POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG

This is the annual refresher training for response police officers at F Division, Ruralshire Constabulary:

Officer Safety Training (Self Defence, Restraint, Conflict Resolution) – 1 day.

Emergency First Aid – 0 days.

Emergency/ Duty Driving training – 0 days.

Mass Casualty/ Major Incident training – 0 days.

New legislation/ law training – 0 days.

Contrast this with the following, also for response police officers here in Ruraltown:

Diversity Training (organised on the Division) – 1 day.

Diversity Training (organised by the force) – 4 days, 1 e learning package and 1 ‘workshop’.

Health & Safety in the workplace (in the office more like) – 2 days, 1 workbook, 1 e learning package.

Crime Performance training – numerous ‘input’ sessions, daily ‘briefing slides’ and weekly begging emails.

Having listened to the harrowing accounts from the 7/7 inquest, bearing in mind the fact that officers from this Division are assaulted on a weekly basis, considering that most of the people we arrest are drunk and don’t want to be arrested and thinking of the death or serious injury that can occur if a police vehicle crashed at high speed; why on earth do we keep training for things which rarely if ever happen (I can’t think of a single complaint by a member of a minority group against any of my officers ever) and blatantly ignore the basic policing skills we need?

The answer is simple. No prospective senior officer ever lost a promotion over a Constable being battered on the street. Police traffic accidents can blamed on the driver (even if they were desperately trying to meet the allegedly scrapped ‘policing pledge’ response times).

As for major disasters; an officer using the term ‘manhole cover’ is their definition of a major disaster these days. That, and a failure to meet the targets which the Government ‘scrapped’ 4 months ago.

Some people complain that police stations are closed after ‘office hours’ and even when they are open, there are no staff to see callers at the front office. Also, people complain that no one answers the phones at local police stations.

A good few years ago, Front Counter duty was a regular feature for probationer constables. Recently my team had to cover the front counter at one of our rural police stations for a week. We saw a total of three people in five days, two of whom were criminals ‘signing on’ as part of their bail conditions and one of whom was a Polish truck driver, lost in the lanes around the town.

National Response Times have forced everyone out of the nick into fast cars, so there is no one left to answer the phone. It’s best to call the county police call centre.

The force recently spent the equivalent of Rooney’s wages on a complete ‘make over’ of all the front offices in the Shire. This was part of some American corporate nonsense called ‘improving our outward facing presence’ and was part of the now-scrapped-but-not-scrapped Public Confidence agenda.

The staff still attend the desk all day seeing no one and the public still prefer to use the telephone and internet to contact us. Having said that, if you do have to sit around on your own all day it is nice to have brand new surroundings. I wish all police stations were open all the time, but there simply is not the demand. A&E would never stay open with only three casualties a week.

Policing minister Nick Herbert’s article in the Sunday Telegraph would be more helpful if his assertions were not based, yet again, on a terrible misunderstanding.

His insistence that targets have been abolished.

He writes ‘So we have scrapped national targets and the policing pledge’ and then ‘We are cutting out unnecessary forms’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the new government took the reigns we have been burdened with more red tape and targets. Chief Constables have simply renamed the national targets and adopted them locally. Herbert then writes about ‘a risk averse internal culture’ but fails to realise that this is caused by the very targets he claims we no longer have.

Risk Aversion is mainly caused by the ‘public confidence’ agenda; when ‘bad news’ stories damage confidence, they damage our ability to meet public confidence targets. ‘Media Strategy’ is now a major priority in the decision making process for any incident. Officers will now routinely build risk averse tactics in to their operational plans to avoid what we call ‘damaging public confidence’.

If Nick Herbert is going to insist that ‘it matters what people think’ of what the police do, then the police will do what they think the people believe matters, not what may be operationally necessary. Hence; risk aversion.

In the same newspaper this Sunday, Jan Berry is quoted as reporting that ‘Performance culture is huge and while the government has rightly removed a lot of the targets, at a local level targets are alive and well’. I hope they speak to each other.

Gadget Note: We still have a team on this Division alone, who spend their day auditing, monitoring and administering the policing pledge and public confidence targets Herbert thinks he has scrapped. If it is happening here in Ruralshire, it is happening everywhere.