You just cheat and lie to me all the time

The fall in crime in England and Wales ‘may be exaggerated’, says the BBC.

What? Crime figures being manipulated to meet targets set by the idiots in government?

Who knew?

PC David Copperfield in Wasting Police Time:

The country seems to be divided between those who think that things are getting worse, and those who think that things are getting better and that it’s all in our heads.

The latter includes most politicians, the liberal left, and ACPO. Many of these people earn quite impressive salaries and can afford to live in areas where crime is, for the time being, relatively low. This may explain their optimism.

The former includes: everyone else, many of whom live in areas where crime happens, and are people to whom crime happens.

The UK population has risen steadily over the last century or so, from 38 million in 1901 to around 60 million today (note, it hasn’t doubled).

In the same period, the total number of police officers employed by the State has risen from around 40,000 to close to 130,000 now (ie it has more than trebled).

What about crime? Well, the number of indictable offences known to the police in 1900 was 2.4 for every 1,000 of the population. In 1997, the figure was 89.1. I’d put my house on the fact that it’s gone up since then.

I suppose some cynics might interpret these figures as to show that the police are actually causing crime. I wouldn’t go that far. But I do wonder this: where are all these new police officers and what are they doing?

Inspector Gadget in Perverting the Course of Justice:

I don’t trust official crime figures… I know the Home Secretary says we have more police than ever, but how many of them are working Response? I know, too, that we have PCSOs now, and that they look a bit like police, but very few of them work beyond 9pm because it’s too dangerous (it’s not too dangerous for the public, note, but it is too dangerous for PCSOs, despite their stab vests and their radios). In the first few months of 24 hour licensing, we were given enormous amounts of centrally-funded extra money to put more bodies on the street – the overtime was great for the Sergeants and PCs. As a result, everywhere you turned there were police. Once that dried up, we were back to normal – and we really don’t have the numbers to do much more than control things to a just-about acceptable level.

So, what if we could do something to the figures, to make it look like things are better? If it’s not within our gift to stop the nations’ youth getting drunk and fighting, and it’s not, the only place left for us to go to, to get the reductions we need, is our bureaucrats.

If we arrest lots of people for relatively minor things, so we get lots of ‘detections’, we at least have some ammunition to use in our defence when people start squealing about NTE ['night time economy'] crime. Or if police statisticians start to look at definitions of crime, maybe we can shift things that would have been counted into areas that wouldn’t be?

For instance, someone is being aggressive and drunk in the street. We have two options. We can arrest him for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ or for one of the offences under the Public Order Act 1986 – sections 3, 4 and 5 of which are more commonly known as ‘Affray’, ‘Threatening Behaviour’ and ‘Disorderly Conduct’.

What’s the difference? The difference is that ‘drunk and disorderly’ is not a recordable crime. You are found in that state by a police officer, arrested and bound over to keep the peace at court the next day (or, more often, given a Penalty Notice for Disorder and sent on your way). It doesn’t show up on our figures. S5 POA is recordable, and does.

There is widespread anecdotal evidence of PCs being put under pressure to arrest for drunk and disorderly. Even if they arrest for S5 POA, it can later be changed to d&d – this is perfectly legitimate, no-one is doing anything technically wrong or illegal, but it does have the added benefit of making the NTE figures look a lot better than they actually are, doesn’t it?

PC Bloggs in Diary of an On-Call Girl:

(M)y mobile rings. It is the Scrutineer Herself.

‘Hello, PC Bloggs? About this racist incident?’

‘Yes?’

‘We can’t just reclassify it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, how do you know it wasn’t racist?’

‘The victim doesn’t think it was.’

‘Well, how does she know it wasn’t?’

She’s got me there. I mean, just because Mrs Patel doesn’t think it was racist doesn’t mean it wasn’t, I suppose. But I recover like lightning. ‘Um… well, how do you know it was?’

There’s a momentary silence, and it sounds like an irritated one. Then she replies. ‘I will change it to a criminal damage, but unless you can provide verifiable evidence that it was not racist, the classification will have to stand.’

Will is now watching me with his head on one side, looking thoroughly amused. That’s the problem with more experienced officers: they treat all this Crime Managing stuff as a joke and just go along with what the Scrutineer wants.

I swivel my chair to face away from him and refuse to succumb. ‘Verifiable evidence that it was not racist? Like what?’

‘Perhaps if we knew the motives of the offender?’ She says this as though she is talking to a small child, or an idiot.

‘Perhaps if we knew who the offender was,’ I say, ‘I could arrest him or her and find out. Do you know who the offender was?’

‘Now, now, PC Bloggs, I know it seems pernickety, but we have to abide by ethical crime recording rules.’

‘But if it’s racist, I have to do a report to the Hate Crime Unit. I can’t do that because the victim doesn’t think it’s racist. So the report will just say that it isn’t racist, in which case why am I sending it to them?’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s just the way it is.’

‘But…’ I am starting to doubt my sanity. ‘How did it become a racist incident in the first place? The victim doesn’t think it is, for goodness’ sake.’

‘If someone perceives it to be racist, then it is.’

‘It looks like the only person who perceives it to be racist is the Crime Centre.’

‘Well, that is ‘someone’.’

‘Look, this is just some kids chucking stuff at a door. It’s antisocial, it’s annoying and I’d love to arrest the little blighters if I knew who they were, but it isn’t racist.’

‘That’s your view.’

‘Fine… can we just file it then?’

‘Not without the report to the Hate Crime Unit. It won’t get through Crime Compliance.’

‘Fine, I’ll do the report.’ The call ends.

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Bloggsy in the Telegraph

Following the Manchester shootings, PC Bloggs wrote a comment piece for yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, entitled What life is like on the front line for policewomen.

(For those who haven’t read the book, a more detailed explanation can be found in Diary of an On Call Girl.)

It might read like a moan (‘Now I am a sergeant, with a team of mostly men under me. Our numbers are so depleted that I scarcely notice the gender of those turning up for work. My few female officers are as likely to work with each other as with a man, or by themselves. Extreme budget cuts have done more for gender equality than any amount of positive action.) but you’d be hard-pressed to find a less miserable person than Bloggsy.

The usual mix of sane and insane comments underneath.

One chap writes:

I do enjoy reading the comments below. Some are useful, most are not, pushing their own political square points into the round hole offered to them.
I have also been a police officer “on the front line” for over 15 years – the incident above is doubtless not the scariest thing that the author has encountered. It is however typical, and frequent. It is one that I recognise. However as a 16 stone male I am usually (but not always) able to fight them off physically – a 10 second brawl then translates into 6 hours of writing.
Equally telling, is the comment my colleague makes about being a sergeant and seeing not a team of men and women, but a team; numbers steadily declining (rapidly over the last few years regardless of who holds political office) necessitate single crewing, even at night, in the rural, or in the violent town centre I work in.
Our back up is not other officers, it is almost always doorstaff who are first to help on Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday – Thursday nights as well thanks to licensing laws.
The  commentator below who babbles on about not arresting someone high on drugs, please remove your head from its current location, you will sit more comfortably – alcohol is a very potent drug and people do extraordinary things when they are pissed – as to arresting them all, you have no idea, really no idea, we do not have enough officers or enough cells.
I could write for hours about the state of policing, and the state of the country, but I see no point and I have no voice beyond this page, we are not a political entity. Just be happy we are there, our job is crap, but at least we aren’t soldiers, they have the toughest jobs.

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Come Back On The Show And Tell Us About It

The terrible shooting of two bobbies in Manchester has led to the usual mixture of handwringing, lies, and radio phone-ins. The amazing thing is the ignorance exhibited by journalists about modern British policing. It’s not like it’s a secret.

On Radio 5 Live yesterday, Victoria Derbyshire appeared not to know either that the police often patrol alone, or that sentences for serious assaults on cops are woefully weak. There was also confusion from lots of people about bail (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act isn’t written in foreign) and over the question of whether the police put too many or too few resources into the hunt for the guy. Hard to win that one.

As for arming the police, I’ve spoken to many of them over the years since we published Wasting Police Time. It’s not scientific, but I’d say 95% of the front-line cops I’ve interviewed want to be armed. Life has changed since the mythical days of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ (who, let’s not forget, was actually shot dead while on duty). The argument that it makes officers unapproachable is hard to sustain: millions of Britons happily take their holidays in countries where the Old Bill are all tooled-up.

Anyway, from Wasting More Police Time:

Single-crewing is stupid. It only makes sense if you think the point of the police is this thing about ‘reassurance’, which is, the public see lots of police about so they feel better… The fact is, it’s a tacit admission that we have decided that a certain level of actual crime happening to some people is a price worth paying for this spurious reassurance of the rest. It’s an admission, actually, that we can’t do much about real crime, we can only massage your ‘feelings’ about it. I don’t personally buy the reassurance argument, anyway. Two years ago, if we went to a proper call needing four cops, we’d go in two cars. Now you’ll have four cops in four cars and everyone sees four pandas rock up and immediately assumes world war three is kicking off on their doorstep.

And:

It has been introduced by people who will never have to live the policy they force on the rest of us, and it doesn’t work for very obvious reasons, reasons you only wouldn’t see if you were a senior policeman or woman who doesn’t understand that things have changed on the streets in the 15 years since you last walked them, if you ever did…

And:

In my force, assaults on police increased dramatically after single patrolling was introduced. Scrotes who would have come relatively quietly when there were two of us now will chance their arm, on the basis that they might get away and if they don’t the courts will not add anything on to the ticket for assaulting a police officer as it’s supposed to be ‘part of our job’.

And:

I get assaulted, both verbally and physically. I’ve been spat at and bitten and then spent weeks waiting in fear to find out whether I’ve contracted hepatitis or HIV/Aids or whatever the person I was arresting told me they had – during which time I can’t live a normal life with my wife. I’ve never had any of these assailants prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because it’s part and parcel of the job, apparently, and not in the public interest to deal with these people.

And:

(F)ar from giving stronger sentences for assaults on police, the reverse often happens. As a uniformed Inspector, and before that, as a Sergeant, and a Fed rep, I’ve been involved in a large number of cases of assaults on my officers. The general pattern is one of the CPS refusing charge except in the most egregious cases. In the cases where they do charge, they will accept pleas to lesser offences – so the defendant says he won’t plead to GBH but he’ll plead to ABH, or he won’t plead to ABH but he will plead to common assault. Instead of saying, frankly, bollocks to that, we’ve got the evidence, let’s have a trial, they roll over to keep their own stats up. And then, the courts do next to nothing to offenders. I’ve had a young WPC bitten and scarred – no jail for that. I’ve had officers hit with iron bars, chains and bottles, and the offender is given anger management and a small fine. I’ve had an officer stabbed with a syringe where the offender claimed that he had AIDS, which turned out not to be true but was horrible for the officer. No jail for that. It makes me very angry.

And so on and so forth. We’ve published four books dealing with this sort of thing now – not far short of half a million words. Gadget has been blogging about it for years, as has Bloggs, and Copperfield before them both, and lots of others. Victoria Derbyshire even had Copperfield and Bloggs on her show!

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Er… Um… Well… Er… The thing is…

The crucial thing to establish, when publishing books by anonymous coppers (or anonymous anything), is their bona fides. Are they actually coppers?

Inspector Winter looked like he was; turns out he wasn’t. Before we move swiftly on, nothing to see here etc, this from behind The Times‘ paywall:

Inspector Winter was the darling of the police social media scene [er, not quite. Ed.]. At the height of last summer’s riots, he tweeted and blogged about his experiences on the front line — comforting people who had been burnt out of their businesses in Tottenham, arresting suspected rioters in dawn raids and drinking tea with bedraggled fellow officers in rescue centres. His fan base of more than 3,000 Twitter followers included police and the media, and he was even commissioned by The Daily Telegraph to write a first-person piece that described the “chaos” of policing the riots… The only problem was that Inspector Winter was not a policeman. He was a serial conman…

…

He spent the next two-and-a-half years on the run, effectively hiding in plain sight by visiting police stations, mixing with officers and pretending to be one of them. He fooled at least three lovers into believing that he was variously an officer in the Metropolitan Police, an officer in Essex Police, a captain in the Army and an officer in the Royal Military Police…

Ward’s claims ranged from the believable to the implausible. In Ware, Hertfordshire, he posed as Ethan Winchcombe, a major in the Royal Military Police. He told local residents he had a false leg after an incident in Afghanistan, had served in Northern Ireland and owned a series of restaurants and a garden centre. He drank at the town’s Royal Legion club and even participated in the Remembrance Day parade last year wearing an RMP uniform.

John Hawthorne, owner of the Albion pub where Ward was a regular, told The Times: “He said he had his leg shot off in Afghanistan, and that the bullet ricocheted up through his nose. We realised that wasn’t true when we saw him jogging along the street.”

Ho hum. The weird thing is, if The Daily Telegraph want pieces about riots by genuine coppers, we’ve got them coming out of our ears, and the Telegraph know that.

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UK Riots: I hate to say we told you so

Wasting Police Time opens with the pseudonymous PC David Copperfield reporting for duty in ‘Newtown’ and finding himself the only uniformed response officer on duty:

The other day I turned up on my own to the morning parade.

I don’t mean I had got the wrong room, or turned up late after everyone had gone.

I mean I was the only uniformed officer on duty that day, in a town of about 60,000 people.

Let me just spell that out again: the population of the town in which I work is about 60,000, and I was the ONLY UNIFORMED OFFICER ON DUTY AT THAT POINT.

True, there were other uniformed officers inside the police station; there were even a few officers on duty who were not wearing a uniform. But as for officers, in uniform, on duty and able to deploy to a call from a member of the public, there was only me.

The ‘thin blue line’ had become a very insignificant dot.

When PC Copperfield outed himself as PC Stuart Davidson and ‘Newtown’ as Burton on Trent, Staffordshire Police essentially said he was making this up, and that he had never paraded alone. The repulsive, reptilian then-Police Minister Tony ‘Second Home’ McNumpty went further and used parliamentary privilege to denounce Copperfield as a liar, his book being ‘more of a fiction than Dickens’. He later conceded, on the BBC’s Panorama special about Copperfield, that this was not the case and that the book was in fact an accurate portrayal of the woeful state of modern British policing.

We didn’t need the fatuous McNulty (who could himself call on armed police guards to protect him from the consequences of his government’s policies) to tell us this: we’d had literally hundreds of police officers ringing and emailing us to tell us that the book was spot on. There was also a recurring phrase in those conversations: ‘The wheels are going to come off.’

There are lots of cops, they said; the trouble is, most of them are sat on their backsides in police stations filling out forms and chasing government targets.

Of course, Copperfield, Gadget and Bloggs had also pointed this out, explaining what happens when a member of the already stretched thin blue line actually makes an arrest. In Perverting the Course of Justice, Gadget tells how – thanks to the mania for paperwork and box-ticking – arresting and dealing with ‘Mikey’ for smashing a window takes hours and hours and hours:

Here’s a list of the paperwork required from the patrol who were unlucky enough to arrive at the scene and arrest Mikey:

- A full, handwritten, pocket notebook entry detailing the incident, the grounds for his arrest and anything he said about the incident.

- A typed arrest statement containing exactly the same information, only in more detail.

- A typed form requesting the release of CCTV tapes. We don’t need the CCTV, but we still have to view it. If we don’t, Mikey’s lawyer will claim it contains evidence exonerating his client of the offence that four people and the CCTV operator saw him commit and to which he has confessed.

- A handwritten custody ’search and booking-in’ form.

- A property sheet, listing the contents of his pockets.

- A typed Persistent Offender form, containing the same information as the arrest statement but in a format which prevents ‘cut-and-paste’ (meaning everything has to be re-entered).

- A typed Young Offender form, containing the same information as above, but in yet another format.

- A typed or verbal ‘update’ for the computer log held by the Control Room, containing – guess what? – the same information as all of the above.

- A typed Crime Report, with the same information as in the notebook, arrest statement and Young Offender form, but with the details in different fields which, again, cannot be cut-and-pasted.

- At least two MG (Manual of Guidance) forms for the case file, summarising all of the above.

- Witness statements from at least two of the people who saw the whole thing occur.

- A PNC check of all his previous convictions.

- A witness statement from Beachtastic Breaks saying that Mikey didn’t have permission to smash their window.

- A print out with a map showing their address.

- An ‘intelligence report’ about the incident (the full details of which we can’t discuss here).

- A typed Domestic Violence form (because Nicci was mentioned by Mikey as a reason for his committing of the offence) with all of the same information again, and a complete risk assessment for her, even though she wasn’t there at the time. (This risk assessment will take hours and is likely to involve several appointments made with Nicci which will be broken by her when officers arrive at her home to find she’s gone out to the pub.)

- The paperwork for Mikey’s fingerprinting and DNA record. This will run into at least four pages.

- The Custody Record. This will be at least ten pages long (though admittedly this is completed by the custody team and not by the patrol).

- The brick will have been seized as evidence: there will be the forms and statements to be filled out for that.

- A typed ‘update’ on the ‘Night-time Economy Incident’ diary sheets.

- A three-page Community Impact Assessment briefing form for the Inspector (because Mikey is a ‘traveller’ and therefore his arrest has an ‘impact’ on the ‘community’). As the Inspector, this enables me then to fill out a longer version of the same thing, totalling six pages.

- A handwritten two-page form for the Licensing Officer discussing where Mikey might have purchased the alcohol he had drunk, again containing all the details of the offence.

There will also be a ‘control sample’ of the glass from the window for CSI, and associated paperwork, so that the defence can’t claim later that he did smash a window, just not that window

They then take it to the Sergeant, who looks at it and then fills out his paperwork, another huge tranche of forms and writing.

You may think that this is insane for such a simple job. You would be correct.

We collect all of this because we live in fear of Mikey getting to court and saying, ‘I didn’t do any of this. I just said I did because the police bullied me. Now prove it.’

It’s about worst-case scenario policing: every job we go to, we have to assume that it is going to go really bent at trial.

This isn’t a triple murder, it’s a smashed window. A smashed window, moreover, which Mikey has already admitted breaking.

Imagine what happens if it’s slightly more complicated than the incident described.

What if Mikey doesn’t admit the offence?

Or if there are two offenders, and each blames the other?

What if drugs or a weapon are found in his pockets when he’s searched – as they usually are? Mikey will be arrested for those offences, too.

We haven’t even talked about nicking him for resisting arrest, or assaulting the police, or about the lengthy booking-in process (we’ll get there in a minute).

If any or all of these factors come in to play, the whole process doubles or trebles in size and complexity.

If any of these forms contains a single mistake – even a genuinely unimportant error, like a digit wrong in a postcode, which could easily be corrected by the admin clerk who discovers it – it will be sent back to the arresting officers for correction.

We need paperwork. We need to know that the police are not fitting people up, or maltreating them in custody. We need to keep a close eye on domestic violence offenders. I don’t know a single police officer who believes otherwise. But do we really need all of this? Of these forms, half are duplicating information for the Crown Prosecution Service and the remainder are ‘data mining’ exercises to satisfy various national or local initiatives and ensure we’re hitting centrally-imposed targets.

As with reviews of our books about education (Frank Chalk just ‘hates kids’) and doctoring (Theodore Dalrymple just ‘hates his patients’), lots of people were quick to shoot the messengers as right wing apologists for ‘the man’ – ignoring the fact that the victims of crap schooling, unrestricted criminality and random violence are the poor, not the rich.

Well, now there are a lot of windows being smashed by ‘Mikey’ up and down the country, and the wheels really have come off. I’m sorry to say it, but we saw it coming.

++

Winston ‘Generation F‘ Smith may be on BBC 5 Live at 1pm today. They want to hear from him first hand what it’s like to work with the kind of people who are currently rioting. (Winston works with the Youth Offending team in Manchester.) Here’s a clue.

++

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Ending Police Bureaucracy

Theresa May says she’s going to end police bureaucracy. Aaarrrggghh! We’ll get no more books out of that, then!

Luckily, commenters at Gadget’s blog (now at six million hits) have their doubts:

Nick Herbert is a dangerous individual with a clear agenda and Teresa May is the same.

…

May: “Police need to move away from ‘cover your back’ culture.”

Stop stabbing us in them, then.

“Wants to further enhance officers’ discretion”.

Christ, how many times have we heard that? How many times are such soundbites crushed by constant SMT micromanaging?

…

“Any police officer who knows of unnecessary police bureaucracy should write to me personally” – May

Dear Home Secretary,

Thank you for the invitation to raise this issue with you. In a similar fashion I wrote to David Cameron some time ago on following his triumphant statement: “Police targets: smashed”. At the time I was very puzzled by this because as a serving ‘Frontline’ police officer I can attest to the fact that now, more than ever, targets and bureaucracy are a weightier burden upon thinly stretched police more than ever before. With this in mind I wrote to Mr Cameron and asked him for clarification. Had been misinformed by civil servants, was he simply ignorant as to the reality, or of greater concern, was he simply telling the public that which he thought they wanted to hear? Unfortunately I never did get to the bottom of this matter as Mr Cameron obviously did not think my comments worthy of a reply. In fact I did not even receive an acknowledgment.

Similarly, I have now written to my local MP on three separate occasions asking for him to state his position on a Royal Commission on Policing and whether he supports the cuts to policing. He has not replied nor has he even acknowledged my letters.

Mrs May I suspect that were I to write to you, my letter would also go unanswered. You do not need any officer to tell you that bureaucracy is endemic in our organisation and strangles the small number of officers available to answer calls from the public. If I arrest someone for a minor offence, perhaps you can explain to the public why it will take me on average, and seldom less than, 4 or 5 hours to process this prisoner before I can get back out onto the street? Would the public be surprised to learn that if at the beginning of my shift if I make an arrest, then I will, more often than not, be off the street for the rest of my shift? I believe most people would be shocked. I certainly was when as a young probationer I discovered how much time was wasted in completing pointless paperwork for minor matters.

I will however not waste my time in sending you this email, as it will not be read by you, simply deleted by one of your staff. Instead I will post it on Inspector Gadget’s blog where I am assured it will be read..

Home Secretary, I firmly believe that neither you, nor anyone else in your Government, hold any interest in reducing police bureaucracy. Your interest in the police starts and finishes with finance. Neither I nor any one of my colleagues on here believes you would lift so much as a finger to do reduce bureaucracy and your words are nothing more than yet another empty soundbites we’ve all heard before.

Sincerely,

another angry Rozzer

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