Well that was a busy 54 minutes…

Thus said my colleague after sitting down to the first hour of the night shift.

One arranged dog fight in a public car park, about 20 animals of the two-legged variety gather to watch 2 of the four-legged variety who are forced to fight. Mostly this is just a job, but as a dog owner I enjoy seeing dog fights end in arrests and dogs rescued. Sadly we get there a short while later to find an empty car park.

One neighbour calling in the fact the other has spend the last hour screaming at his wife/girlfriend. Nothing physical has happened when we get there, he is invited to choose another address to spend the night, or he’ll be spending it in the cells.

One callers suicidal girlfriend runs off, cue an area search for her, local roads and side roads, parents address etc. She has previous for suicide attempts, so it’s treated seriously.

Three domestic assaults, in one of which the caller is a blatant liar. His girlfriend wasn’t assaulting him at the time. We know this, because she’s sitting in the police station telling us about how he assaulted her yesterday, being at a police station is pretty good as alibi’s go.

An ex’s new partner sending threatening text messages to the old partner, that they’re coming round now to set the house on fire. Why? At least ring and make threats verbally, then all the records show is a phone call, the conversation is one word against another, but a text message stays forever. Not a very bright move.

A drive-by shooting. A 20 year old kid goes down with a GSW (gun shot wound) to the chest. As usual, armed response vehicles go in first. Two reasons, one, if there’s anyone still around with a weapon and they want a gunfight, they’ll lose. Two, the ARV’s have advanced paramedic gear on board and suitable training and can stabilise victims prior to an ambulance getting there, who will clearly be waiting to be told the area is safe. Our kid goes for emergency surgery for several shotgun pellets to the ribcage and intestine, but before he’s sedated he tells the officers he’s not involved in any form of criminality and has no idea why anyone would want to kill him. Yeah, someone just decided to shoot you, risk a possible life sentence, for no reason whatsoever, if you say so…Anyway, a marker goes on the offenders car on PNC, if sighted in the next few hours it will be subjected to a hard stop, i.e. boxed in by several cars full of nasty armed police officers who will point rifles at you and shout at you to do exactly what you’re told. Trying to  then point the weapon at them is behaviour that will not have the chance to become habit forming.

Two males trying to kick the callers door in over some money he owes someone else. A civil debt is blatantly not a police matter to resolve, nor is the door kicking when it transpires the caller is somewhat of a drama queen.

A 14 year old kid rings frantic as other family members are trying to force his mother out of her address. She has several serious medical issues, it’s not clear whether its family members genuinely trying to move her to somewhere more appropriate such as a care home, or simply kick her out into the street to exploit her vulnerabilities and try and take the house out from under her.

A noise complaint from one neighbour about another, who ends the call by threatening suicide if we don’t sort it out. As the years go on, I grow increasingly cynical over this sort of threat, over a trivial matter with no track record of the problem having existed for years. People who genuinely intend to end their own lives generally just crack on and do it, and will find a way no matter how difficult. They don’t tell people about it, because people then have an annoying habit of trying to stop you.

The rest of the evening is happily somewhat less frantic.

I got the Covid blues…

First interesting job of the day, well amusing more like, is a school reporting concerns for a 15 year old who’s not been heard from since lockdown started. Not logged on to do any school work, family not rung school, not written in, nothing. He’s Romanian and lives with his aunt and uncle, not his parents, not that it really matters. School have been round to the address several times, and got no reply. As they’ve clearly tried first, rather than just ringing the police to do their work for them like so many other agencies, we’re happy to pick up the mantle.

A bit of digging on the address history reveals a run of old mobile numbers – a lot of people change them on a very regular basis, either a better deal, my ex has the old number and harasses me, it got cut off as I didn’t pay the bill, etc etc. There’s an inverse effect here, a number twice as old is half as likely to be still used. However, I’m lucky and get the kids uncle on the first number I try. His English is passable, far better than my non-existent Romanian, and I explain why I’m ringing.

It soon transpires that little Gheorghe is in very deep doo-doo. He’s taken advantage of the situation to tell his aunt and uncle that school was simply cancelled, and neglected to mention the bit where you log on to get school work done remotely. The cheeky little scamp has basically had 7 weeks solid in front of the X-Box without interruption. The family had moved at some point over the last 6 months, and clearly someone had forgotten to update school with their new address. I’m guessing that Uncles English wasn’t quite up to the level needed to hear what was being said about schooling on the UK news and think ‘But that’s not what he said, the little bugger!’. I furnish uncle with the schools phone number and defer the job for someone else to ring the school during normal hours and update them. I would not want to be in Gheorghe’s shoes tonight.

Crews go out to an ambulance job, a lady has boiling water poured over her and has serious injuries. Normally this sort of thing is a domestic ‘If I can’t have you, no-one else will’ effort by an estranged spouse/boyfriend, but it turns out it was her sister, who has serious mental health problems. The injuries aren’t life threatening, she’s scooped up and taken straight to hospital and we start looking for the offender. In a lot of the so-called honour attacks, the offender will be sheltered by family members or friends, but this offender will likely surface soon when her erratic behaviour brings her to notice. Whether she goes to court afterwards or to a secure mental hospital isn’t really our concern.

A vehicle tracker service contact us as a recently stolen BMW is pinging nearby. Several units go and approach carefully. Sometimes the offenders who steal expensive cars are aware of the possible presence of a tracker, so they’ll steal a car and dump it somewhere, to see if the police come and collect it. They’ll give it an hour or two, and if no-one comes for the car, then they shift it somewhere more permanent. So we head nearby and spend more time looking to see if any of the local toerags are hanging around – easier now most of the world is in lockdown. Everyone needs to adapt to new situations, but for your typical car stealing scumbag, there’s no easy way round this one. Drug dealers have taken to dressing in jogging gear with their goodies in a bum-bag, so they look like they’re just out for their daily exercise to avoid detection (working from home doesn’t suit everyone), but car thieves struggle. Anyway, we don’t find the car, suggesting it’s been hidden in a garage nearby, and the tracker isn’t accurate enough to identify an individual garage. Hey ho.

Incidentally, it’s not unfair that we sometimes put more effort into finding an expensive stolen car than a cheap one. It’s simply a function of the fact that most cheap cars are pretty easy to steal, whereas the expensive ones tend to have sufficient security features that the easiest way to steal one is violently assaulting the owner for the keys, or breaking into their house at night, when you know the owner is home, to get the keys. A lot of such burglaries get violent if the offenders can’t find the keys quickly, and robbery (theft with violence or the threat of violence, to use the legal definition) should always be treated more seriously than simple theft.

Last bizarre call of the day, a local hostel resident rings to let us know that 3 weeks ago, another resident of the hostel stated to the caller that he’d murdered someone and buried them in the garden several years ago. Most calls like this are crap ultimately, it’s one drug/alcohol addled brain talking nonsense to another, but nontheless can’t be ignored. The suspect, let’s call him Bob, has slowly been getting more and more unstable over the last 2 months of isolation, as it’s a probation hostel they’re monitored by staff so has taken isolation seriously even if not through choice. His conversations have got more and more random, leading up to this.

Rather than just rock up and arrest him, we try to identify him from the scant details given by the caller, as probation aren’t answering the phone. He clearly isn’t talking about doing it at this address, I’d think even the dimmest staff member would mention one resident burying another in the back garden, so it’s a question of working out his address history for the last few years, excluding the gaps where he was in prison, and contacting the relevant forces to see if he’s ever had an address that would permit the type of privacy required to discreetly inter someone. It’s almost certainly a BOS job (bag of shit), but you just never know.

Incidentally, a shameless plug, but here you go. I’ve tidied up the blog somewhat and released it as a book on Amazon, if you fancy contributing 87p a copy to my pension fund, feel free. 😉

Plodding on…

Nights, deep joy.

Ambo call us for a 12 year old who’s hung himself. He stormed off to his room after a row with his parents, probably over homework not getting done or something similarly mundane. His sister goes to his room to check on him, and finds him hanging from the bed by his school tie. No breathing, no pulse. Ambo cut the tie off, scoop him up and rush him to children’s hospital, they’d been working on him for an hour by the last time I saw the log, to no avail. We attend, seize the tie, seal the bedroom off and get the family to stay elsewhere for the night, heartbreaking though it is, they won’t be allowed to go to hospital to be with him in the current circumstances. Children can sometimes go for longer than adults without resuscitation before permanent damage sets in, but it’s still not looking good. There’s no way of knowing if he’d been hanging for 30 seconds or 30 minutes before he was found.

A recent rape victim rings from her hostel to say she’s heard the offender, a former resident, speak to the guy next door and be allowed in. While she’s got previous for making complaints up through her mental health issues, we blue light to it nonetheless. He’s not there. While the rape is known to be genuine, there’s nothing to say whether his presence here was real but brief, or imagined.

One unit gets a little jolly down to pick up a prisoner detained in London who’s wanted by us, and collects another on the return journey who also needs returning. Sometimes a contractor like G4S does the work, sometimes it’s quicker and easier if we do it.

An armed siege on an adjacent division, some idiot decides to assault his wife, then barricade himself in his address with a firearm when the police come’a’calling. A siege like this can go on for days, I vaguely remember one in London that went on for nearly 2 weeks, but thankfully this idiot comes out peacefully fairly soon. They’re a vast drag on resources, making sure that no-one can get close enough to be at risk should he decide to go out in a blaze of glory. The gun turns out to be fake.

There’s a few shoplifters, who are rarely near the top of the queue. If they’re not threatening the shop staff, the best strategy for a shoplifter is simply to wait – eventually, the shop will decide they can’t tie their staff up forever and let you go, but kick off and you’ll be a higher priority. Despite the fact some of them do this for a living, they’re still not rational enough to wait calmly.

Like many forces, people can get in touch via webchat as well as more traditional means. A woman contacts us for advice as her soon to be divorced husband is a serving officer and is causing domestic issues through working at home. A lot of staff are doing this in managerial roles, skyping in from secure laptops, but you wouldn’t really want your kids to hear about stabbings and brothels over the breakfast cereal, which is exactly what’s happening, and he gets angry/abusive when she says something about it. She adamantly won’t give either of their names, address, department or anything, fearing the consequences if he finds out she’s been in touch, and the mobile number she leaves turns out to be false.

However…the system does save an IP address, and the intel department can narrow it down to a block of flats. There’s only so many names on the voters register for the block, and there’s only so many people who are working from home at the moment, and there likely will only be one name on both lists. Once we know he’s at work, we can ring her without fear of making him aware, and go further from there.

Last notable job of the night, about 8 phone calls over a car crash and a disorder. One of the calls is from the girlfriend of the victim, who’s apparently been burgled for his car keys and then run over with his own car. Houses often get burgled for high-performance cars, Audi’s, BMW’s, Mercedes etc, but this one is a 3 door Renault Clio.

Although she’s hysterical, a check of the neighbors CCTV sheds some more light on the events. Although he clearly has been run over, it would appear that his dealer came to him over his outstanding drug debt, there’s an argument and the car gets taken as a part payment. He kicks off about it and gets run over in the fracas. He is also nowhere to be seen now, so we don’t know if he’s been kidnapped into the bargain or is just hiding in some nearby bushes.

Actual routine workload is surprisingly low still, there were around 550 jobs handed over to the morning shift force-wide, last Summer we were lucky to be under 2,500. Largely this is due to the number of things that get recorded over the phone before being passed on to the relevant department, but the interesting jobs more than make up for it

Life goes on. Or not.

An interesting night shift, a reminder that much of life, unfortunately, carries on very much as before. We certainly get our money’s worth out of the helicopter this evening.

Early on in the evening, we have a pursuit of a suspected stolen vehicle. The normal pattern of a pursuit is, one police vehicle sees a suspect car and indicates it to stop with blue lights. If the vehicle shoots off, the driver calls in the pursuit, gives the reason for the chase (suspected stolen, dangerous driving, etc), and gives a commentary of speeds, risk level, road conditions, other traffic/pedestrians etc, while control moves in other traffic units who are trained in pursuit techniques, to try and get ahead of the bandit vehicle with a stinger to do the tyres, or on a wide enough road, to get 3 or 4 traffic cars round the bandit car, box it in and then just slow down until it’s forced to stop. There’s also TPAC (Tactical Pursuit And Containment) which is largely used on the motorways, which can end up with the bandit car getting physically forced off the road if all else fails.

The control room inspector can order a pursuit abandoned for a number of reasons, including :

The reason for chasing it isn’t sufficiently serious.

The offenders name is known, and they can be arrested at a later date.

The radio communication is poor quality, either because of technical issues with the radios of the officers communication is poor.

There’s not sufficient pursuit trained units nearby to actually bring the pursuit to a conclusion in the way we want. If we can’t get a stinger ahead of them or enough vehicles nearby to box them in etc, then there’s no point in taking risks to aim for an end goal we can’t manage.

The bandit vehicle takes excessive risks, e.g. going the wrong side of the road, round rounabouts the wrong way, excessive speed in built up areas or for the road/traffic conditions. A pursuit that might be perfectly acceptable at 3am in a residential area won’t be acceptable going past a school at 3pm, for example.

This pursuit is abandoned pretty quickly when the bandit vehicle hits 100mph in a residential area and switches his lights off.

The helicopter next gets involved in a car being driven badly being pursued. The driver pulls up into a cul-de-sac, runs down an alleyway and throws a bag of some sort over a fence, before going back to near the car and walking nonchalantly off. Needless to say, as he’s being filmed continuously from the helicopter, his protestations of innocence get him nowhere. He’s locked up on suspicion of theft of the car, when an officer is guided down the same alleyway and gets into the garden, they find the bag contains a loaded handgun.

Next helicopter job, they assist in the pursuit of a quad bike being driven like a maniac. While following the bike, the aircraft is attacked with a green laser pen, dazzling the cameras temporarily, though thankfully not the pilot. They continue the pursuit, the bike is stopped and the riders arrested. The helicopter goes back to try and identify exactly where the laser was fired from. Despite the intelligent thing to do at this point being  to throw the laser pen down a drain, the chump fires it at the helicopter a further 30 times. He’s filmed repeatedly going in and out of one particular property, units arrive, and start kicking the front door in until he opens it. Arrested, pen seized, he is undoubtedly looking at a prison sentence. For no reason whatsoever. Scumbags lasering an aircraft so they can get away, I understand, there’s a benefit to that, but this idiot has no benefit from it at all.

A short while after this, the reasoning behind abandoning pursuits is emphasised, another vehicle makes off from police, the officer self-abandons when the bandit hits 125 in a 40 zone. A few seconds later, the bandit car crashes into an electrical sub-station and ends up on its side. The driver amazingly survives, and is sufficiently conscious to tell the officers he has two dogs in the back. And they are rottweilers as well. As only one dog can be located in the wreckage, ARV’s head towards in case the other dog is injured, loose and aggressive and needs shooting, but the poor thing is located inside the sub-station compound, doing the doggy equivalent of crying its eyes out and gibbering in a corner. It’s extracted and both are taken to a vets, at the owners expense. Along with a new car. And his legal fees. And a civil case from the electricity company to have the sub-station rebuilt.

As the last hour of the shift slips away, some overnight deaths in care homes start to trickle in. We’ve set up a joint team with the ambulance service to handle them as quickly and empathetically as possible, while I don’t doubt that attending dead people all day, every day, is emotionally wearing, it bothers me that I make arrangements for them to be seen with the same emotional detachment I’d have if they were burglaries. There’s a minefield of PTSD waiting in the future for NHS staff and others who have experienced such a workload of fatalities recently and have months more of it to come, and I for one an glad I don’t have to put myself through that.

A day in the life of Bravo Mike 1

Callsign Bravo Mike one is a randomly chosen response car. Double crewed, both officers male and both have around 8 years service, which is more than average for response policing. Neither one is Taser equipped.

Job one, a family ring about their brother, who was arrested for breach of the peace last night. He was released this morning when he calmed down and came home this morning. He changed clothes, collected his wallet and phone and left, repeatedly saying sorry to his family. He left, saying he felt the same as yesterday and he didn’t want to be here any more and was going to book into a hotel. His marriage was breaking down, and as he self harmed yesterday, family reported him missing this morning when he left, fearing he was suicidal.

He had no car, as he’s been previously locked up for supplying controlled drugs, we have a description and photograph of him saved, and his photo is quickly emailed out to the officers looking for him. Several cars go, he is quickly located at a local hotel. Spoken to, he is not suicidal, just trying to make a clean break and move on, which right now involves a large cooked breakfast and then a few hours sleep. We leave him with it.

Job two, a tenant at the local YMCA starts kicking off at the staff, for no apparent reason. Suspecting he’s either drunk or on drugs, they lock themselves in the office while he merrily tries to smash his way round the lobby. They have his details, and a PNC check shows he has markers for violence, mental health issues namely depression for at least the last 4 years and alcoholism. We attend and speak to him, as he’s now in a calmer frame of mind.

Like a number of forces, we run a triage car system, a car with one PC, a paramedic and a qualified mental health nurse on board, the combination of medical knowledge, access to mental health information systems and legal powers on board can get people assessed and into mental health care much more speedily than before. Our man has no recent history with the mental health services, however, so there’s nothing they can add. As he’s calmed down, staff don’t want to kick him out, so on the understanding he stays calm, he’s allowed to remain. The same location had a heroin overdose death yesterday, so compared to that, todays visit ends well for everyone.

Job three, we’re contacted by an outside force, who have a victim reporting rape in a hotel in our force area. The nature of hotel rooms being cleaned every day dictates we preserve it as soon as possible, so the car blue lights there, only to find out the room number they were given was not used last night. The outside force is still speaking to the victim, as there were no guests last night who match the description of the suspect staff are aware of, we clear until some tactful questioning of the victim clarifies if we’ve been given the wrong room number or wrong hotel. Meanwhile, the correct room somewhere has probably already been vaccuumed, surfaces wiped and sheets changed, so goodbye to the forensic evidence.

Job four, a suicidal woman rings the police claiming to have taken an overdose, shouting and screaming at the operators. The address she gives doesn’t exist, so we’re struggling to find her, as are the ambulance service. We eventually find her after a third call, along with several boxes of tablets, and hand her over to the ambulance service.

Job five, caller rings as her neighbour has reversed into someone accidentally, and the other driver got out with a baseball bat and assaulted him. Like you do. By the time we get there a few minutes later, it’s over and he’s not badly hurt. The offending driver has left the scene, and the victim has to take his kids to a tuition class, so can’t stop too long. An appointment is arranged to see him tomorrow.

Hometime!

999’s

A random sample of 999 calls today.

The AA ring, attending a vehicle broken down on the motorway. As the AA are already sending a vehicle which is far more visible than our, no-one gains anything from us coming out, so we politely decline to attend.

The ambulance service ring as one of their crews has gone past some traffic lights which are out. Nothing to do with us, one phone call to the council to come and fix them and we move on. If there were a dozen calls about it, then maybe the congestion would justify us attending and trying to direct traffic until they are fixed, but based on one call only? Nope.

A crazy man doing cartwheels in the road. Not normal behaviour, especially when you’re naked. In the middle of winter. Although he’s clearly got mental health problems, you can’t expect medical staff to try sectioning him in the middle of the road, so we detain him under Sn 136 of the Mental Health act and take him to a secure hospital. Under a blanket.

A rather angry male rings complaining about the guy down the road from him, who’s dealing cannabis from his works van in the local pub car park, then driving home after a skinful. He’s angry because he’s rung us about it a few times before, so he says, and nothing has happened. he’s right, he has rung us before, so in calming him down on the phone and getting further details, I take the opportunity to tell him just how many open jobs we have at that point, and how many response cars there are to deal with it.

And moving on to the easily avoidable and therefore frustrating calls…

A rather stupid taxi driver who’s complaining as the prostitute he’s been seeing has taken intimate photos of them together and is now blackmailing him with them. Apparently, he thought it was romantic when she took them, although I fail to see what’s romantic about the back seat of an old Ford Mondeo. There’s not a lot we can do, as he won’t identify her, all we can do is suggest he make a discreet visit to an STD clinic, and stop seeing her. This sort of thing often happens from apparently random facebook friend requests, leading quickly to intimate video conversations and then demands for money, people have been known to commit suicide as a result. He doesn’t seem that bothered, so neither are we.

A depressingly large amount of front-line police work involves doing the thinking for people who are just incapable of doing it for themselves, and he is no exception.

In the cold snap, there’s also the usual swathe of idiots leaving their car running unattended outside to defrost while they stay in the house nice and warm. Only when someone gets in your car and drives off, it’s not quite so convenient. Even less convenient when the insurance company rightly refuse to pay out.

If you wait longer than you’d like for the police, you are probably waiting in the queue behind people like these.

Triage

Another night on control, and it seems to be a night of changing priorities. A frequent complaint is ‘We called you about <insert serious offence here>, they got away before you got there, then we had to wait for ages’.

No-one enjoys making people wait to be seen, but current risk is usually more of an urgent concern than the offence itself. Pissed off though you may be at having to wait for hours, if the risk is over and the delay doesn’t cause you further risk, then it’s sometimes just tough luck. So…a sample of things that slipped down the running order, 6 jobs that landed within a couple of minutes of each other, with no cars then available. A mobile phone robbery. Graded as immediate as it should be, but the offenders are long gone. We catch personal robbery offenders either because we get a description, swamp the area with officers and catch them running off, or they’re morons and they rob people they know.

We have neither advantage here, so the victim is told to go home where they’ll be safe, and we’ll see them as soon as we can. He’s probably still fuming about it, but he was safe and no worse off. A domestic violence offender is seen near his ex’s house. He’s not right outside, not trying to force the door open or vandalise her car, and she can’t see him any more. Although he needs locking up for the original assault, he’s not a current immediate risk, so it’s deferred for a visit in the morning, with the proviso that she’s to ring 999 again should he return. Theft from a car. In a similar fashion to robberies, we only catch people for this if we catch them running away, and with no staff free and no personal risk involved, it waits. If they don’t leave any blood on the broken car window, there’s no point sending for scenes of crime, fingerprints are recovered in only around 2% of car breaks. Recorded as a crime over the phone, sending a bobby in person to say ‘Yep, there’s definitely a broken window and no stereo’ and then record it takes longer and is no more effective. So no visit.

Suicidal male rang the 999’s. As he’d taken an overdose, rather than using sharp objects, and we have no previous history of violence from the address, we left that with the ambulance service, as it’s purely a medical issue.

Previously violent shoplifter, who returns to the same shop. Although he needs locking up still, and is committing another offence on this occasion, he’s not being violent this time. It waits. Suicidal woman, self harming with razor blades. That is down to us, so it’s next in the queue. Hopefully she won’t inflict fatal injuries before we get there, as the ambulance service won’t go without us.

Burning questions

Morning log count – 2550

One fringe benefit, if I can call it that, of terrorism is an increase in armed response vehicles, such that they are usually much more readily available for non-terrorism incidents. Although as detailed before, they have a wide variety of lethal toys on board, an ideal scenario is one where they finish the day with the same number of bullets as they started.

So meet Bob. Bob split up with his wife and moved out, and retained access to their child, Bob junior. One day, bringing Bob junior back to his mum, Bob lost the plot completely about his forthcoming divorce, and the soon-to-be ex-wife rang hysterically as he had locked himself and Bob junior in the car on her drive, after pouring petrol over the car, and was now sat in the front with a lighter, Bob junior strapped in his car seat in the front, and the petrol can on the back seat.

An armed response car is sent along with everyone else, including the Fire Brigade, and having heard the job over the radio, request authority from the inspector to take a critical shot when they get there, i.e. shoot Bob through the head with a rifle before he starts trying to light the lighter. The boss considers it, but declines at this stage based on the grounds that :

*The petrol sloshed around was on the outside of the car, not the inside, and will be difficult to ignite from inside the car.

*Bob has had several minutes to try and light up should that really be his intention, and has not done so.

*Petrol burning on the outside of a car will not be immediately dangerous to the occupants.

*Fire Brigade are on scene and in a position to drench the car in foam in a couple of seconds, should Bob be so silly.

An officer, armed or otherwise, can always use lethal force despite lack of such authority, if such a situation changes and there isn’t time to discuss the changes with anyone, largely common sense, but also national police policy, thank God, but there turns out to be no need. Although a negotiator is called, Bob is talked out of the car fairly shortly and arrested. Good luck trying to get access to your child through the courts once you get out of prison.

Anyway,  as always, there is a debrief after an incident where we’ve come close to shooting someone. Questions raised :

If the petrol had been sloshed around INSIDE the car, would they have been given the authority? Yes. A bullet passing through glass is very unlikely to cause a spark. It will, however, then pass through  Bobs skull, and cause him to stop doing what he’s doing.

Would a bullet have been deflected by the glass enough to endanger Bob junior? Almost impossible. A bullet going at 2,500 feet a second will not be deflected much in the 1 or 2 foot gap between the window and Bobs head.

Once the bullet had passed through Bob, would it have caused harm anywhere else? Very unlikely, we use hollow-point bullets which fragment on impact for that exact reason. He was parked near to a wall which would have stopped any fragments going further.

Unpleasant questions to ask, but necessary. Some of the questions asked have to be answered at the scene in a few seconds, some after the event, we have all day, but we would prefer to learn from success as well as failure.

The 1%

A list of the most recent ten jobs in force:

1. Domestic abuse. Caller reports his mother is being verbally abused and threatened by estranged husband, who wants money for prostitutes. There is already a restraining order against him, and he’s stated that the prostitutes ‘manager’ has threatened to harm his estranged family unless he pays up.

2. Elderly male, reporting £300 stolen from his address overnight, he found the door open this morning and the money gone and his chequebook missing also. There’s a hint of alzheimers about it, as there’s no damage to his door, but no previous history to the address to support this or to rule it out.

3. Caller reporting someone going through black bin bags, concerned about ID fraud.

4. Silent 999 call, no reply on callback.

5. A repeat shoplifter violently resisting staff who are detaining him.

6. Male with apparent mental health issues being very angry in the middle of the road, throwing bins around, and last seen heading into an off-licence.

7. Caller at a petrol station reporting a bilking (drive off without paying) last night, £112 worth of diesel fuel taken, and the registration plate given says the car is a Nissan Micra. I used to own one, there is NO WAY you can get that much fuel into a Micra unless you’re pouring it in the boot. Either the registration taken is wrong, or it was a false plate.

8. Contact from a triage car – several forces are trialling these, it’s a vehicle jointly crewed by a police officer, a paramedic and a qualified mental health nurse, streamlining the process of getting mental health patients into care. They contact ambulance service over a patient and log it, he is taken straight to a hospital for his own safety, and doesn’t have to come through a custody suite first.

9. Front window to a Pizza takeaway smashed in by a large rock, which is still at the scene, making the premises vulnerable to being burgled.

10. Semi-abandoned 999 call from a hairdressers, the number has previously been used to report a domestic assault, as the female caller this time sound confused and distressed and can’t really tell us what is going on, it is initially treated as a domestic assault this time.

The next ten are similar. A fairly typical random survey of response work. We have over 2,000 such calls in the system at present, so that’s less than 1% of the total, and around 160 officers on each incoming shift to deal with it all. All this against a backdrop of massively increased workload after last weeks failed bomb attempt on the underground, plenty of officers are taken off normal duties to patrol (i.e. stand around visibly) nearby certain public locations to reassure people. All response officers are moving onto 12 hour shifts for at least a week.

More routine work will inevitably have to wait longer, and the overtime bill will go through the roof. Thanks to last weeks payrise, the money we as a force have to spend on overtime has just gone down. As an individual, I’m glad to get a 2% payrise this year, not the usual 1% and there’s no point in saying otherwise. But as a taxpayer, knowing that government imposed the payrise on forces but didn’t give them any extra money for that payrise, means I know the money has to be cut from somewhere else. As around 2/3 of force budgets are on wages, which have gone up by 1% in real terms, this means a roughly 2% cut in everything else our money is spent on to balance the books. So cars will take longer to get fixed, uniform will take longer to arrive, when computers break, they will take longer to get fixed. Maybe less officers will be recruited in future.

So the 1% isn’t really an improvement from your point of view.