Interview
they’re always working on someone else’s patch. Not only do they have to know all the law that a Home Office or Scottish Office officer would know, they need to know all the transport regulations that apply to policing and they must have a broader view of what they see in front of them, because the transport system, wherever possible, must keep running, not just as a commercial imperative but one that affects people’s lives across the country.’
An evidence-based approach
That pressure to avoid delay must be enormous, and Trotter obviously agrees. ‘One of the things I’ve really pushed is looking at how what we do impacts the railway. For example fatality management: we have a lot of fatalities and one or two incidents jarred me in the way we handled them. I felt we could have done better and that perhaps we even added delay in our slavish adherence to our own standard operating procedures, which as usual, had been put in to deal with a previous problem. So we did a root and branch dismantling of the way we deal with these matters.
‘If someone’s dead that has to be dealt with properly with
dignity, sensitivity and in making sure there’s a professional investigation. We try to do those things as swiftly as we can so that our decision making doesn’t add delay. But in making our minds up about whether a situation is suspicious or not, we look at the evidence available and then empower our officers at quite a low level in the organisation to say, ‘I think this was an accident, let’s make a decision and go’, which is the reverse of what you might find in motorway policing where they tend to
start at ‘this is a crime scene and we’ll work our way down’. Dismantling all of those processes and procedures and putting them back together again has brought a considerable reduction in delay minutes – last year it stood at 23 per cent. ‘We’ve made a 93,000 minute difference,’ said Trotter, ‘still doing exactly what we ought to do and not cutting corners, but swifter.’ Trotter is certain that this evidence-based approach is the best type of policing for a finely balanced transport system: ‘Our Home Office and Scottish Office colleagues whom we work with very closely don’t have that mind-set, and if they get to an incident before us as they might in rural areas, we do value their help but we try to take it off them very quickly so we can apply our principles, because if they deal with it it’s blue tape everywhere and everything stops. We also take this very different view and approach with bomb threats, suspect packages and so on. We’re not risk averse but we’re not reckless either, and if someone says ‘There’s a suitcase over there’, it’s still a suitcase until we determine that it’s suspicious, or the railway staff do. Whereas somebody else might immediately assume it’s a suspect package, which brings with it a whole train of events – the 400 metre cordons, the standoffs. We look at the evidence and then decide how to react.’
Pick a pocket or two
Crime on our transport system has come down for the eighth consecutive year, but Trotter is not a man to rest on his laurels, ‘I’ll never be too triumphalist about that because there are still around 100,000 crimes a year.’ But has it changed in nature? Nobody in the industry, and beyond probably, can fail to know
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