A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO OUR POLICE OFFICERS

A Merry Christmas To All Our Visitors!

We've all seen them on our patch, you know the houses .... the ones where the occupants simply must out-do their neighbours with a bigger neon christmas tree, life sized illuminated santa, sleigh and full team of reindeer, or perhaps saddest of all, the 20 ft horrid Homer Simpson!

Please be patient as the video buffers, it's worth the wait !

Imagine the lecky bill for this little lot!

Some people just can't stop showing off can they?

TO ALL OUR VISITORS . . . .

Please spare a thought this Christmas for the lads and lasses who will be doing their very best to ensure we all enjoy a safe and peaceful christmas - the police officers who will be working while we enjoy our rest over Christmas. Spare them a kind thought and send them your best wishes. We pray that your shifts pass peacefully and that you are able to enjoy some special festive times with your families and loved ones.

A special thank you goes out to the unsung heroes of police blogging this year and the years that have gone before. Having worked long, hard challenging shifts, dealing with the worst society can throw at them, they find the time and energy to write their articles, share their experiences, with a great passion for "What's right" and delivered in the most part, with good humour.

Thank you to one and all, you know who you are, for all your fine efforts. We look forward to plenty more and perhaps some well deserved reforms for you in 2010.

With best wishes

Steve & The Crime Analysis Team

Nice 1 Limited

LATEST GOVERNMENT MADNESS - POLICE TO INVESTIGATE ALL INCIDENTS

SURELY THIS IS COMPLETE AND UTTER MADNESS?


Police are to be forced to fully investigate every case reported to them under new Home Office rules . . .

“The new guidelines, which have the backing of police chiefs, mean officers will have to give every report their full attention and makes it far more likely that they will visit any alleged victim”.

This latest stream of DRIVEL from the Government is surely the most ill thought out nonsense yet? If it is indeed has the backing of the police chiefs, then this is truly the saddest indictment of just how out-of-touch these boys club members really are with operational policing.

In this article in The Telegraph, it explains that officers will have to give every report their full attention and makes it far more likely that they will visit any alleged victim.

If the police are forced to investigate every report, this will just exacerbate the bureaucracy mountain government have built. Clearly they have completely lost the plot. This is echoed by the common sense front line officers we speak to.

Exactly which cardboard box contains the thousands of extra officers required to investigate every nonsense call that discretionary policing would weed out?

So Mr Johnson, you propose slashing the police overtime budget by £70 million over the next six months, back office support staff by £75million, continue paying exhorbitant bonus and perks packages to Chief Constables for crime reduction statistics no one has any confidence in, decimate the manpower, smash the last morsels of morale, and create an insurmountable bureacracy mountain. Just for good measure, let's show the front liners they can't be trusted to use their common sense and discretion, we'll make them attend and investigate every fabricated and nonsense report so our backs are covered and we might just capture a few votes in the process. Absolute madness.

Chief Constables are so far from the coal face they wouldn’t recognise it, if it smacked them around the head. The higher up the tree they climb, the further from reality they slip, and yet still their voices are heard louder than the guys at the front line, with common sense and discretion waiting to be used. Only by placing our trust in their abilities and experience will the public see better policing in this country.

Simon Reids’ comments on behalf of the police federation, seem eminently sensible, and in line with the proposal to restore more discretion to front line officers : "We are going to end up investigating every incident to prove no crime has happened. We need to trust the officer's discretion. All we are doing is making the whole process more bureaucratic. Let's use our supervisors in the role they are designed to do. They should be looking at these crime reports when they come in."

Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "This Government’s reputation over its use of crime figures is so shot to pieces that frankly most people will think that Labour Ministers are engaged in yet another attempt to massage figures for their own political advantage."

All we see is Labour issuing ridiculous vote catching propaganda and senior officers, apparently without thought or awareness of the operational consequences, echoing their sentiments. With all due respect to them all, the average member of the public wants to see effective and proportional transparent policing, delivered by effective coppers on the ground, not these airy fairy concepts dreamed up from within the gated confines of senior officers highly protected environments.

Sorry to rant, but this one will really widen the rift between Government and the front line troops and kill off what little public confidence remains.

TOP COPS PAY & CRIME SCANDAL

As Christmas 2009 approaches and the Labour Government proposes slashing operational police overtime by £70million over the next six months, and plans to cut police support staff to the tune of £75million, you might find yourself asking “What the dickens is Alan Johnson playing at?”

Stronger expressions leap to mind when senior police pay scales, expenses and benefits are revealed, showing who gets paid what and what they get bonuses for. It is then that the real scandal emerges and more obvious and suitable targets for reduction jump off the page. In these desperate times for the private sector, hard-pressed taxpayers can only gasp at the lavish secret perks paid to senior police officers.

In a report published today, we will show how the crime reductions that form the basis of such payments to Chief Officers are dishonest and have been engineered by the upper echelons of policing with Government supervision and encouragement. Click here to view the report or click the link "TOP COPS PAY & CRIME SCANDAL" in the view our reports sidebar to the right. Police forces are using a series of tricks to manipulate crime figures to give a false picture of their performance, a former senior detective has revealed in the press within the last week (December 2009).

So what has all this subtefuge and secret senior officer activity to do with cutting police overtime?

This report presents alarming evidence supporting a widespread belief that the manipulation of crime statistics forms part of a conspiracy to deceive the public into believing that crime is decreasing. The orchestrators of this deceit are the Government and Home Office, aided and abetted by senior police officers, who are obscenely rewarded for their part in the plot.

Front line police officers are unable to untangle this web of deceit, despite protestations by many with an informed and accurate perspective at the public facing coal face. Distortion of the figures has led to misallocation of financial and human resources, resulting in the public being deprived of the policing it deserves. The gravy train of police funds has been milked and the “con” disguised through years of bureaucracy, performance targeting and distraction techniques, making the task of basic policing more difficult to deliver.

There is plenty of evidence that there are senior officers who are paid grossly disproportionate salaries and bonuses for perpetuating the deceitful illusion of crime reduction. The honour and distinction of achieving a high rank in public service has been replaced with greed, with a convenient blindness to the immorality of their actions. A full, transparent 43 force public enquiry is needed to force the disclosure of these illicit payments and inducements. Among the most disturbing are the revelations of Heather Brooke in the Guardian, about the expenses of Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. The rot is clearly embedded within the “root and branch” culture of the highest ranking police officers, when the man who is charged with the responsibility of overseeing the Chief Officers in England & Wales sets such an example. ACPO, its finances and function will be analysed in detail in a later report.

If “cooking the books” of policing and crime statistics had no consequences, it would command no attention. The consequences however, are dire and plain for all to see. The victims in all of this are the tax payer, who is deprived of the police service his contributions are intended to provide, and the front line police officer who is forced into silent acceptance of a job that has become enmeshed with bureaucracy, risk averse policing and fiddled crime figures. Who could blame officers that have no faith or respect for senior officers and politicians who orchestrate a criminal deception of the highest magnitude for personal gain, and then expect the staff on the ground to do their dirty work with no resistance?

Alan Johnsons’ proposal for cutting frontline police overtime is not in the best public interest. A more appropriate target for savings surely lies within the senior officer pay structure. Our report shows that there is plenty of "fat" that should be cut from that source before even considering such an essential as operational police overtime.

We support the proposal that crime statistics should be properly independent. This would remove responsibility for compiling and publishing crime figures from the Home Office, who clearly cannot be trusted to be truthful with the electorate and not to apply their political spin. The responsibility should be placed with the Office for National Statistics which is totally independent. The pre-release access that Ministers and political advisers get to crime statistics should be abolished – so the public would be the first to get an honest account of the facts.

Politicians and Senior Police Officers may talk about resuscitating public trust. The party and individuals that demonstrates the transparency and complete honesty of their future reform intentions and follow it up with decisive action that is genuinely in the public interest, will have the best chance of achieving it.

Click here to view the report or click the link "TOP COPS PAY & CRIME SCANDAL" in the view our reports sidebar to the right.

Related reports (click links) :-

DECREASING CRIME BY FAIR MEANS OR FOUL
FORCE OR FARCE? - RECORDED CRIME

Crime Analysis Team – Nice 1 Limited

Force or Farce? - Police Recorded Crime 2009

Accurate and trusted crime recording and statistics are essential, not only to underpin the legitimacy of policing, but also to enable the effective allocation of resources. Unnecessary bureaucracy is caused when systems for recording crime become inefficient or worse, manipulated for personal or political reasons. The recording of crime should not receive more attention than the subsequent investigation. Trusted and accurate crime statistics are a key component of building confidence in policing and the Criminal Justice System.
 
In this paper, the crime analysis team at Nice 1 Ltd, will highlight an area that causes anxiety among front
line police officers - the crime recording process. Having collated numerous operational examples of how forces are encouraged to minimize incident numbers reported, we set about identifying the areas where there is greatest potential for manipulation. To read the latest report click here. Alternatively click the Force or Farce link in the sidebar to the "View Our Reports".

In a previous report “Home Office Crime Statistics – Decreasing Crime By Fair Means Or Foul”, we dealt with the disparity that exists in the incident numbers between the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime. In that report, we commented that crime statistics could not be considered accurate or trusted, but were rather “a pernicious conspiracy to deceive” with the Government being ultimately responsible for a sham two tier crime measurement system. In creating a performance target driven Criminal Justice System, a tangled web of bureaucratic systems have been implemented within the police service, disguising the true picture of crime and defeating the ends of justice the system is meant to serve.

By targeting senior police officers to reduce crime and increase detections with lucrative monetary rewards, (senior officers receive 15% bonus on top of six figure salaries for hitting crime reduction targets), the Government is assisted in its plot by willing co-conspirators. Senior officers looking to progress further are encouraged to devise systems and procedures that perpetuate the illusion of reducing crime.

This report takes the enquiry further, by exploring the flaws that exist within the police recorded crime process. Both reports can be viewed in the View Our Reports sidebar.

NEWS UPDATE - SUNDAY 5TH DECEMBER 09

Supporting the evidence we have presented in this and prior postings, an article appears in the Telegraph today that will blow the lid off the police force tricks to fiddle crime figures. 

Read the article here  or paste this link into your browser http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6736505/Police-force-tricks-to-fiddle-crime-figures.html

We will report on this further shortly.

Comments or observations are welcome to enquiries@nice-1.co.uk

Crime Analysis Team
Nice 1 Ltd

PROTECTING THE PUBLIC:Supporting The Police to Succeed : Home Office White Paper December 2009

LABOUR TO CUT POLICE OVERTIME BY 20% AND SLASH BACK OFFICE SUPPORT

A long-awaited Home Office document, meant to dramatically reform the police service and slash red tape, outlines moves to dramatically cut police overtime, once again putting the Government on a crash course with front line police officers.

The paper also proposes standard police uniforms, body armour and beat cars in England and Wales.

Last year forces in England and Wales spent around £400 million on overtime. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson will slash resources for police work at a time when the public are demanding officers spend more time on the streets. However, he also proposes huge reductions in back room staff, who are supposed to help free up officer time.

The White Paper — Protecting the Public: Supporting the Police to Succeed — sets out the Government plan to save £70 million on police overtime and £75 million by making huge cuts in back office support services over the next six months.  

The draft, released today, is available for download by clicking here, or the link in the Reference and Resource side bar. A quote from the draft states  “We will deliver better value for money for the public and achieve more frontline delivery through improving business processes, reducing bureaucracy and better deployment, at the same time saving money by reducing overtime.”

The document contains plans and long-term policies they plan to introduce, including police officers in England and Wales being required to wear the same uniform if Labour are re elected. A separate distinctive national uniform is also to be introduced in the next parliament for police community support officers.

Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "This is quite clearly a real damp squib of a White Paper. There is a lack of any new real ideas and we get a clear sense that we have now is a Labour Government which has run out of steam and has no idea how to reform policing in the UK."

Only sergeants and constables are paid overtime, officers working at the front line of our society. Front end policing is where the financial support should be focused and overtime is a vital part of delivering the policing the public wants and needs. Senior Officers should have the freedom and discretion to allocate overtime according to policing priorities.

"Supporting The Police to Succeed" hardly seems appropriate when accompanied by proposals that might just push police morale over the edge.