Bang on the money again Dom. I’ve been out of The Job 14 years now and I know that the police just simply chase targets that mean f*ck all to the general public. Until Society sorts itself out and decides what’s important it’s no good pointing the finger at the police and expecting a miraculous cure. My small south coast force was top heavy with senior officers vying for promotion. How so many achieved it is beyond me. Small pond, big fish etc. Telling it like it really was was considered promotion suicide. Better to go along with the smoke and mirrors than stand up and speak the truth.
You’re spot on. Exactly the same thing happened towards the end of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (GC) and has gotten even worse in the Police Service for Northern Ireland. We, the ones at the coal face, knew from the inception of PACE and ECHR that they’d gotten both wrong. To us it seemed that they’d forgotten the victims and the human rights of officers and ordinary members of the public over that of the offenders. It also added drastically to the amount of paperwork for officers. Make an arrest and you were regularly guaranteed to be sitting outside the custody suite (particularly in Belfast) for 2-3 hrs before you got anywhere near the custody Sergeant. We got accustomed to having to change the way we did things on the whim of senior officers who had to complete a ‘project’ to climb further up the ladder, even if the project was never going to work. It then drifted back to the way we had originally done things.
I know that the PSNI are around 1500 officers short of the ‘Patten agreement’ which was ratified by Blair and all local parties. The fact that officers now are expected to be relationship councillors, social workers and many other suits in the one cloth, which are a drain on officers dealing with what they joined the service to do, protect life and fight crime. Decades of Government underfunding of other services have brought this about.
The police service is creaking at the seams which is effecting officer morale, sickness and mental health. This has to change and in a drastic way, however with the current system of senior officers climbing over each other to get up the ladder and the fairytale world of the College of Policing I fear we’re on the Titanic (built in Belfast), playing ‘Abide with me’
Every senior cop and politician has lied to the public. The truth is that policing cannot do all this plod on the beat nonsense. It can't. It's a myth. It's a lie It's a mirage. Plod can barely cope with 999 calls never mind all the rest. Tell people the truth. Oh no I won't get rejected! Maybe you shouldn't. I won't get promoted. Maybe you shouldn't.
Unerringly accurate as always Dom - I always look forward to reading your Substack as it reflects my own thoughts and the thoughts of my former colleagues. 3 years retired and you couldn’t pay me enough to go back xx
Everything you've written here, and elsewhere in your Substack (and including the comments I've read, so far, here) could be said by every big-city American cop, too. Although, me thinks you guys in the U.K. have it way worse. Keep up the excellent writing!
You hit the nail on the head yet again Dom. I completely agree with the comment that PACE and ECHR seems to only protect the criminals and ignores the general public (victims) and police officers rights - do they have any rights? Apparently not.
Other main issues in my view are - as discussed - senior officers whose sole purpose is self interest and promotion. Ask any operational officer to name their favourite senior officer and it will have been decades ago. The good ones have all retired and are shaking their heads in dismay like the rest of us. The latest bunch are shocking.
Secondly the arrival of mobile phones to the masses. Now every incident/RTA/whatever results in 200 or more 999 calls whereas before it was maybe 3 or 4 (this created Metcall or whatever it is called now) and also because everyone thinks they can earn a fortune sending videos to Sky/Youtube etc. We have seen the videos of PC's getting a good shoeing when in reality if the public had waded in and helped it wouldn't have happened.
Perhaps the shower of shit - sorry bloody Government - should work on a law protecting officers from being recorded... and how about making it obligatory to assist if required.
Another bugbear will be the issues with social media. Even when I retired we were flooded with death threats on Facebook between teenagers. Q. Why don't you just unfriend them/block them? A. I don't want to do that, how would I know what they are doing. <<Sigh>>
I had not considered CT (probably because I was involved with it) as being one of the nails in the coffin for SNTs, but now I think about it, it was CT Aid tastic in those heady days post 7/7. That and the usual abstractions for football matches and Notting Hill, meant the SNTs never stood a chance. Also when I got out of the dream factory, NOBODY wanted to be on an SNT, it was all about Response (unless you were a weirdo like me that just wanted to join SB)
When I moved from CT to DPS it was one of the main complaints I'd hear from BOCU based officers at C/I and Supt level, as you said due to aid commitments etc.
The trouble is that everyone - public, politicians, police and media are harking back to an idealised past that never existed. Anyone - anyone who tells you there is a 'simple, common sense solution' to any problem in policing should, in my opinion, be given a stern ignoring. The fact is that at the moment policing is having to deal with a witches brew of problems that are, in the main, outside of the ability of the police and indeed any other agency to solve, yet mental health, social problems etc all somehow end up in the remit of the poor response officer. Look up 'wicked problem' and you will see what I mean. The best you can hope to achieve is the 'least worst' outcome. I would cheer any senior officer/politician/community leader who would say 'there are no quick answers, the best we can do is to try to reduce the problem, we won't solve it'.
My view is that nothing can be achieved without an uplift in numbers so that properly staffed neighbourhood policing teams can make headway but we need to remember that other agencies that have been cut need to take their share of work and fill the 5-9 gap. I'm not holding my breath but as long as police are held accountable for other agencies failings nothing will change. I read the article about 'My local bobby', all well and good but how would they cope with being given three hospital guards, a scene watch and a sudden abstraction for aid? As the private sector they can say 'no, we're not doing that'. Try that as the late turn duty officer and it goes bent and look who's got your back then. I confidently predict that 2025 will bring a major failure of capacity and capability in a UK police force.
If 'community policing' was the 'bedrock' of policing - a phrase often used by NPCC spokesmen after 2010 -why did it simply wither away? We now renewed statements of intent and just may be some actual police officers funded. Sorry I don't believe it.
Instead we have a difficult to understand community law enforcement in some cities (not London) with council wardens (using PSPO powers), travel security officers (with more powers), PCSOs and a few police officers.
If reform was to happen I would simply allow borough councils to have their own police. Yes, this might be difficult in London and the bigger urban councils e.g. Birmingham. Borough Police would have limited jurisdiction, so no 'mutual aid' or planned public order involvement. There is plenty of law enforcement needed locally. If it a cyber crime, simply report it elsewhere, though we can take some details and send it on.
Bang on the money again Dom. I’ve been out of The Job 14 years now and I know that the police just simply chase targets that mean f*ck all to the general public. Until Society sorts itself out and decides what’s important it’s no good pointing the finger at the police and expecting a miraculous cure. My small south coast force was top heavy with senior officers vying for promotion. How so many achieved it is beyond me. Small pond, big fish etc. Telling it like it really was was considered promotion suicide. Better to go along with the smoke and mirrors than stand up and speak the truth.
You’re spot on. Exactly the same thing happened towards the end of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (GC) and has gotten even worse in the Police Service for Northern Ireland. We, the ones at the coal face, knew from the inception of PACE and ECHR that they’d gotten both wrong. To us it seemed that they’d forgotten the victims and the human rights of officers and ordinary members of the public over that of the offenders. It also added drastically to the amount of paperwork for officers. Make an arrest and you were regularly guaranteed to be sitting outside the custody suite (particularly in Belfast) for 2-3 hrs before you got anywhere near the custody Sergeant. We got accustomed to having to change the way we did things on the whim of senior officers who had to complete a ‘project’ to climb further up the ladder, even if the project was never going to work. It then drifted back to the way we had originally done things.
I know that the PSNI are around 1500 officers short of the ‘Patten agreement’ which was ratified by Blair and all local parties. The fact that officers now are expected to be relationship councillors, social workers and many other suits in the one cloth, which are a drain on officers dealing with what they joined the service to do, protect life and fight crime. Decades of Government underfunding of other services have brought this about.
The police service is creaking at the seams which is effecting officer morale, sickness and mental health. This has to change and in a drastic way, however with the current system of senior officers climbing over each other to get up the ladder and the fairytale world of the College of Policing I fear we’re on the Titanic (built in Belfast), playing ‘Abide with me’
Every senior cop and politician has lied to the public. The truth is that policing cannot do all this plod on the beat nonsense. It can't. It's a myth. It's a lie It's a mirage. Plod can barely cope with 999 calls never mind all the rest. Tell people the truth. Oh no I won't get rejected! Maybe you shouldn't. I won't get promoted. Maybe you shouldn't.
Unerringly accurate as always Dom - I always look forward to reading your Substack as it reflects my own thoughts and the thoughts of my former colleagues. 3 years retired and you couldn’t pay me enough to go back xx
Dom,
Everything you've written here, and elsewhere in your Substack (and including the comments I've read, so far, here) could be said by every big-city American cop, too. Although, me thinks you guys in the U.K. have it way worse. Keep up the excellent writing!
You hit the nail on the head yet again Dom. I completely agree with the comment that PACE and ECHR seems to only protect the criminals and ignores the general public (victims) and police officers rights - do they have any rights? Apparently not.
Other main issues in my view are - as discussed - senior officers whose sole purpose is self interest and promotion. Ask any operational officer to name their favourite senior officer and it will have been decades ago. The good ones have all retired and are shaking their heads in dismay like the rest of us. The latest bunch are shocking.
Secondly the arrival of mobile phones to the masses. Now every incident/RTA/whatever results in 200 or more 999 calls whereas before it was maybe 3 or 4 (this created Metcall or whatever it is called now) and also because everyone thinks they can earn a fortune sending videos to Sky/Youtube etc. We have seen the videos of PC's getting a good shoeing when in reality if the public had waded in and helped it wouldn't have happened.
Perhaps the shower of shit - sorry bloody Government - should work on a law protecting officers from being recorded... and how about making it obligatory to assist if required.
Another bugbear will be the issues with social media. Even when I retired we were flooded with death threats on Facebook between teenagers. Q. Why don't you just unfriend them/block them? A. I don't want to do that, how would I know what they are doing. <<Sigh>>
Retired for 13 years now and grateful for that.
Damn you!
Interesting stuff.
As if I haven't enough reading to do.
Merry Christmas from a new subscriber.
I had not considered CT (probably because I was involved with it) as being one of the nails in the coffin for SNTs, but now I think about it, it was CT Aid tastic in those heady days post 7/7. That and the usual abstractions for football matches and Notting Hill, meant the SNTs never stood a chance. Also when I got out of the dream factory, NOBODY wanted to be on an SNT, it was all about Response (unless you were a weirdo like me that just wanted to join SB)
When I moved from CT to DPS it was one of the main complaints I'd hear from BOCU based officers at C/I and Supt level, as you said due to aid commitments etc.
The trouble is that everyone - public, politicians, police and media are harking back to an idealised past that never existed. Anyone - anyone who tells you there is a 'simple, common sense solution' to any problem in policing should, in my opinion, be given a stern ignoring. The fact is that at the moment policing is having to deal with a witches brew of problems that are, in the main, outside of the ability of the police and indeed any other agency to solve, yet mental health, social problems etc all somehow end up in the remit of the poor response officer. Look up 'wicked problem' and you will see what I mean. The best you can hope to achieve is the 'least worst' outcome. I would cheer any senior officer/politician/community leader who would say 'there are no quick answers, the best we can do is to try to reduce the problem, we won't solve it'.
My view is that nothing can be achieved without an uplift in numbers so that properly staffed neighbourhood policing teams can make headway but we need to remember that other agencies that have been cut need to take their share of work and fill the 5-9 gap. I'm not holding my breath but as long as police are held accountable for other agencies failings nothing will change. I read the article about 'My local bobby', all well and good but how would they cope with being given three hospital guards, a scene watch and a sudden abstraction for aid? As the private sector they can say 'no, we're not doing that'. Try that as the late turn duty officer and it goes bent and look who's got your back then. I confidently predict that 2025 will bring a major failure of capacity and capability in a UK police force.
If 'community policing' was the 'bedrock' of policing - a phrase often used by NPCC spokesmen after 2010 -why did it simply wither away? We now renewed statements of intent and just may be some actual police officers funded. Sorry I don't believe it.
Instead we have a difficult to understand community law enforcement in some cities (not London) with council wardens (using PSPO powers), travel security officers (with more powers), PCSOs and a few police officers.
If reform was to happen I would simply allow borough councils to have their own police. Yes, this might be difficult in London and the bigger urban councils e.g. Birmingham. Borough Police would have limited jurisdiction, so no 'mutual aid' or planned public order involvement. There is plenty of law enforcement needed locally. If it a cyber crime, simply report it elsewhere, though we can take some details and send it on.
... what he said ... with knobs on!