Where Are All The Police Officers?

Where Are All The Police? – An Analysis of Police Resources

truly independent overseer of management practices and force spending to establish if our interests are being best served.

In the private sector, when a company stops listening and actually hearing what their buying customer is telling them, the company flounders and often fails. The false safety net of the public purse within policing has created an environment of waste of human and financial resources. The culture must change if true reforms are to be attained. Providing the best service that represents value for money is essential if any changes are to withstand the test of time.

INSPECTOR GADGET

Inspector Gadget lives in Ruralshire, “a county in England, not too far from Metrocity” – an anonymity measure, obviously, because if this police inspector had his identity revealed, he'd be out of a job. His blog http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/ and book “Perverting The Course Of Justice” are where he lets off steam about the Home Office, bureaucracy and politically correct training courses. It’s provocative, challenging and controversial stuff, and as an informed and valuable insight into life on the policing front line in 2010, makes for essential reading.

Gadget is a real life Police Inspector, in charge of a real life team of response officers and is among the best qualified and most experienced officers, with a gift for directly addressing the flaws and inadequacies of policing in the UK. There is perhaps, no-one more suitable or qualified to comment on Senior Officers and how their mismanagement of the police service provides more obstructions than solutions to modern policing. Quoting from his regular and popular blog (4 million plus visitors) he comments:-

“There is an enormous gulf between police officers who deliver front line services, and those who make up the Senior Management Teams. I would characterise it like this. The SMT’s (Senior management Teams) are constantly changing the way they view police work, one day it’s about Crime Detection, another it’s all about Public Confidence. Sometimes it is paramount that we drive carefully within the highway code, the next it is crucial that we meet response times no matter what. Posters go up, like Orwellian screens, proclaiming that Neighbourhood Policing is the way ahead, then they come down, replaced by others urging compliance to some new trend or other.

Day after day, week after week they endlessly flit between competing priorities, dumping the previous ones shamelessly. Initiatives that once ruled are now no longer allowed to be spoken of. They even change their names, Senior Management Teams one day, Senior Leadership Teams the next. When I ask what has become of some new plan or other, people say “someone got promoted”.

This means, the plan achieved its aim for someone (they could endlessly talk about it at a promotion board) and now that person has succeeded, the plan can go”.

The service cannot continue like this, with Chief after Chief, manager after manager changing the goal posts almost daily, with the consequence that the front line staff are often forced to police like headless chickens. It is only the dogged application of street level experience from front line officers that prevents the crass arrogance, ignorance and stupidity of some Senior Officer decisions preventing common sense policing being delivered. Fortunately for the public, we have many common sense coppers on the frontline. The unfortunate thing, is that in delivering their back to basics – common sense tactics which achieve results, this also masks the all too frequent idiotic decisions of the top brass.

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