Call Takers and Dispatchers

Recently in my force there has been an increase in call takers and radio dispatchers. We obviously were never told about this and have managed to work out what is happening. There is a new management "clear the box" ethos where controllers desperately try to off load old unresourced jobs onto response officers. The reason for this is the civilian "lets create a job for everything" ethos and as i have mentioned before the crime managements "lets crime everything before attendance" ethos.

You see we have now woken up to this and are aware of what these people are trying to do.

The situation used to be we knew our controllers, we could tell by the tone of the voice how urgent the job was and would trust them to the point that if they called me and said "we really need to attend asap but its not immediate" then we would go off and get there straight away rather than do something else first as its not immediate.

Now we have the reverse, we have new controllers who sound panicked when an urgent commitment job comes in but they don't give us the grading when they hail us. "Any unit available for an assault at xxxx respond with call sign" now the tone of voice suggests that this is happening now and is a fight in progress but no, its 3 days old. We have been caught out too often now that immediate commitment jobs are being unresourced because we simply don't trust the controllers.

The call takers are creating jobs that come in that really don't need any police involvement. Jobs such as "my ex husband has cc'd me into a letter he has written to the solicitors" now you would have thought that this would be a non starter advice given by the telephone ops but no, its classified as urgent attendance (within 45 mins) domestic harassment.
Great you think but it gets better
Now Crime management have seen this job come in and its yet to be resourced so they set about criming it as a domestic harassment. Even though on attendance you read the letter and its totally legit correspondence no harassment aspect there at all. No crime and move on maybe but no, now we need to investigate it!

Whatever happened to DISCRESION.

Civilians have taken away the core function of policing which is discretion. Now I'm nicking Mr domestic harassment because its been clasified as such. And SOCA powers mean i have to justify the arrest. But no Domestic Violence Unit state that we must take "Positive Action" and this means arrest to prevent physical harm to the caller.

I always try to police practically. Arrest when necessary, suitable advice when appropriate.

Its getting harder and harder to do now so much so we will soon be robots doing as we are told and I'm damned sure that, that is not what was meant to happen when we were sworn in as the powers were given to us not to the force and we should not be told to use our powers when we don't feel it right to do so!

End Rant
JS

Police Force Mergers - The Decision

Well the alleged consultation process has been completed. But i'm not sure when this happened or how we were consulted, must have been one of those sneaky consultation all user emails that we never read!

BBC News Report

JS

Nothing like respect

There is a small town with a fairly condensed population. The majority of which populate the town center of a Friday / Saturday night which is not uncommon of many towns over the weekend.
This one is quite heavily policed though over the weekend as it is prone to lots of trouble coming from nowhere. On one weekend, the usual gobby people are out, shouting at police and generally being a nuisance.
The people in general are spoken too and you would have liked to think that sense was seen and everyone went away happily......

Noooo, these people started making phone calls and down come there mates. and before we know it we have a hell of a lot of Asian youths trying to provoke the police into action. The reasoning we think is to alow us to be accused of being racist.

We receive racial abuse as well as being accused of being racist ourselves. We hold off just trying to keep a lid on things but there is only so long you can be called various names and generally abused. Several units arrive on scene as well as dog units and an ARV came along.

First off you would hope a show of force may make them think twice. But it didnt, more phone calls were made and more Asian youths arrived.

Out comes the dog as it was starting to look like it was going to kick off and the sight of a snarling land shark is hopefully enough to dissuade them but unfortunate the response we get is "Let the F***ing dog go then ill F***ing kill it" etc etc etc they run at the dog knowing it wont be released.

The ARV crew get in the mix pushing people about in their own way only to be fronted by a large group of people taunting "come on Hit me you fat B***ard" or "go on nick me then and see what happens" We did not have the resources to make arrests and if we were to arrest then its a 30 min ride to the nearest custody.

Eventually everyone went there own way but that was down to the police backing off more than anything.

I am of the opinion that we should not have backed away, we should have done what we are paid to do and arrest these scum regardless of there race.

I am aware that officer safety is at the back of our minds all the time, but we have a job to do and we cant let people get away with this or it will happen again and again.

I personally am of the opinion, well lets try and sort it we have CS and batons lets see what happens when we do show force against them and show we are not scared!

Arm the Police Poll

I have created a quick Poll on arming the police, please take the time to have a quick look and vote.

It would be interesting to get peoples views on this as i have my own as do my colleagues!

Ill Post the results in a few weeks.

Thanks

JS

Should The Police Be Armed?
	Yes - All Officers should carry firearms.
	Yes - More officers should be authorized to carry firearms but not routinely carry.
	Yes - We need more armed response vehicles but no to routine arming.
	No - Because i don't trust the police with firearms.
	No - Because the criminals would carry guns as well.
	No - Because its breaking tradition of having non armed police officers.
Free polls from Pollhost.com