Crime Of The Century - A Chilling Look At Crime Statistics In The UK
into a very difficult situation because you are on that train. You have got to do something else then and that is when it starts getting ethically and morally wrong. I think we’ve hit that stage now with the politics behind it all. Certainly as far as I’m concerned we have got to the stage now where it’s getting a bit dangerous because we’re obsessed with it. Everybody is obsessed with it. It’s not just our rank. We have to pass it down as well and when you get to the stage where all the middle management teams are spending 50% of their entire working life on, (I’ll keep calling it housekeeping because I like housekeeping rather than what it really is), housekeeping the statistics, I find that incredible.
Examples of ‘housekeeping’ provided by other groups included the ‘tidying up’ of the crime queues of 24/7 response officers by picking out self-solver crimes they had not had time to investigate.
We were told to go out and ‘get them in because it’s close to the end of April and that’s when we’re going to be judged’. So suddenly now payment for overtime is not a problem. Everybody can work as much overtime as they want. Not that you could have kept it up. It meant doing very long hours for about four weeks; doing double shifts and things like that. It was just detecting the stuff that’s sat in the queues of the response teams that they hadn’t had time to do. It was common assaults, ABHs, stuff like that; straight forward easy detections.
At a time when their resources are so stretched, members of GO CID are frustrated when funds are released simply to enable the BCUs to achieve their targets on time. Others objected to the amount of time they had to spend on housekeeping activities when they had numerous enquiries to complete and case papers to prepare.
Detective inspectors who carry responsibility for both GO CID and BCU specialist units experience this frustration. As one detective inspector commented:
I was looking forward to getting promoted to Inspector because I thought I would be managing some half serious investigations but I soon realised I have become an accountant, everything else apart from investigating crime.
Detectives find it incredible that the scarce resources of other units are also diverted into activities aimed at improving the sanction detection rate. The 24/7 response lot are pulled out with work yet our Local Policing Unit head, who is held accountable for crimes and sanction detections on his area, has dedicated a uniformed officer to look through the crimes to see if any can be reclassified. Doing nothing else than that...looking for burglary dwellings that can be classed as damage. There are other people looking at robberies that can be classed as theft persons because the stats are good for thefts.
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