Scratchings in the Dark...

I don't know whether blog etiquette allows me to mention my book, published last week, but I've been blogging since August 2013, so perhaps I've earned the right?

Please indulge me. It's amazing what fifty chimpanzees can achieve if they spend a decade hitting random keys...

Those apes - perhaps representing my own personality disorders :-) - have managed to create a 330 page frolic through my police career. The Accidental Copper

This is how the book was born:

When I was a new recruit I saw systemic dysfunctionality that was obvious to anybody with half a brain, and I quickly realised that the job was nothing like what I'd been led to expect.

Over the following months and years, as the job closed around me – micromanagement, obsession with performance figures, aggressive and dimwitted bosses, hundred-hour weeks, no control over work load, sleep deprivation – I began keeping notes of everything I found amusing, angering, bizarre, inspiring or sickening.

It was my coping mechanism. Most cops have one.

I knew that normal people had a right to know to how things go wrong (and right) in policing. And to understand how hard their police officers work, and the impossibility of them maintaining any sort of a normal life.

Police management are in no hurry to raise the issues, nor to allow officers to speak freely. I had always enjoyed writing, and it now became my purpose to compile my scribblings into a book, and to blog.

And so I strive to put the facts out there in an entertaining fashion - to make people laugh and open their eyes.

Do please click on the link and tell me what you think. My purpose certainly isn't to make money - I've priced it almost as low as Amazon will permit, and have already written off thousands of pounds spent on bananas...

Think of police managers as greedy bonobos throwing their excrement at each other. My fifty simians are on the side of truth and integrity.

Enjoy the book!

It's for you.