The Policeman's Blog

The footage of PC Mick Regan being attacked by a mob of drunken Scottish football thugs in Manchester City Centre raised the heartbeat a little.
TV viewers saw Mick fall to the ground, surrounded by a swarm of scumbags who started kicking him.
Fortunately, he managed to get to his feet and was saved from more serious injury by a British Army medic and another bloke who grabbed him and bundled him clear.
Mick tells the BBC, "If they had not come along at that point I'd have been in big trouble. I'd have been seriously injured. I knew I was going to get done over. I feel lucky; whoever that Army lad was, he wants a medal."
It wasn't Keith Blakelock territory, thank God, but you do wonder what might have happened if one or two of those who surrounded him had been carrying knives.
It will have come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the whole thing kicked off after a telly went kaput. Of course it did. If you interfere with a drunken British moron's goggle box, even a giant one which you've provided for him free of charge, you only have yourself to blame.
Not to worry, though. Those responsible for the attack on Mick and all the other assaults on police, criminal damage and general mayhem will be hunted down and dealt with ruthlessly.
Just ask James Davis.
In a video filmed by his mates and helpfully posted on myspace, Davis is seen headbutting Sgt Ken McNish in the face, breaking his nose. As Sgt McNish makes the arrest, Davis is heard complaining that the officer's blood is dripping on him. "Let me go," he says. "Get that blood out of my face now you silly c*nt."
The papers went big on this at the time and this istotalessex.co.uk said Judge Timothy Lamb was planning to view the video before sentencing.
Who knows? Maybe His Honour watched the wrong vid? Anyway, we can only find one tiny reference to what actually happened to Davis. According to Courts News UK he was 'spared jail'. (It would be great if someone could email in and let us know what Davis actually got.)
Meanwhile, that tinkling noise? That's the sound of bits of the iceberg swirling round in the judges' G&Ts.

TCT

Here's a picture of me (Copperfield) clearing my driveway two weeks ago. I eventually got so fed up with freezing my extremities off, I went out and bought some decent cold weather gear. In the picture, I'm clearing the snow at a marginally faster rate than it was actually falling from the sky.

Thankfully, the snow has now all melted, the grass that was underneath for weeks and weeks has suddenly turned green and it's very pleasant. We went for a run the other week and I even got a bit sunburnt.

Work is progressing well, with only a few more weeks to go before the latest batch of recruits (including international applicants) get on the street. For now though, here are a few initial thoughts in no particular order:

More discretion

Less paperwork

Cheaper cars

Fewer powers of arrest and search

Better DIY stores

More firepower

Better kit

Almost no foot patrol

More stuff to do

More IT

More traditions

Better training

Cheaper food

Less law training

Lacklustre TV comedies

More physical training

Better pay

Virtually no suspect interviews

More guns

Cheaper petrol

Missing family and friends

Rubbish local radio

Challenging weather

Big rabbits (in my garden)

It's mid spring, the darling bluebell buds of May are in full bloom and the sunlight is streaming through the leafy fronds of Longspring Wood.
If you close your eyes for a moment, your senses are assailed by the traditional smells and sounds of rural west Kent: ganja, poppers and hardcore techno played at around 130db.
And - finally - here come the Old Bill. Well, it is 1pm.
Welcome to the Garden of England, 2008 stylee.
A group of selfish ravers have decided that Longspring Wood is a good place to set up some industrial-sized speakers and play headbangingly awful music, at high volume, throughout the night and long into the next day.

They have done this with some regularity; the fact that a thousand people in and around the nearby village of Shoreham can't sleep is kind of an irrelevance to them.
So the people of Shoreham complained to the police.
The police? They did nothing.
This week, Ch Insp Gill Ellis explained that the decision to let the illegal ravers ruin the lives of taxpaying residents was taken on 'health and safety grounds'.
According to yesterday's Daily Telegraph, she "said that it was not safe to disperse revellers in remote locations when it was dark - insisting safety regulations meant officers had to wait until sunrise to break up the bashes. And the force said it could also be dangerous to disperse ravers because they may get into their cars to drive home while still high on drink and drugs."
Ch Insp Ellis told a recent meeting of angry locals: "We will wait until daylight hours before making interventions."
But one district councillor pointed out a bash in March had been allowed to go on until 1pm the following afternoon.
Wonder how 'healthy and safety issues' went down with the law-abiding residents of Shoreham, vis a vis respect for the law and support for those sworn to uphold it?
And the rave organisers and their punters? They've just had confirmed what they already know: that authority in England has all-but collapsed and they can do pretty much as they like.

UPDATE: The original title of this post asked if anyone had a spare set of balls they could lend Kent Police. Obviously, we meant the high-ups at Kent Police, but on reflection maybe even that's a bit simplistic. So we've changed it.
Ch Supt Matthew Nix has written to the Telegraph today to suggest that the real problem was that his officers were too busy with other incidents. (Thanks to Jerym for sticking it up in the comments.) We can understand people defending the police, but this letter poses as many questions as it answers; at least one of them is, when are senior police officers going to start being absolutely frank about frontline police numbers with local people?
Health and Safety, manpower, call it what you like - the truth is getting out, that if you want to commit crime in England nowadays (ravers cannot live by Evian alone) you have more than a half decent chance of getting away with it even when the cops can see you at it.

Perhaps it's the nature of the beats (see what we did there?), but lots of the posts on this and other police blogs can get a bit depressing. Alex emailed in with some positive thoughts about his new sergeant. Send your own stuff in via the link at the top right.

Duty Response Sergeant has to be just about the most important and - when done right - stressful job in front line policing.
Your Sergeant is your 'Team Leader'. Your guide. Your mentor. At least, that's how it should be. I've had some godawful ones in the past.
We recently welcomed a new Sergeant to our section.
She had spent the last four years driving a desk and failed the board for Inspector because of her "lack of recent front line policing experience".
I presume that's why she's come to us. Looks like she's on the way up.
Personally, I don't care why they sent her over, I'm just glad they did. She's brilliant.
I'd like to think that, as a section of 5 PCs with around five years' service each, and one probationer added to the mix, we're not a particularly hard bunch to supervise. Most of us know what we're doing at least some of the time.
But she has made a really positive difference, all the same. She's a master batsman with the paperwork, she finds ways of getting us out of conducting endless enquiries on jobs that will never go anywhere, she is not a control freak and she doesn't call you up on the radio every 30 minutes to find out where you are.
She trusts our judgment. If I return from a job and say, "Sarge, this is LOB," she is happy for me to write it up accordingly.
She supports us from the BS rolling downhill, she fights our corner and most important of all... she actually puts her stabby on and gets out of the nick with us. Her arrest rate rivals that of most of the PCs on section.
If all of this sounds like she's just doing her job, she is - but many don't.
I remember one Sergeant we had a couple of years ago who spent all day, every day, in the office with the radio turned down low so that he couldn't hear anything that was going on. Even worse, when I had been sent one day single-crewed to a violent domestic, he called up and said, "Sorry comms, I don't have anyone to back that unit up," rather than getting his stabby on and coming out himself.
Unfortunately, the lazy and unprofessional do sometimes get promoted.
But what a difference a good Skipper makes.
The effect on team morale has been astonishing. She's breathed fresh life into our section - and I actually feel like a police officer again (instead of a crime report taker in a uniform).

Alex

After TOTO's piece about SPP, and the recent posts about police numbers and money spent on recruitment, PCSO Bloggs wrote in (click on the email address at the top right to contribute) to show us the view from that side of the parade room. It's not pretty. You can read more of PCSO Bloggs' posts here.

I read TOTO’s piece with interest.
I was rather taken back to read that it is getting so bad in some parts that police officers are contemplating becoming a PCSO and taking a pay cut, just so they can get back out on the beat.
It reminded me of the story of a retired Inspector, with years in Vice and Special Branch, now pounding the beat as a PCSO.
Is it really this bad?
We were brought about to not only bolster the high viz side of the police for public reassurance, but to also support our police officers by taking some of the lower level jobs off them, dealing with the long term, time-consuming tasks like neighbourhood disputes, meetings, crime prevention visits, police surgeries, CCTV collections, house-to-house enquiries and scene guard/preservatio – to get them back out on the beat.
But TOTO was quite right, police officers are in the office just as much now as they were before we came along, if not more so.
So how on earth are we fulfilling the part of our job that's meant to free them up if they spend more time indoors?
This seems to be down to a larger remit, more forms, more repetitiveness and longwinded procedures.
I dread to think how things would be now, with no PCSOs at all and the police officers having to do all of this community stuff, all of the surgeries, all of the lower level jobs with the expectations we have now to tie everything in with outside organisations (more people to copy forms in to) and create problem-solving files for every minor issue, with regular updates required.
It's really worrying stuff.
What concerns me even more is that we (PCSOs), are now having to do more forms ourselves.
We now have stats in place for the number of FPNs, PNDs, Stop and Account forms, Intelligence Reports we do.
We are having to copy council officers, probation officers and unusual 'squad' officers in to every email or action we take. We are having to justify what we do in a day, explain what results we expect to achieve and analyse the results we actually do achieve.
When I first started doing this job, around four years ago, I would spend an hour in the office and the rest of the time pounding the beat; it was frowned upon if you spent anymore time than that in the office. Sergeants would give you a telling off if you did.
Now they expect to see us in the office a good three hours of the day; we couldn't update all the forms, email all of the people and update our problem-solving files out on the beat now could we?
We also have to fill in a document, every day, to explain (for some Home Office evaluation) exactly what we did in that day and how long we spent doing it.
So I'm filling in a useless form, apparently designed to try and see why it is that we are spending so much time in the office filling in forms.
Are they taking the p***?