Oh the irony! 2001 Election campaign posters.

2001. Conservatives complain about Labour taking people’s pensions.

2001. Conservatives complain about Labour cutting police numbers.

Creeping Privatisation (Part 2)

I have just noticed that the Stats counter at the top right of the Blog has gone past the 10 million mark. This is such an awesome number I don’t know what to say about it. My best memory of this kind of thing is the second night of the London riots when this site received so many hits that we could have filled the new Wembley stadium!

We must be doing something right…. Oh yes, it’s called “telling it as it is”.

Please keep it here; this summer could be a blast!

Gadget Note: Would all 10 million of you please buy a book or order Ruralshire Constabulary mug?  That way I can retire and go on the telly. Seriously though, thanks for reading!

A proper Gadget rant from the frontline.

“Your job is nothing more, and nothing less, than to cut crime”

Theresa May, 29th June 2010.

In Ruralshire, the courts are so weak that our persistent offenders are not afraid of the process. We regularly see individuals with over 30 previous convictions ‘go free’ from court after yet another conviction.

Criminals with convictions for breaching the so-called community sentences actually get sentenced to further community sentences, even thought they have shown that they have no intention of sticking to any of the conditions.

Convicted criminals can wait so long to see a probation officer that their sentence can actually be over before they get to their first so-called supervision interview. This is not the probation services fault. There are simply not enough of them.

It has been the case for years now that even if we arrive at a ‘crime in progress’ the criminals will not even run away. They often stand and wait for us, then attack us, knowing that the worst that can happen is a 24 hour stay in our well equipped modern ‘custody suite’. Many criminals get tickets, cautions or are simply released after a CPS decision.

Only 20% of the calls we attend on Response are to do with crime.

The reason we need police on the streets is to maintain order by scooping up violent, drunken idiots and locking them away until the next morning, or to provide an out-of-ours social services response, or to be the first line for child protection issues after 4.00 pm, or to act as a taxi service for the NHS and a back-up for ambulance crews. We also spend a huge amount of time and effort looking for missing persons, banging down doors at ‘concern calls’, running around trying to stop Facebook harassment and generally being the only real service available outside office hours.

This is all good stuff, and we need to do it. But it is not ‘cutting crime’ in any measurable way. So strictly speaking, we are failing in our mission, although of course we are not. Not really. Policing was never about simply cutting crime. It was and is about having someone you can go to (someone who is not politically or financially motivated) when things go bad. And they do come to us. We get something like 3000 calls per day.

Yes, yes; the pantomime villain policeman (the brutal riot cop, the racist cop, the fat, lazy, inept cop who ignores your ASB problem) is all very alarming. But back here in the reality of the Swamp, we are sinking fast. We rush about like blue arsed flies on a minute by minute basis. The aggression we meet on the street is matched only by the bullying we get over targets, over sickness, over PDR completion, over everything from our own senior officers. Everyone has noticed the management style becoming more and more aggressive and nasty recently. They have forgotten who the enemy are.

Blaming the police for crime rates is pointless because there is nothing meaningful after police contact.

Drink-driver Leayon Dudley, who admitted killing two Leicestershire police officers following a high-speed pursuit, has been jailed for 14 years by a judge at Stafford Crown Court. In America, in some states he would have taken the needle, in others he would have received over 100 years in jail. Here, he will doubtless be out in 7 years.

We have so few police officers left on my team that we simply cannot provide anything approaching an emergency service for most of the night. All proactive work has long gone. If we get one high risk missing person and a car crash at the same time we are finished. We simply cannot respond. You might get a traffic car from 30 miles away if you dial 999.

Nothing we are sent to can be dealt with by a single officer. Yet still we persist with the single crewing policy to give the illusion of more officers on the street. The reality is that we simply send two cars to everything.

We only carry on because there are no jobs in Ruralshire, we can’t afford to commute to a city and besides, one day the penny will drop and some of that £4.5 billion increase in foreign aid might come back home, probably under a new government.

Theresa Mays announcement about ‘trigger’ calls for ASB is more hogwash. Our trigger is currently fewer calls than the government are now demanding. This means that people here will now get a worse service. Now, they only have to call twice in a certain number of months to get a premium service. Not that the courts give any of this any credence once we arrest the perpetrators. They are back on the streets faster than a broken Libdem promise. More spin.

The biggest joke at the Fed conference for me was listening to Theresa May ‘inventing’ conditional cautions. Like we haven’t been handing those out for years! How in Gods name do they get away with this? Oh and by the way, the default rate on conditional cautions is massive. The penalty for default? Another conditional caution! You couldn’t make it up.

Elected Police Commissioners – UPDATE!

Last year’s Manchester Pride queen is to stand for police commissioner.

Mr Felse – whose drag alter ego is Ethol Mary – also stood for the English Democrats in last week’s Salford mayoral contest. He came eighth, but he still harbours political ambitions.

Mr Felse, 62, a welfare officer at the Manchester-wide Northern Wave gay and lesbian swimming club, once described his drag queen alter ego as looking ‘more like a Grimsby docker than Lady Gaga’.

He stood as an English Democrat candidate in Dewsbury three years ago before becoming the party’s candidate in the Salford’s mayoral race on a pledge to slash council tax by 50 per cent. The community worker polled 3.6pc of the vote, meaning he lost his deposit.

His candidacy is based on getting ‘more Bobbies on the beat’.

The new police chief role will have the power to hire and fire the chief constable and supervise the force’s budget It is being introduced in all 41 policing areas nationwide.

Meanwhile; Conservative PCC ‘poster-boy’ Colonel Tim Collins has pulled out of the race because he can’t make the interviews. Nice to see his level of commitment.

We eagerly await news of Katie Price; I suspect that she will drop Hampshire Constabulary blaming them for using her to further their careers and embarrassing her on the telly.

Winsor, Vested Interests and Privatisation.

The ‘Winsor report’ as we all know it  actually has a formal title. Here it is:

Independent Review of Police Officers’ & Staff Remuneration & Conditions.

The key word is Independent.

Many people are therefore surprised to learn that Tom Winsor is a senior partner with Global law firm White & Case who advised G4S in relation to its £200 million privatisation project with Lincolnshire Police Authority. The contract is the first of its kind to be awarded in the UK police sector.

How can a situation where a senior partner making large amounts of money from the very law firm advising G4S about how best to replace police jobs with private staff, also writes a report about the very terms and conditions of employment for those police jobs, and it is called independent?

Here is the proof.

http://www.whitecase.com/press-02292012/

http://www.whitecase.com/twinsor/

I’m now off to write an independent report about how Perverting The Course Of Justice by Inspector Gadget should be compulsory reading for GCSE English students

A Sea of Berghaus and North Face

What a week for policing in England & Wales.

GMP decided to unilaterally bin the ACPO definition of a racist incident after one of the most shocking serial-crimes of the decade, while at the same time the Met are desperately ‘sticking-on’ anyone accused of saying anything remotely nasty and banning the term ‘Blacklist’.

As I have said before, the only racism I ever see at work comes regularly from members of the public when they deal with black officers. If you want to witness the most appalling racist abuse, come and watch what happens when an Irish Traveller is arrested by a black officer. Or you could speak to our female Asian PCSO who used to patrol the Swamp Estate on the edge of Ruraltown.

But such things are never spoken of. Too scared you see. The Diversity agenda is all one-way-traffic, coming directly at policemen. I say ‘policemen’ because they wouldn’t dare discipline a female police officer in the same way. The heat generated by a clash between the Gender Agenda and the Diversity Agenda would light a small city for several months.

At the moment, the public rightfully expect more from us than they do of themselves; this may change radically when local patrols are carried out by private Lincs-style security police .

And finally, apart from a rather uncomfortable looking police minister talking complete George Orwell-inspired claptrap (For goodness sake someone file a crime report for Herbert’s missing personality) I will leave the best description of the march to Gadgeteer ‘Anon’

“No fires set, no windows smashed, no obscenities daubed, no cars overturned, no buildings stormed, no destruction of property, no insults to dead countrymen and women who sacrificed their lives in past conflicts, no escorting Police (or even fellow protestors) injured, no objects thrown, no kettling, no negative headlines in the world’s press, no huge mess of discarded detritus, shit, piss, posters, wooden poles, vomit and smashed glass after everyone went home”

Students, occupy movement and Dale Farmers take note: this is how the grown-up’s do things.

Gadget Quote Of The Week

“I’m sorry Emily, you must have mistaken us for somebody else”

Paul McKeever to Emily Maitlis on BBC TV News at 5.00 pm

Conservative supporters must be SO proud.