Due to the fact that there are now so few officers working across the four divisions that have been the basis of my force’s structure for the last two years, some new and very strict policy has been brought into play in the last three months.
I have given this ‘new world’ a while to bed in before bringing it under the spotlight as all these things need a while for the kinks to be worked out. Sadly this period of adjustment has had little effect on the effectiveness of the new procedures….and so the ranting begins!
The largest division in the force is, since the last time the borders were re-drawn, is now about 45 minutes across in the lower orders of the driving hierarchy and 25 minutes for those of us lucky enough not to have had our nice cars taken away and replaced by hateful base spec 1.4 diesel Astras.
Previous levels of driving expertise are immediately disregarded as soon as you pick up the keys to one of these cars, and as a result some of the most experienced drivers on the team can regularly have to deal with the frustration of massively reduced speeds and proportionately increased arrival times.
Prior to the intervention of the senior management there was a local agreement (informally created by the Response Team Sgts) which allowed officers from the geographically smaller divisions on either side to pick up jobs just outside their own area. This was a good thing as it sometimes meant a reduction of 35 minutes or more in the response times. However, since the cuts really started to bite and performance has become a bargaining chip for keeping that second response car or officer, local Inspectors have become more and more possessive of their troops and charitable contributions to common-sense policing have become far less common.
It has, in fact, become so inconvenient for one Chief Inspector to sacrifice his troops to ‘the greater good’ that it has been decreed that such grand gestures are no longer acceptable practice and virtual glass walls have subsequently been built on all the divisional boundaries to keep the dots on the right section of the map.
In these days of reduced resilience and dwindling public confidence I would have thought that getting an officer to the job as quickly as possible would be the primary concern, but sadly politics and corporate one-upmanship has taken its toll. Having been identified as under-performing according to the internal league tables, (which have nothing what so ever to do with those fictional performance targets) all uncredited activity has now been banned in order that the balance can be restored.
Ironically the same data used, in tandem with repeated bleating about lack of resources, to highlight the under-performance cited by that Chief Inspector as his reason for withdrawing cross divisional response was separately manipulated by two Superintendents from two separate divisions to brag about how their own division was the best in the Force that month. The power of statistical analysis never ceases to amaze me…
So, if you live on the wrong side of the A-road that separates these two worlds and you find that some miscreant has raided your house while you were at work, you will be disappointed to know that they will not be coming from the station two miles away. They will, instead, be making a 34 mile drive in evening rush hour traffic to take the same report.
By the time they get to you, complete the paperwork, confirm the crime with Control and issue you with your Crime Report Number the Scenes of Crime officer and your own home insurance company (who will want that reference number before they will acknowledge you exist) will have gone home for the night.
I can only apologize on behalf of the organisation for this mindless piece of bureaucracy.
You can, if you so wish, take some solace in the knowledge that while you pace around your house amongst the post burglary debris for an hour or so, a few miles from your home is another Police officer who is, due to the fact that he is on a different radio channel, completely unaware of your suffering.
This Police officer could probably have taken your burglary report by the time a colleague from the next division arrives, but instead they spend their afternoon waiting to pounce on groups of 13 and 14-year-old children sitting quietly in a park in an attempt to bolster the ASB enforcement figures and make his bosses bosses boss a happy Chief Inspector.
Luckily for her she doesn’t live in the area that is worst affected by her policy. Sadly, however, I do.
