the above, I don’t know why we can’t just use our pocket note books to record the notes at scene, as this is always carried with us and taken to court with us, it would also prevent the CPS from losing the EAB’s which has happened on occasion. This is would also save untold amounts of paper, an EAB is about 40 pages long, 8 of which are for the actual witness statement, so in most cases when filling one out, there is about 25-30 pages that aren’t used, so it’s just wasting paper and ink!