Confusion – It get’s me every time!

Here at Ruralshire Constabulary we have just held a competition for demented pre-school children. Each child was selected for their particularly anarchic and illogical characteristics, fed on E numbers and frozen pizza for a week and then given a huge paintbrush, a map of the Shire and placed in a dark room with 100 similar children. They were then told to paint whatever they wanted, the only rules being that they had to cover the whole map, they could only use two colours and they had to do so in just three minutes.

The results were thrown together, judged randomly by someone from the police authority with no previous knowledge or understanding of policing and then adopted as the new Response & Patrol Hub system for answering 999 calls.

We haven’t been told that this was the methodology, but having now had the chance to have a good look at the new system, it is the only explanation. As usual, the design and implementation team who really did come up with this nonsense was unique it its lack of membership by anyone who actually has to operate the system.

Don’t take my word for it, the very sensible Michael Nicholson has discovered something similar in his home force, Surrey Police.

In terms of sheer cheek, you really have to hand it to our Chief Officers. They have managed to deliver an emergency response system with less officers, based in fewer places taking longer to get to you and yet it’s all done with a cynical promise that ‘frontline services’ will be unaffected by the cuts! The confusing thing is that we are not actually saving any significant amounts of money, being as the officers being removed from these teams are simply being redeployed elsewhere, mainly ‘prisoner handling teams’ where the rich harvest of ‘Detections’ are found.

Publisher Dan Collins and I talk about this all the time. We can’t understand where these useless ideas come from, and how such nonsense can be adopted time and again, only to be abolished later at vast expense. My only suggestion is that after 13 years of top-down, target driven, bureaucratic and ideologically driven policing nonsense being peddled by Centrex and then NPIA in the selection and promotion of senior officers, we have a whole generation of fools at the top.

The solution is to immediately sack everyone above the rank of Inspector and start again, preferably with myself in charge of the whole lot. I would start the cull at Chief Inspector to avoid my own demise, after all, Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

Oh no! I wrote the word ‘Christmas’. I’ve had it now……….

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