The Policeman's Blog

Here's a poster!!:

Lancashire Constabulary also have an internal message board for those with no interest in further career progression. Here's a selection of rather po-faced messages of lack of support. I've highlighted the best post, about half way down:

Policing Pledge versus Chocolate ????
Whoever designed the current "Policing Pledge" advert/campaign really should reconsider the whole thing. Trying to emulate a well known chocolate bar is not very sensible in this day and age of healthy eating... and to offer a month’s supply of chocolate as some kind of incentive to embrace the pledge is an insult to those people who:

Want to maintain a healthy eating approach
Diabetics
Any other person who has no interest in chocolate whatsoever.

If this was aimed at children I could see the adverts comparison aims... but we are not so why use this style?

I totally agree. It’s like pumping the smell of fish and chips through a dieter’s club. It’d be interesting to see if the sale of “Wispa” bars or chocolate in general has increased over the last week or so.

I fully agree with these comments. If you want to bribe people into reading the policing pledge then you should not be offering chocolate. This appears to be against all the health advice we are given. What are you going to offer next alcohol and cigarettes?

It would also concern me that you are close to breaching copyright.

Whoever thought this up should take more care for future campaigns and adopt a more professional approach.

Also what has the cost been to produce all these posters etc. not to mention the cost in staff time to put them up?

I saw two support staff that I didn't recognise, so I assume they were from HQ, putting up the 15+ (!!!) posters in my station.

Surely the Intranet was set up to be used for such purposes, to save money on posters and other "publicity" material which probably have a questionable relevance.

What worthwhile initiatives that would actually benefit the public of Lancashire could use the monies that have been wasted on this "awareness campaign"?

I agree with the previous post and wonder what reaction we will get from other partner agencies who visit our stations when they see what is basically a very "childish" campaign.

Subjects that are far more important like MOPI get no posters. Where's the logic in that?

Additionally has the Constabulary checked copyright issues because it would be tragic if they got sued by a leading confectionary manufacturer for breach of copyright?

But I love chocolate.....

I thought I should reply on behalf of the department who has thought up, produced and delivered this campaign across the force. There are a number of issues raised, and I would like to address them:

You are right to be 'concerned' about copyright - we certainly were and that is why we checked our legal position. Just so you are aware, there is no legal case for copyright in this case as the campaign is internally focused and we are not making any monetary gain from the 'adverts'. Even if this was 'external' we would have to be taking a market share from Cadbury and quite clearly as selling chocolate isn't our primary concern, then we wouldn't be. There may be an increase in chocolate purchases across the force though!

Secondly, this campaign was designed to get people talking and to raise the profile of the Policing Pledge across ALL staff. I am certainly pleased that we have succeeded.

We often get criticised for churning out the same old corporate stuff from HQ, so when we stray away from the norm to try and get some attention on an issue that is vitally important for the force, I am disappointed that some people can't support this approach.

I don't think the campaign is childish or unprofessional in any way - I am in my 30's and love chocolate (people who know me will totally understand that!) but I don't eat it every day as I do have an element of self control. It is a bit of fun to get people involved – you can take or leave the chocolate, but please do look at the Pledge.

The staff in our department are professional, specially trained graphic designers, marketers and communicators who take great pride in what they produce. They have been recognised outside the force for their work so I am quite comfortable that they have delivered an extremely professional campaign.

We felt it important to ask our own staff to come into division to put these posters up as we appreciate just how busy life is out there (I was out in division for 10 years until I came to HQ, so I like to think I haven't lost touch with reality completely).

Finally, the campaign has the support of the Chief Constable and the Police Authority and other organisations that have visited HQ in the last couple of days have actually asked to take samples back as good practice to their forces.

We are trying to support you, not work against you. Love it or loathe it, you are talking about it so we are quite happy with that.

Here, here!!

I thought it made a refreshing change, as the Constabulary is often thought of as stuffy with no sense of humour/fun (plus I love chocolate and still manage to lead a healthy lifestyle!!!)

I think that the campaign is highly creative and eye-catching. The posters look as if they have no bearing on police work, so staff seem drawn to them, which I guess is their intended purpose. Had it been the same old staid posters or leaflets, then they probably would have become as invisible as every other campaign literature has become. Love it or hate it, it seems to have even got the cynics talking about the 'Policing Pledge', so something must be working! As for the health benefits of chocolate, one can choose not to eat it, but I believe it does allow a release of endorphins. Conversely, you could always walk around your local supermarket getting into a fit of rhetoric about the masses of foodstuff as well as chocolate that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. Doner kebabs or fruit, surely it's all about the 'Policing Pledge'.

It might be an idea to do a survey in due course as to how many people actually digested the Policing Pledge, and how many just digested a bar of chocolate!!

************** BEST COMMENT ********************
This is not a bribe, it's a great way to promote a fantastic and important performance initiative. It's just the sort of fun thing I joined the job for. I'm very impressed with the pledge and having told my wife all about it, she too is very interested and pleased with the whole thing. I suspect she'll be attending our local PACT meeting shortly for the first time ever to hear from our Community Beat Manager just what it will mean to us at a local level. This campaign certainly works for me. Viva la pledge, viva la chocolate. Operationalising the pledge will be hard work, but no one ever said it couldn't be fun too. I hope the next campaign will imitate Kentucky Fried Chicken, that'll whet my appetite for what could have been a very dry and boring subject even further. The Home Office have clearly put their best brains behind this. They are to be congratulated on their intuitive and well-researched, and very driven approach.

“If this is a success then it must have reached its target audience” Sorry, I did not realise I'm a chocolate eating 9 y/o with an IQ less than my shoe size. What Government sponsored initiative will we be tackling next in this vein?

"…this campaign was designed to get people talking and to raise the profile of the Policing Pledge across ALL staff. I am certainly pleased that we have succeeded"

But has it? It has certainly got people talking about the Pledge, but the content?


"We often get criticised for churning out the same old corporate stuff from HQ, so when we stray away from the norm to try and get some attention on an issue that is vitally important for the force, I am disappointed that some people can't support this approach."

So hasn't the 'norm' passed the different messages on throughout the years?


"I don't think the campaign is childish or unprofessional in any way - I am in my 30's and love chocolate (people who know me will totally understand that!) but I don't eat it every day as I do have an element of self control. It is a bit of fun to get people involved – you can take or leave the chocolate, but please do look at the Pledge."

I feel it is. Everything about the design from the logo, phrases used, type of pictures is reminiscent of 'spoof' adverts you sometimes see in student 'rag mags' and the like.


“The staff in our department are professional, specially trained graphic designers, marketers and communicators who take great pride in what they produce. They have been recognised outside the force for their work“
Yes, it is very well presented and executed and congratulations to the designers, but is it relevant and necessary in an environment such as ours? Tesco, Sainsburys or Asda maybe, but in a police station? No.


“We felt it important to ask our own staff to come into division to put these posters up as we appreciate just how busy life is out there (I was out in division for 10 years until I came to HQ, so I like to think I haven't lost touch with reality completely).”

Maybe a survey of staff within Divisions should be taken about the campaign?


“Finally, the campaign has the support of the Chief Constable and the Police Authority and other organisations that have visited HQ in the last couple of days have actually asked to take samples back as good practice to their forces.”

It would be interesting to see the feedback from the operational officers within the respective forces if and when they are used.


“We are trying to support you, not work against you. Love it or loathe it, you are talking about it so we are quite happy with that.”

I'm sure the rest of the Constabulary realise that, while the Constabulary may be talking ABOUT the Pledge (or the Pledge advertising campaign) are they talking about the content?

I have read the Policing Pledge as per instruction but I did print it out for the sole purpose of answering the questions for the competition, however I would like to know the definition of a month's chocolate because by my consumption, that's a high value prize.

Surely the constabulary could spend tax payers’ money better than wasting it on silly signs and advertising. Are we not supposed to be encouraging a healthy work force not a group of roly polys?

The "Chocolate Bar" Pledge
I'm sick and tired of seeing these damn chocolate bars all over the police station. I'm desperately trying to lose a bit of weight and have a soft spot for the Wispa Bar. Subliminal promises of chocolate are just not fair!!!!

Personally I think it should have been a can of polish on the promotional material... with the tagline "policing pledge... 10 steps for a polished performance"... God I’m in the wrong job !

What I find abhorrent is the fact that the Constabulary spends money on designing/printing a huge number of unnecessary and expensive posters, yet they won't contribute a single penny to the health and welfare of retired police dogs when they need veterinary treatment.

I have already had my say on this subject but then things got worse on Thursday when Pop-Ups started appearing every time I clicked on Sherlock. I thought I had gone onto one of those websites (you know the ones) by mistake.

As a said last time this is an unprofessional campaign and you have just proved it. It may have people talking but not about the pledge.

I would have loved to have been in the meeting when this campaign was green lighted. Despite the generally negative reception this will be a "huge success" as everything in this organisation is...

Fair point, I have some friends who worked on the Cadbury's Wispa campaign they would be a tad upset to see this somewhat blatant rip off

Can’t agree more - I’m constantly in and out of Sherlock and I’m getting these 'pop-ups' all the time. They're getting in the way.

If this were my personal computer I’d be upgrading my software to block them!

PLEASE someone tell me how to stop them.

Pledge and pop ups
Sorry, but these new 'pop ups' are really beginning to grate - we get it!

Insult to intelligence choc bribe
I agree with all the comments so far and have emailed media and marketing about this annoying pop up as follows:-

Please remove this extremely annoying pop-up as it’s stopping me from doing my job! I find it an insult to my intelligence to constantly see this appear each time I open a window. It’s bad enough seeing it on the front page and having banners about it in our work place. We don’t need to be offered unhealthy confectionery as an incentive to work hard and give good service to the public.

Thanks for your comments about the 'pop up' - we have had a number of complaints about it and are making steps with ICT to stop them today. So, please bear with us, as soon as we can stop them we will!

Stephen Lawrence's murder was, like all murders, a tragedy; every right-thinking person wants to see his killers locked up for life (if not hanged).
But did it prove that the Met were institutionally racist?
The doctor, prison trick cyclist and writer Theodore Dalrymple (on the sidebar under Politics and Media) thinks not.
The good doctor has written a piece for the US magazine City Journal about the disaster of Macpherson.
Attacking what he sees as the 'intellectual confusion', 'moral cowardice' and 'feeble mental pirouettes' of the learned judge, he points out the obvious truth: that the report was essentially a modern-day witch hunt, and its literally nonsensical findings (of 'institutionalised racism', because not one single episode of actual racism could be identified), have caused infinitely more harm than good.
It's well worth reading in full, but here's an edited version:

This year, on the tenth anniversary of the report, the press and professional criminologists are celebrating it for... bringing about a “paradigm shift” in the sensitivities of British police about “diversity”—police now think about race all the time, it seems. The report’s real effect, however, was to demoralise further an already demoralised police force, which, immediately after the report appeared, retreated from stopping or searching people behaving suspiciously and watched street robberies increase 50 percent.
...The public gallery regularly overflowed with activists and extremists, who did not hesitate to jeer and mock the witnesses with whom they disagreed; the head of the inquiry, Sir William Macpherson, rarely admonished these spectators, thus creating an officially sanctioned atmosphere of intimidation... (The report itself said:) “We thank the officers from the Walworth Police Station, who in difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances have helped to keep order when emotions ran high.” An incipient riot is not a situation in which the truth is likely to emerge or to be uppermost in people’s minds.
...The report’s contention was that the mishandled Lawrence case illustrated the “institutional racism” of the (Met). Poor Sir William tied himself in knots trying to explain the notion of institutional racism... admitt(ing) he could point to no actual instance of racist behaviour by the officers involved in the case, though evidence of incompetence and delay was abundant.
Macpherson (said): 'Failure to adjust policies and methods to meet the needs of policing a multi-racial society can occur simply because police officers may mistakenly believe that it is legitimate to be ‘colour-blind’ in both individual and team response to the management and investigation of racist crimes.'
On the very next page, however, he quoted approvingly the assertion of an association of black police officers: “Institutional racism leads officers to act, albeit unconsciously, and for the most part unintentionally, and treat others differently because of their ethnicity or culture.”
In other words, if you treat people the same, you are racist; but if you treat them differently, you are racist.
The evidence of institutional racism that Macpherson uncovered would be laughable, had the liberal press not taken it so seriously. For example, when the police arrived at the murder scene, Brooks snarled: “Who called you fucking cunts anyway, pigs, I only called an ambulance.”
That the police did not feel entirely reassured that Brooks was a respectable, upright citizen, and ignored the fact that he was also a victim of the attack, became for Macpherson a sign of their racist stereotyping, not a natural response to such vile abuse, which is not a normal way for the law-abiding to address the supposed guardians of the law—or, indeed, anyone else.
...Sir William (criticised) some of the detectives (who) refused to accept that the Lawrence murder was “wholly racist,” though none denied at least a racist element.
Of course, since no one had actually been convicted of the murder, the murderer’s motive could not be known for certain. And even if the suspects—a violent group, certainly—were indeed the culprits, was racism the sole, or even primary, cause of their violence? One suspect—David Norris, the drug trafficker’s son—was almost certainly guilty of that earlier stabbing in which his father became illegally involved, as the report observed. But there the victim was white. Norris and two other suspects in the Lawrence murder had also been suspects in another assault, this one on two brothers, both white. In both instances, Norris got off because of incompetent prosecutions.
Macpherson did not draw the obvious inference, and if he did, the liberal intelligentsia would not have applauded.
Let us assume that Norris was indeed one of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers. If the prosecution of Norris’s earlier crimes had not been so incompetent, and if he had received an adequate sentence if found guilty (an unlikely outcome in contemporary Britain), then Lawrence would now be alive.
At one point, the inquiry listened to secretly recorded conversations among the Lawrence suspects. The conversations were racist in the crudest possible way, but they were not purely racist. Norris said, for example, “If I was going to kill myself, do you know what I’d do? I’d go and kill every black cunt, every Paki, every copper, every mug that I know.”
The police in London are not predominantly minorities; it is also unlikely that “every mug” that Norris knew was a minority. Norris’s propensity to racism was probably caused by his propensity to violence, rather than the other way around.
So on every possible ground, the police who dismissed the idea that the murder was “wholly racist” were right, at least factually.
Their error was political or even metaphysical—beyond the realm of mere empirical evidence. On Macpherson’s view, the police should act more as defenders of politically correct orthodoxy than as keepers of the peace and searchers after the truth.
...Further confirmation of Sir William’s moral cowardice was his uncritical acceptance of everything that Stephen Lawrence’s mother said. Now, Mrs. Lawrence had lost her son to murder, and the police had failed to solve the far from insoluble crime; she was understandably distraught and angry. But that did not make her the arbiter of truth; common sense, indeed, should have suggested the contrary. One might have hoped that a judge would have shown some judgment.
At the beginning of the report, Macpherson defended the unusually “adversarial” manner in which the inquiry was conducted. “Cross-examination of many officers was undoubtedly robust and searching,” he wrote.
A few pages later, without noticing any contradiction, he mentioned that when the counsel for the police was questioning Mrs. Lawrence, “The nature and content of the questions made Mrs. Lawrence protest that her perception was that she was being put on trial. Wisely (the lawyer) desisted.”
In short, only the accused could be questioned.
In her statement to the coroner’s court, [Mrs Lawrence] said (and later repeated the assertion to Nelson Mandela when he visited London): “In my opinion what had happened was the way of the judicial system making a clear statement to the black community that their lives are worth nothing and the justice system will support anyone, any white person who wishes to commit any crime or even murder against a black person, you will be protected, you will be supported by the British system.”
Even if we leave aside the question of why she bothered to participate in the system at all if it really was as she described it, she ought to have known that she was exaggerating. I quote from the report, which sought to show that Lawrence’s was not the only racist murder in the area:
In February 1991 a white man named Thornburrow murdered a young 15 year old black youth named Rolan Adams. . . . He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On 11 July 1992 an Asian boy called Rohit Duggal was stabbed to death by a white youth named Peter Thompson. . . . Thompson was found guilty of the murder in February 1993.
Mrs. Lawrence should have known about these sentences. If she did not, she was ignorant; if she did, she was lying. But all that Macpherson said of her incendiary charge was that it showed the depth of her feeling—not that it was inaccurate and misleading. Her victimhood had to be immaculate.
Mrs. Lawrence further said that she felt condescended to by the police and ascribed this condescension to their racism. Macpherson showed—surprisingly, for a judge—no recognition of the obvious difficulties in accepting such feeling as evidence of anything. He did not even demand that her feelings have some objective correlative: if she felt condescended to because of racism, she was condescended to because of racism
Among the report’s many pernicious recommendations was the following: “The definition of a racist incident should be any incident which is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person.”
Nothing could be better designed to destroy the possibility of easy—dare I say normal—relations among people of different races. For the notion that racism is so pervasive and institutionalised that it is everywhere, even where it appears not to be, induces in the susceptible a paranoid state of mind, which then finds racism in every possible situation, in every remark, in every suggestion, in every gesture and expression. It is a charge against which there is no defence.
Two incidents in my clinical experience illustrate this nonfalsifiability.
In the first, the lawyers for a black defendant asked me to appraise his fitness to plead. The defendant faced charges of assaulting another black man, out of the blue, with an iron bar. The man was obviously paranoid, his speech rambling and incoherent; his lawyers could obtain no sensible instructions from him. I argued that he was unfit to plead. Whereupon the man’s sister denounced me as a racist: I had reached my conclusions, she charged, only because her brother was black. Her 15-year-old daughter started to describe to me her frequent difficulties in understanding her uncle, only to be told to shut up by her mother. The lawyers had been unable to obtain instructions from the defendant only because they were white, the sister persisted. Give her brother black lawyers, and he would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, if I had said that he was fit to plead, she could have claimed with equal justice (which is none) that I came to that conclusion only because he was black.
The second case, far more serious, ended in a man’s death; the blame was partly mine.
A black man in his mid-twenties arrived at our hospital with severely cut wrists. He was nearly exsanguinated and needed a large blood transfusion; his tendons also needed an operation to repair. By all accounts, he had been a perfectly normal man, happily employed, a few weeks before, but suddenly he had stopped eating and become a recluse, barricading himself in his house until police and family broke in to reach him.
His suicide attempt was not one of those frivolous gestures with which our hospitals are all too familiar. If ever a man meant to kill himself, this man did.
His mother was by his bedside. I told her that her son should remain in the hospital for treatment (you’d hardly have to be a doctor to realise this). At first she was perfectly agreeable; but then a friend of the young man, himself young and black, arrived and instantly accused me of racism for my supposed desire to lock the patient up. I tried to reason with this friend, but he became agitated and aggressive, even menacing. Whether from conviction or because she, too, felt intimidated, the mother then sided with the friend and started to say that I was racist in wishing to detain her son.
I could have insisted on the powers granted to me by law—asking a court to have social services replace the mother as the patient’s nearest relative for the legal purpose of keeping him in treatment. But I did not fancy the process: the young friend had threatened to bring reinforcements, and a riot might have ensued in the hospital. Instead, I agreed to the demand that I let the patient go home. The two said that they would look after him, and I made them sign a paper (of no legal worth) acknowledging that I had warned them of the possible consequences.
This piece of paper they screwed up into a ball and threw away immediately outside the ward, where I found it later. I had made copies, and it was one of these that I sent to the coroner when, six weeks later, the young man gassed himself to death with car exhaust.
The notion of ubiquitous, institutionalised racism resulted in his death; and I resolved that it would never intimidate me again.

Sean O'Neill, crime editor at The Times, writes to ask us to stick his new(ish) crime blog, 'Crime Central', on the blogroll. It's good stuff. This recent tale about our old friend Anne Owers - and her suggestion that 'Travellers' should be given 'ethnic food' - should raise a chuckle/eyebrows/bloodpressure. What sort of food is 'ethnic' to do-as-you-likeys, anyway? Half-inched dogburgers? Wagon wheels? Porridge?

Meanwhile, Mr C writes from deepest, darkest Somewhereshire with a familiar tale of public sector madness. (If you want, send in your own stories of policing lunacy via the email link at the top right.)

Recently, our department has acquired a new boss at a Senior Management level. As a clue, he gets paid over £60,000 a year and is eligible for 'performance related bonuses'.
For those outside the Job, these bonuses seem to be paid to senior officers who by either bullying their workforce or by 'adjusting' figures can show that their management skills have improved the performance of their minions (PCs).
Our 'performance' figures are entered by ourselves on a daily/weekly/monthly/when-we-can basis, and are typed into a badly-constructed basic Excel spreadsheet which in itself takes ages.
Our bosses look at many areas of our work, such as intel reports submitted, stop searches carried out, arrests for crime/public order/traffic offences and drug offences.
Time deployed to incidents and to operations is recorded, and - being a specialist department - there are many other columns to fill in, too.
This is probably familiar to many (if not all) who read these blogs - despite promises to end the madness.
BUT - and this is where the £60,000-worth of management comes into being - each entry is worth One Point.
This means that a hard-worked investigation to arrest a suspect for an assault or burglary is worth the same as telling our intel unit that Joe Bloggs was wearing a t-shirt today.
All the points are added up and a bar graph is produced showing how many points each officer has gained.
Not all officers have the same specialist skills, and we are spread all over the Force area which has different crime trends and different levels of crime.
Annual leave or RD in lieu are not taken into account and the officer at the end of the month who has the smallest bar is subjected to an action plan (which apparently isn't an action plan at all).
Once more, inept management has caused another dip in morale, the spreadsheets are drifting further away from the truth as officers embellish figures to ensure they are not at the bottom - and I dare not go sick with stress as I may lose out on an SPP payment if I take too many days off work (currently averaging less than one day per year worked).
Please: More carrot and less stick!

Mr C

Have a look at the following additions to the sidebar:

The Thinking Policeman

The Duty Sergeant

Police One

Enjoy!

...why would a Labour Minister need to spend £25,000 of taxpayer's cash on private security?
Can't multi-millionaire's wife Barbara Follett just call for some officers to escort her home from the cashpoint like everyone else?

If you introduce thousands of new laws but don't build enough prison spaces and you fill those you do have with criminals imported from overseas while you're trying to keep the Gurkhas out, the logical next step is a police force on call to escort people home from cashpoints.