“Off the record, tell me what you think of this CRIS system?” he said to me, appearing genuinely interested. I hadn’t a clue who he was, and so I decided to be frank.
“It’s complete and utter bollocks. It’s slow, dated and incredibly time consuming. Look at all this,” and I pointed to the huge piles of crime reports yet to be fed into the machine. He frowned, and I demonstrated just how slow the system was at handling data. He looked very serious and frowned the whole time. He didn’t stay long.
After he’d gone a colleague passed me saying, “The new chief’s in the building, so watch out.” It seemed I’d just had a frank exchange with Mike Todd, the new boss of Nottinghamshire Police. I hope it was nothing I said that night, but a few years later when he was the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police he apparently threw himself off a cliff in Snowdonia, poor chap.
The concept of the crime desk obviously appealed to the high command at Fraggle Rock because it was expanded at each station and then centralised. In 2001 I was working in an office with four computers and five telephones. During busy leave times I was on my own and the pressure was unrelenting. Many of us worked very hard on the crime desk but as usual some managed to get away with a fraction of the work. This particularly applied to smokers. By this time Nottinghamshire Police had introduced a smoking policy very much along the lines I had suggested years before. Smoking was permitted in the back yard of the police station, ironically immediately adjacent to the diesel fuel pump. At Radford Road smoking took place in the enclosed yard next to the night kitchen. This meant that in both hot and cold weather smokers would stand with the doors wide open, making a token effort to blow the drifting smoke outside but usually failing. In a small and busy office working with a smoker therefore meant working on your own for ten minutes every half hour; at least an hour a day, seven days a week amounted to a whole day off, standing outside smoking, time that was lost and never recovered. This blatant skiving by smokers is not unique to the police service, but it never seems to be correctly addressed. They would often congregate in huge numbers and it sounded like a party there was so much laughter going on. They were probably laughing at everybody else carrying on with their work, covering for them.
As was customary in those days, poor or non-existent supervision meant that if you did a good job you submitted a self-congratulatory report called a ‘Performance Record’ about your achievements. It was around this time that I managed ten years without any sort of written appraisal. They kept paying me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but management of staff really was dreadfully poor. It seemed everyone thought we were going to sink without trace, so a deep feeling of malaise spread everywhere, as it has again today.
I interrogated the crime system in the summer of 2001 and I was shocked by the response. Between 1st June 2000 and 1st July 2001 I personally dealt with 2,730 crimes. I had hand-written each of these on four-page crime reports. In a monthly staff newsletter I boasted that I could deal with a customer in less than a minute, from picking up the phone and saying hello, asking them their problem, taking their details and giving them a crime number. I could sometimes bring it right down to forty-five seconds. It was a necessity, as I was writing fifty or more crime reports a day, in-between lengthy phone calls from colleagues, CRIS inputting and filing. I was the busiest cop in the department, at the busiest station, division and police force. It was quite likely therefore that for a few months I may have been the busiest cop in the world!
By this time we were working round-the-clock shifts providing twenty-four-hour cover. I was sure my boast about how quickly I could deal with members of the public would soon result in more staff appearing, but the opposite happened. We were told to give our customers more quality time, not to rush the calls, to ask appropriate questions and to write them on the back of each crime report. This slowed things down considerably, so I produced a small stick-on questionnaire which I created in multiples on sheets of A4 containing all the necessary questions, which I stuck to the back of each report with Prittstick. All I had to do then was tick them as done, instead of writing them out each time. I expanded the questions to include whether Victim Support or Scenes of Crime officers had been requested, and after a while we were all using this system. A few months later I noticed some new printed crime reports arrived. They had been changed on the back to include most of the questions I had used in my stick-on supplement. I later found out a sergeant with a strangely brown nose had claimed the credit for this, as was the custom.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been ignored of course, apart from this and my failed smoking policy. On 23rd July 1996 I submitted a report suggesting a Divisional Underspend Quarterly Prize Draw. I noticed Radford Road was underspent by £12,000 that year, and much of it was coal. One of the conditions on which the station had been built was that the heating should be coal-fired; no doubt in support of the miners and apparently the idea of the Labour council. In the boiler room the caretakers therefore had to work like stokers on the Titanic to keep the building warm. It had been a good summer so there was money left over. I therefore suggested a monthly cash draw of £1,000 for staff at the station. It would encourage thrift and would be linked to satisfactory work and a good sickness record. I wasn’t surprised it was ignored; it wasn’t meant to be entirely serious. But the idea of making a connection with sickness is used in every aspect of personnel management today.
On 7th October 1997 I submitted a report requesting the force consider employing civilian investigators, perhaps retired police officers, to assist in crime enquiries. This was primarily aimed at helping response cops manage their time. A solicitor had told me he had a similar workload but had regular use of a clerk to assist him. This suggestion was also ignored, and yet such people are widely used in most police forces today. I once requested a pistol and a machine gun with a thousand rounds of ammunition, but this was also ignored.
On one particularly busy evening while single-handedly trying to operate all the computers and telephones, spinning plates like a demented octopus, I repeatedly had a female caller ring the office from the Aspley area of Nottingham. She was asking specifically for the officer dealing with her case which she wouldn’t discuss with anyone else, so I redirected her call. To my disappointment she returned several times like a boomerang smeared with dog shit. After the third or fourth failed attempt to redirect her in exasperation I said:
“Look, I’m sorry, you may as well speak to your dustbin man as speak to me, I can’t help you, I’m sorry.”
There was a very long pause before she replied: “What did you say?” at which I knew precisely the direction the conversation was heading. “I don’t like what you said,” she continued, “what’s your name?” so I gave her my details and spelt them out to her clearly, before she slammed the phone down. Dealing with the public is on occasions comparable to being a member of the royal family, in that you can’t openly fight back in an argument. I suspected this woman was trouble but I was too busy to dwell on the issue. The next afternoon, a sergeant I’d never seen before was waiting for me as I arrived for work. He asked my name but didn’t give his own. He insisted we sit in an office while he chastised me for almost an hour about a poor telephone manner. He ranted on about how crap I was and implied I was idle for being on the crime desk in the first place.
“If you desk jockeys can’t handle it you should get outside and do some proper police work.”
This was just after managing the office almost single-handedly for months and submitting thousands of crime reports. I felt incredibly demoralised by this encounter. I considered throwing him through a window but my anger was checked by a sudden wave of tiredness and apathy. Maybe this had been building for months but suddenly I wanted to give it all up and go home. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d been working incredibly hard for nothing. No-one was bothered, and in fact the fruits of my hard work were to be told I was crap. That night I informed my wife I was leaving the police.
I’ve coped w
ith being spat at, kicked, punched, thrown to the ground and verbally abused by members of the public on numerous occasions, but in all my service it has been police officers who have caused me the most stress. I seem to have attracted bullies like the school wimp. The incident with the sergeant was the final straw. I’d been suffering from stress on the crime desk for months, trying to run an office on my own when there should have been five people. I started drinking heavily and waking at 4am every morning unable to get back to sleep. I felt very low. I know my wife was concerned so she suggested I visit my doctor.
I was initially signed off work with stress for three weeks, which was eventually extended. While I was off work I saw the world change forever when I watched 9/11 live on the TV. I was contacted by my employers and offered counselling. I agreed, and drove to a beautiful farmhouse in rural Nottinghamshire where I chatted for hours with a lovely lady. What should have been six one-hour sessions eventually became twelve two-hour sessions. We discussed my travelling days and the work on the crime desk and she said:
“Why are you in an office? You shouldn’t be inside, it’s not you.”
It was suggested my employers had been negligent by creating my stress at work, so I saw a solicitor who agreed to take on the case. After a while following several sessions of counselling, as I recovered I lost interest in litigation, so I abandoned the idea.
I learnt to ski, bought a drum kit and a new car. A few weeks later I was back at work. My self-esteem was still very low, and I didn’t feel able to discuss why I’d been off sick. We don’t talk about mental health issues do we?
TOWARDS THE END
BACK ON THE BEAT
When I returned to work it was to somewhere different, a small police station in the Sherwood area of Nottingham. This wasn’t Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood lived, but an inner-city suburb on the main Mansfield Road. It was still wonderful. I retrained on the use of the new rigid speed cuffs, the CS spray, and the Asp collapsible baton. I never used the PR24 side-handled baton, because it came and went while I was on the crime desk. Cops were generally not impressed by it.
There were only four cops working in Sherwood and we had a huge amount of autonomy. The oldest among us was Jim, a lovely, quietly spoken man who was only a few years from retirement. We were an outpost called a ‘contact point’ situated between the bigger stations of Radford Road and Oxclose Lane. I was able to resume foot patrol duty after many years of driving around in the cars and sitting in the crime desk office, and I loved it. I attended a problem solving course and it seemed I’d be able to return to old fashioned policing. I began to cultivate new teaspots and I became known to the locals. It was all going well until the gaffers cocked it up again.
It was decided to centralise response in the city to one station, and Radford Road was chosen. This meant that instead of each station across Nottingham having their own local response officers, they were all bundled together in the geographic centre of the division. You may think this sounds quite sensible, but it isn’t, and it wasn’t at the time. Experienced front line cops protested about the idea, mainly because of the logistical nightmare of driving from one end of the city to another, particularly at peak times. A centralised response vehicle could be in the far north of the city and the next moment sent to the far south, and vice-versa, so this was where problems arose. If not in a hurry the traffic was often horrendous, and in emergencies the blue-light runs became much longer with all the extra risk involved. In policing terms the cops were being sent into areas they’d never been before, with no local knowledge and crucially, in my opinion, little regard for the area or its people. If you think you might never see the same people again, then why should you be bothered about them?
It’s the same old story when demand outstrips supply, there’s an urge to change something, like rearranging the deck chairs on a doomed ship in the hope that it will sink a little slower. My foot patrols came to an end and I was back in a vehicle responding to jobs and dealing with ‘handovers’: prisoners left by the night shift. Response duties were still very difficult and demanding, so when a job was advertised working in uniform but with a CID burglary team at Radford Road I took it. For the next eighteen months I worked as a Crime Scene Visitor, attending only dwelling burglaries, and it was rewarding work.
Between 1st October 2002 and 1st September 2003 I attended 418 house burglaries. If there was ever any evidence at the scene I’d take witness statements and make the initial enquiries. Very often an offender quickly became known and the detectives on the team would immediately attend and arrest the villains. It worked very well and we managed to reduce the burglary rate significantly. What’s the best way to avoid being burgled? Most burglars enter through the back, usually a window, so restrict access to the rear of your house. Keep everything locked, leave a radio on and a light, and make it look as though you have an alarm. If you can, leave a car on the driveway. Make it appear you are at home, though some burglars will carry on regardless, but this is rare. If you have small items of high value you don’t wish to be stolen, put them in the loft in a shitty plastic bag. They hardly ever go up there and if they do they would have to search all the other shitty bags you keep up there, so they won’t bother. They want cash, jewellery and credit cards, and will plan to be in your house for only a few moments. If it happens while you are in, then you have the right to defend yourself and your family. Any weapon used must be an item you find in haste rather than planned to use. Just don’t kill anyone, but if you do, never admit that it was deliberate.
Perhaps we should have been less successful because when the figures improved – and in typical police fashion – our team was disbanded.
In the autumn of 2003 I was asked if I’d like to work the north of the city. I didn’t know the area but because the job was that of community officer I took it without hesitation. I moved to Oxclose Lane Police Station and began working with some very good officers.
Helen had worked the north of the city for years and was well known. I was incredibly impressed when members of the public would frequently ring her with information that led to important arrests. She would answer the phone and then run out the door shouting a name and we would all follow. I understood the level of mutual trust required for this, and why such policing is priceless. If I could achieve only half this success then I’d become a very good cop. Sadly, and in a similar manner to so many other hard working cops, Helen’s efforts were not recognised and she left the department a couple of years later. Richard Branson is often quoted as saying the main reason for his success is the value he places on the people working for him. The police could learn a lot from this, because so often the people they employ seem to be viewed as more of an inconvenience than an asset.
The Bestwood Estate in the north of Nottingham was governed by crime gangs at the time. Colin and David Gunn lived on the estate in converted council houses and ran the drugs trade with apparent impunity. It was decided this should end. Our efforts were hampered by one of our own cops passing secrets to the enemy, but the offender, Pc Charlie Fletcher, was eventually caught and imprisoned, amid a blaze of publicity. I took part in at least one pre-dawn drugs raid in the Bestwood area at that time to find all the occupants at the address sitting around drinking tea, waiting for us.
The CID offices at Radford Road had been bugged as part of the net to catch Fletcher, and a few seasoned detectives were recorded referring to local villains as ‘pond life’. These were honest, hard-working colleagues caught up by accident as a by-product of the Fletcher enquiry. The disciplinary action that followed for making these private but candid remarks on police premises was quite frankly bizarre. They were removed from usual duties, told to sit in different rooms and not to talk to one another. Middle-aged professionals treated like five-year-old children. We were henceforth told that any conversation anywhere on police premises belonged to the police and there could be no expectation of privacy. No more jokes, piss-taking or gallows humour. You became selective as to
who you spoke to, and the content of the conversation. I’m sure the tentacles of political correctness are far reaching, but the police are pioneers.
At one point Nottinghamshire Police were dealing with thirty-six murder enquiries, most of which involved firearms, and the force was struggling to cope. The Chief, Steve Green, admitted as much to the Sunday Times and shortly afterwards some extra funding from the Home Office strangely failed to materialise. He made a further comment to the effect that the force found conditions ‘challenging’ and denied they were unable to cope. The funding then reappeared. He said to me:
“Why should I penalise the people of Nottinghamshire by missing out on some funding, just so I can express an opinion in the media?” If you’ve ever wondered why serving coppers of all ranks rarely make public comments criticising the government this is the reason. I happened to be in the Chief’s office for some advice after I too had a letter published in the same newspaper.
In 2004 we were all issued with police mobile phones. We were encouraged to give the public our numbers and to use them as often as we could. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I didn’t have a phone of my own at the time so it was a real help, though we were told not to abuse it. We were even sent an itemised bill every month with advice to pay for any private calls. I don’t know anyone who did.
At that time four of us were based in an internal office ten feet across that didn’t have any windows. I think it was originally intended as a store room. Most of the time it was very cramped but when the PCSOs, the Police Community Support Officers arrived, it became quite ludicrous.
The arrival of PCSOs in Nottinghamshire Police is probably best described as farcical; at least it was at Oxclose Lane. No-one knew who they were and what they were supposed to do. They appeared one morning, standing around in their bright blue uniforms looking useful but entirely clueless. It wasn’t their fault of course, and as individuals they were great people, in fact many of the first intake went on to become very good cops. For weeks they seemed to do nothing in particular, and I can only imagine how demoralised they must have felt as a result. It really was an appalling situation. No-one seemed to be taking the lead on what we should be doing with these people, and I have to say there was a small element of resentment at them being there in the first place. Why employ people to dress like cops when they are not actually cops? I admit to feelings of this sort at first, and to some extent I still do. They are not even a cheap alternative because their starting salary is actually higher than that of cops at £23,000 pa as opposed to £19,000 pa for cops. They couldn’t deal with anything or arrest anyone, so what was the point of them?
Who'd Be a Copper? Page 16