Too many police chiefs? - A review of police strength and costs in England & Wales 2010
INSPECTOR GADGET
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com
And the front line? We just simply get on with policing, trying our best to ignore all the confusion. I firmly believe that all new initiatives should be ignored on the basis that within months, they will be abandoned anyway. I remember being absolutely slated for not being able to quote chapter and verse on some nonsense (I think it was the Ruralshire Constabulary Vision) during a Chief Constables visit in the summer. At Christmas the same year I asked my Chief Inspector to repeat the Vision to me, and he couldn’t even remember that we had a vision back in the summer!
You think all of this doesn’t matter? It does. It matters because it saps morale, creates cynicism, breeds mistrust between ranks and perhaps most serious of all, immunises individual police officers against new ideas. I once had a Superintendent follow my team into the Gents and continue to ask questions about our “performance figures” while we literally wiped blood from our shirts, using the mirror and some paper towels dipped in water. The blood was from a scene where a man had shot his own head off with a 12 bore. He never stopped to ask. When he left, the hatred and contempt in everyone’s faces was Bountyesque.
My message to the new government is this; ignore all the vested interests and the claptrap. Give us some old school traditional police front line leadership and we will deliver where others have failed. Although you might not be able to count it in the same way”.
His best selling book “Perverting The Course Of Justice” contains many real life references to the chasm that have developed between the front line officer and the police chiefs.
“I’m a real police officer writing under a pseudonym about his job as a front line ‘Response’ officer. There are lots of other cops, some doing very worthwhile jobs, others sat in offices doing nothing in particular, but I’m writing about leading those who come out (eventually) when you call 999. The people Response police arrest are probably not much like you. We don’t really deal with normal, law-abiding folks, we deal with seriously violent thugs who attack others for no reason, who viciously beat and rob old ladies, who pimp out their own children, who think first, last and always of themselves at the expense of others. Unlike Copperfield, I’m an Inspector, two ranks above him. This means that I have a bit less of the day-to-day contact with members of the public than he had but more of a handle on the theory and practice of police Bureaucracy.
I work for a force I call ‘Ruralshire Constabulary’. Without being too specific, it covers a population well into seven figures, across an area of hundreds of square miles and a number of towns, some large, some small. I’m based in ‘F Division’ – a couple of hundred square miles, a population of around 300,000 people and six or seven decent-sized conurbations.
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