Commuting Officers Provide Free Security On Railways

Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service pay £500/year for rail travel from Central London out to a distance of seventy miles, although new probationers aren't offered this. The cost is likely to increase further and disappear within three or four years.

I know that police-bashers dislike the idea of us receiving a rail fare concession, but I have points to make. Very few Met officers can afford to live in Greater London, including myself, and wouldn't work for the MPS without the travel concession. For London to be policed, we are expected to pay £500/year and tolerate a two hour daily commute.

But here's something that people perhaps don't realise:

We are technically never off-duty and so have to frequently confront aggressive drunks and fare dodgers during our journeys to or from work. At least once a week I'm on a train on my way home, exhausted after a long shift, and the guard runs to me and asks for help. I have no CS spray, handcuffs or baton. No body armour or back-up. But I have no choice but to deal with a situation which, incidentally, I won't be paid for. Every other passenger is able to enjoy their ride home after work, but not cops. We are on duty 24/7.

Try to imagine that, and how you would feel.

The Met management intend to take away the free travel over the next two or three years, so that the MPS can save the money they pay the railway companies. However, the railway companies have never insisted the Met pay them for the concession, and back when the free travel was granted, they offered it for free. The MPS management however, insisted on paying a small fee and the companies have gradually escalated the fee since then.

When I travel on trains railway staff tell me they're glad to see me - they know they have a police officer to deal with fare dodgers and drunks. We provide a free security service, which the staff on the trains welcome, but doesn't seem to be recognised by their senior managers or the MPS senior officers. Officers of Thames Valley and other forces have free passes, so if the train companies want to keep the free security service that we provide, shouldn't they consider giving Metropolitan Police officers the benefit of passes?

It isn't as if we enjoy a long commute to work, or having to deal with situations off-duty.

The reason Sir Bernard gives for not offering the concession to new constables is that he wants to encourage applications from people living in Greater London, which he says this will increase the diversity of the officers.

This is propaganda and spin designed to justify a money-saving exercise. I can't afford to spend a third of my salary on the daily commute and, in two or three years when the concession is taken away, I predict a mass exodus from the MPS.

Gideon is a new probationer on my team. His salary is too low for him to live in London, so he commutes, like most of us. But because he has no travel concession, he can't afford to pay into the pension scheme.

Gideon expected the travel concession, and so has had to change his plans. He is still in his two year probation and already wants to leave and find a career with a pension, perhaps where he can afford to work within a reasonable distance of his home. Like many officer he might take a part-time job alongside his police work, in order to pay into a private pension scheme.

Sir Bernard might claim he wants more Londoners to join, but Gideon tells me that all of his class at Hendon were young, white, middle-class and living in the Home Counties with their parents.

Without the travel concession, only candidates from affluent families can now afford to work for the Metropolitan Police. By removing the travel concession Sir Bernard has created the opposite effect from his stated intention.

Gideon adds that most of his classmates intend to work for the Metropolitan Police Service only a couple of years, then either join a county force or leave the police altogether, having acquired it for their CVs.

The travel concession was brought in roughly twelve years ago to stop the haemorrhage of Met officers to county forces. I predict the Met will again become a training ground for county officers, as it was before the county cops flooded into the Met. These things run in cycles, as management reinvent the wheel again and again, pretending they've had original ideas, and doing so only to gain evidence for their promotions.

Sir Bernard's stated desire to increase recruitment from London is also ironic because he himself isn't from London and neither are most of his entourage.

Denying officers the travel concession to save money – it's a short-term goal that creates long-term problems.

Stop And Search

BBC News: police stop and search powers to be overhauled

I wonder about the unhelpfully negative government attitude to stop and search until I remember that politicians always want to win votes amongst marginalised groups – particularly those who ordinarily wouldn't vote, such as young black males. How convenient for the politicians that this group also attracts more stop and search than any other demographic.

Stop and search is notable because it has placed politicians on the same side as the media – a rare event indeed. The media find the police an easy target, and the politicos are always happy to stick the boot in if it helps their popularity. It's my opinion – I understand you might not share it.

The whole tenor of this discussion around stop and search, and Mrs May's statements, seems to rest on an underlying assumption that cops don't know their stop and search powers - that they carry out searches without grounds, negligently and targeted on black youths.

I don't want to get into a discussion about the likelihood of black male youths carrying drugs or weapons, except to say that in my personal experience many drug dealers and violent criminals are black. And some are white.

This BBC article fails to mention the benefits of stop and search, or its purpose – which is to lock up thieves, drug dealers and violent people carrying weapons. Also there is of a course a deterring effect when people see police carrying out stop and searches.

None of this is being mentioned, as if the benefits of stop and search are a dirty little secret. Unfortunately our society remains very non-utopian - guns, knives and drugs are plentiful on our streets - and so for the time being police need search powers.

As for a ban on stop and search – there might be imperfections in its use, but if officers can't stop and search how can they prevent criminals carrying guns, knives and drugs on our streets? And how can they catch thieves carrying stolen items, such as shoplifters, or burglars carrying cro-bars and bolt-croppers?

Please, let's get real. Search powers exist to prevent our criminals carrying their guns and knives around with impunity.

The article states that “...only about 10% of ...searches lead to an arrest.” This is incorrect - the publicly available figure is 17% (I will find the reference for this). More importantly, why should a low fraction be a bad thing? The greater the proportion of unsuccessful searches the better, because this shows that stop and search is succeeding as a deterrent.

The discussion seems to imply that there is no good reason why a lawful stop and search would not result in an arrest, but that view makes no sense to police officers. Cops are not omniscient, and stop and search is not a science. It is more of an art, based upon using experience to put together a mosaic of clues to justify a search - something an armchair critic will not understand.

Mrs May might say that misused stop and search is "enormous waste of police time”, but officers know that too. We have heavy workloads and constant pressure from supervisors to generate arrests and detections, therefore no constable is motivated to waste time searching a person unless he has good reason to suggest he will find a weapon, stolen credit card, crack cocaine etc.

In practical terms, if the Home Office were to bring in some kind of stop and search registration system for coppers, how could it possibly work? Will officers show a card before searching somebody? Let's imagine two officers arrive on the High Street and tackle a man seen with a knife in his back pocket. They grab his wrists and handcuff him because of the obvious threat to life. What if neither have passed the stop and search test – they would have to radio up: “Can we have a search-authorised officer please?” And this would happen constantly. Finding the item might be time criticial.

One last point – the government might seek to reduce stop and search, but that won't prevent the ongoing fact that every constable is under pressure to hit a personal monthly target for searches. Sir Bernard and Simon Byrne might deny the existence of personal targets, but they are lying.

Your Local Station Has Closed? Hey Presto! – A Reduction in Crime.

Dominic Casciani has written a review article for BBC News:

BBC News: Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

However I'm not sure why, because this matter was thoroughly examined by George Monbiot back in January 2013:

George Monbiot: The grime behind the crime

I speculate that Dominic Casciani is revisiting the same material purely to support his Radio 4 programme on the subject. I do wish the BBC would generate it's own ideas.

Anyway, the suggestion is that lead in petrol leads to criminality and therefore the removal of lead twenty years ago is responsible for the alleged current reduction in crime. Lead is a neuro-toxin and could certainly be a contributory factor, but I have another theory as to why the UK recorded crime figures have reduced over the last few months. Here's a link for reference, but let's remember that police crime figures aren't worth the paper they're written on.

The Guardian: England and Wales crime falls to lowest level in 32 years

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, desperate to shore up his decaying stewardship of the Metropolitan Police Service, hasn't held back from claiming that he is responsible for the declining UK crime figures. This is highly unlikely, but to explain I have to again talk about Sir Bernard's Local Policing Model (LPM). This is his brainchild – the Brave New World of policing we have been working within since June 2013.

Recorded crime has not dropped because of the efficacy of the Local Policing Model, but for the following two reasons.

Crime has reduced because (1) the LPM now forces the public to jump through hoops when they wish to report crime, and (2) the LPM has eliminated the time available for officers to go out and pro-actively find crime.

Let's consider the first issue - obstacles preventing the reporting of crime:

Sir Bernard has closed stations and front counters with alacrity – on my borough the availability to the public has reduced by two-thirds. It's hard to find an open station, especially after 5pm.

The public must now request an appointment and hope that the attending officer's previous appointments have not overrun. The appointments are hourly and the officers often cover half a borough on foot, with perhaps 40 minutes travel time between the appointments. Inevitably many overrun and those later in the day are therefore cancelled.

I often see members of the public with their perplexed faces pressed against the glass of the closed front counters, wondering Where are the police officers? Many of them give up when they learn they must travel miles to the nearest open station or jump through the hoops of the appointments system.

The second issue - officers no longer able to pro-actively seek crime:

Tom Winsor's edict to get officers out of the back offices has had an unintended consequence. Instead of removing officers in 'back offices', Sir Bernard has closed the highly productive Beat Crimes, Case Progression Units, and other so-called 'back office' teams. These took possession of volume crime investigations and dealt with the prisoners – freeing other officers to patrol and do pro-active work, such as drugs warrants and removing dangerous dogs from their owners.

A valuable secondary function of the now non-existent Beat Crimes and Case Progression Units was that they provided investigative training for new officers.

These burdens now all lie squarely on the shoulders of the Local Policing Team officers, who are expected to do everything, and remember that the simplest prisoner can rarely be dealt with in less than six hours.

Summing up:

Under Sir Bernard's Local Policing Model, officers find less crime because they have no time to go out looking for it – they are instead tied up with appointments and drowning in volume crime. Instead of searching drug dealers on the street, or interrupting the drug supply chain by closing crack houses and executing warrants, they now visit café after café to check CCTV for wallets left on tables. Ironically, those officers who were moved to bolster the Local Police Teams now spend much of their time replacing desk-bound officers across the borough who are sick or on leave. This is because the LPT is treated as the 'go-to' team – a pool of resources that inspectors can dip into at will.

The appointments system has roughly ten slots each day, therefore a maximum of ten crimes can be reported per Disappointment Car. It's a bottleneck designed into the system – it regulates the rate at which people can report crime. No matter how much crime is happening, the individual crimes cannot be reported faster than ten per day. Also, the public don't expect to leap through hoops, so they sometimes just give up.

We spend less time out looking for crime, and the public can't report it!

Hey presto – The figures show a reduction!

Lose Those Pointless Senior Ranks

How might the dysfunctionality be fixed? The domestic violence policies and Sir Bernard's Local Policing Model, for example, are far from fit for purpose.

The Metropolitan Police hierarchy is such an absurdly high tottering structure – eleven ranks from Commissioner to constable – the likes of Simon Byrne and Bernard Hogan-Howe can never know what happens at the ground level.

Sir Bernard and his entourage are held responsible for failures so they understandably want to control everything. However, because they are so remote, they put great store in targets and performance figures. These are poor proxies for the real business of policing, but are the only information that can be easily measured.

Unfortunately, as I've explained in earlier blog posts, these proxies are almost meaningless.

What happens in practice is the Commissioner creates a philosophy, or brand. The two or three ranks below turn this into a broad set of principles. The two or three ranks below then convert these into a package of actions. Finally, the lower three ranks attempt to carry out this, now highly theoretical, scheme. Examples are Sir Bernard's Local Policing Model, or Sir Paul's Single-Patrolling.

Why not halve the distance between the top and the bottom? Eliminate those highly-paid ranks that achieve little but insulate the Commissioner from the rank-and-file: Chief Inspectors, Chief Superintendents, Commanders, Assistant Deputy Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners. These cosy layers ensure that Commissioners' schemes are disconnected from reality.

With a much flatter hierarchy the top bosses might better understand and be motivated to take into account the experiences of the officers at the coal face. Those constables struggle to make the policies work, fighting against day-to-day realities.

This leads me to the other factor. The senior managers never feed the constables' experiences back into their grand schemes. They are unwilling to tweak and amend the policies to get them to work. Once begun they are always cast in stone, and so ultimately every top-down scheme fails. I don't care how many graphs and spreadsheets the Commissioner can produce to 'prove' otherwise. My colleagues and I witness the consequences at the ground level.

Bill and Melinda Gates run a multi-billion dollar charitable foundation aiming at helping impoverished people in the developing nations. They travel around Africa speaking to and living with the same people they are working to help. Bill and Melinda take note of what they learn and use this information to decide where the Foundation's money is channelled.

They only consider that a project has succeeded if they see a tangible result for money spent. They really care that the Foundation's work results in products that work.

Their reward derives from the satisfaction of creating these products and real improvements in people's lives. Met managers of all levels, however are satisfied if they simply gather enough performance figures to keep their managers happy. The senior officers consider it a success if they have the figures to generate graphs and spreadsheets demonstrating they have achieved notional reductions in crime and increases in public confidence.

There's a huge difference between these two ways of interpreting 'success'. One management style works and the other doesn't. The Met's approach flows from the fact the Met managers are embedded inside a reward structure that recognises only one thing: achieving targets – arrests, detections, stop-searches.

As long as this reward structure continues nothing can change. We will continue along this trajectory of rewarding managers for figure-gathering. Sir Bernard claims 'Victim Focus' is everything, and yet every officer would say we are not at all in the business of focussing on the victims. We are hounded daily for figures. Figures are everything.

If an S-grade – a rape for example – has reached 59 minutes with no officer free to attend, it is down-graded to an E-grade (48 hours attendance target) and becomes simply another appointment in the Local Police Team's diary.

Technically the attendance target was hit, but this is poor consolation for the victim. We have totally failed insofar as Victim Focus is concerned. An officer should have been with the victim within 60 minutes, not 48 hours.

We are trapped inside an obsession with figures and the fear of not achieving those figures. Failure means promotions withheld.

A change in attitude can only flow from the mentality of the person at the top – the Commissioner. He or she needs to set an example all the managers and constables can follow.

The Met functions to a degree but could do far better.

The Figures Prove It's Working!

Panicked by suggestions from the public and media that Sir Bernard's Local Policing Model is a shambolic failure, Simon Byrne – the Assistant Commissioner, soon to be Chief Constable of Cheshire Constabulary – has been holding public meetings.

The meetings were attended by community members, press and cops. One of my contacts described to me how, prior to the arrival of the public, an inspector organised a police-only 'briefing'.

“We need to make this look good,” he told the assembled constables. “If you are asked questions, give the impression that it's working well. Reassure them and don't say anything negative.”

A constable told me afterwards:

“He was asking us to lie to people - sickening. Our job was to make Simon Byrne and the Local Policing Model look good.”

The officer explained that people looked askance, but Byrne just kept pointing at his graphs and repeating himself:

"Look at the figures - they prove there are more officers out there. The figures prove it's working!”

The Local Policing Model certainly might function if it received a little tweaking, but Sir Bernard refuses to accept that there are problems. "Nothing will be changed" we are constantly told. This shows an ugly element of police management: a fear of losing face. Senior bosses think that acting upon constructive criticism means losing face. They therefore refuse to accept any useful constructive criticism, of which there is plenty coming from the constables struggling to make it work.

Simon believes his graphs really do indicate increased patrolling and more effective policing. His a certainty is an interesting symptom of the dichotomy between senior management and rank-and-file:

Their spreadsheets and graphs are the senior bosses' reality. To the guys and girls who are hands-one with victims and criminals, the realities are the victims and suspects, the events they witness and the day-to-day organisational stupidity that threatens to drown them.

I don't blame Simon Byrne. It's understandable that he is unaware of the realities of policing, and that his perception of policing is riddled with misconceptions – he is nine ranks above a constable, so how could it be otherwise. It's unavoidable that all senior officers at that level are PR managers.

What is avoidable is that they force their policies through, ignoring feedback from the rank-and-file, and so fail to fix or discard their failing initiatives. They grit their teeth, ignore reality and keep presenting their graphs.

That is unforgiveable.

Shattered

The Guardian: Police officer Mike Baillon smashed pensioners car window

Most police journalism is painfully tendentious however this piece by Vikram Dodd is relatively balanced and transparent. Incidentally, I enjoyed the two spelling mistakes in the link: "penshioner" and the officer's name.

It's no surprise to me that this officer was treated with contempt by his managers. When my colleagues have taken time off for injuries on duty, their inspectors have taken no interest in their convalescence. On the contrary they usually attempt to force a premature return to work by threatening disciplinary action.

Making armchair criticisms of this officer's actions is the easiest thing in the world. But what qualifies people to give their views? Police officers start work each day not knowing what will happen during the shift, except for the likelihood of facing confrontation and violence. Who, apart from the military and police, is qualified to pronounce on the split-second decisions that constables make every day under great pressure?

I broke a windscreen once, in order to save a colleague's life. She and I were with a woman regularly beaten by her husband. While I was writing the victim's statement the guy arrived in his car so we went to outside with the intention of arresting him. I asked him out of the car but it was clear he had no intention of cooperating.

“Fuck off and keep your pig noses out of our business!”

He was known for assaulting police and carrying weapons so I watched him very carefully and called for back-up. He grit his teeth and would probably have punched me, had he been outside the car. He then put it into reverse gear, clearly intending to drive away.

At that moment I realised my colleague was standing directly behind the car. I drew my baton and slammed it into the windscreen, creating a web of cracks. This gave him pause - he climbed out and screamed threats at me. I wrestled him to the ground and put handcuffs on, then arrested him for a string of domestic assaults.

If I hadn't made that split-second decision to smash his windscreen he would have reversed over my colleague. It was a scary situation and I don't regret my decision for one second.

Police officers only do such things when absolutely necessary. Each of us knows that any action or inaction can can result in dismissal, public infamy and a criminal court case.

We know all this but are still prepared to do the job. The ultimate armchair critics – the media – ought perhaps to show a little appreciation from time to time?

My Thumb's in the Hole!

I am sorry to hear of PC Patrick's resignation:

The Guardian: Victimised Metropolitan Police Whistleblower Resigns

He is a brave man. Many of us spell out the senior officers' constant lying in blogs but PC Patrick called their bluff. Not being able to see him sacked must have felt like a knife in their sides. I'm not surprised he is leaving: ethical acts such as disclosing to outside world the huge lies told by senior bosses such as Simon Byrne, the new Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, and Sir Bernard, are considered anathema. PC Patrick would be constantly forced to work the most unpleasant jobs until he quit voluntarily. That is the real face of the 'caring' Met.

PC Patrick, good luck on the outside! Perhaps leave a comment here reporting on life out there?

Why is the Met like this? It's an infection of management culture which meshes perfectly with senior managers' desire for promotion and status.

The Commissioner and his underlings rule by command-and-control. They are in thrall to performance indicators, which the Sir Bernard and the likes of Simon Byrne use to defend themselves from criticism. But these are 'indicators' – they should be allowed to 'indicate', and no more.

The water is pouring through the dam, but Bernard and Simon have their thumbs in holes:

“Yes I know water is pouring through, but look – my thumb is in the hole. It's achieving nothing, but it's in the hole! I deserve my promotion!” 

They create practices like the disastrous Local Policing Model (see my post below) – and pass rigid requirements for figures to those below. This propagates downwards, each manager knowing that he is safe as long as he can provide his boss with the figures she wants. For the PCs – the ones doing the work – they must do exactly as they are told, even if it's impossible.

“Square pegs in round holes? Just do it. I don't care how.”

Consider Yves Morieux 2013 fascinating TED talk about removing complication in management:

Yves explains:

"When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, matrices – they need poor proxies for reality. They don't understand reality and they add the complication of matrices and KPIs...the less rules we must have to give discretionary power to managers.
 
We do the opposite – the bigger we are the more rules we create and we end up with the Encyclopedia Brittanica of rules. You need to empower everybody to use their judgement, their intelligence.”

Doesn't this sound like a photographic negative of the UK's Command and Control policing, where KPIs and matrices are everything and nobody can make decisions except the Commissioner?

The Local Policing Model belongs to a world of make-believe. Sir Bernard believes that by taking away from officers all flexibility or self-determination he ensures it will work. Unfortunately the reverse is true - he ensures that nothing works effectively.

It's likely the Local Policing Model would function to a degree if tweaked – the senior managers need simply listen to the problems experienced by the PCs and make amendments. But they don't do this. Each strata of management simply orders the layer below it:

“Make it work exactly as we've told you. Nothing is going to change.”

So here is the lack of power to make a decision. Managers and constables are not empowered to make choices. Sir Bernard reserves that only for himself.

So the blame lies at the top – a Commissioner unwilling to accept that policing cannot work without flexibility, and that new practices will never work first time. It's not about saving face, but being realistic.

When a company manufactures an item, the final design comes about by an iterative process of development, taking problems on board. When a fault is found with a manufactured product it will be recalled and fixed – for example a car. So why can't police managers do this also?

Another is that it is foolish to expect a constable to be a Jack-of-all-trades when even the simplest arrest will spirit away eight hours of her time. Sir Bernard has closed the prisoner handling teams, but why not reconstitute them? Every PC knows how well they worked - effectively processing prisoners and providing excellent investigative training for new officers.

Tom Winsor dislikes the idea of constables in back office roles, therefore Sir Bernard has obliged by closing support teams such as the prisoner handling units and the 'IBO' - a kind of help-desk. Those officers were then moved to the Local Policing Teams - a show of strength that was heavily sold to the media. Ironically, those uniformed officers are rarely available on the streets because they are the first port of call when PCs are needed to deal with prisoners or fill vacant roles in the 'Grip And Pace' - a half-hearted replacement for the IBO function. The remainder of the time the LPT officers are standing on cordons, bulking out response team or anywhere else a gap is perceived.

Recreating the support roles and particularly the prisoner handling teams must be made a priority. Those teams would free up PCs for the street, reversing the moribund disaster of Sir Bernard's beloved Local Policing Model.

Any new system, such as the Local Policing Model, has flaws that appear after implementation. One such flaw is the closure of police stations and replacement with the appointment system and the 'Contact Points' – a PCSO shuffling her feet in a town hall for an hour, unable to report crime or do anything except direct people to the nearest 24-hour station. Why not recognise this as a failing and revise the plan?

That doesn't happen in Britain. Police senior bosses seem to ape each other in absolutely refusing to admit that some decisions are mistakes.

Incidentally, with all these hoops that members of the public must leap through to see a constable, no wonder Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe can claim crime has fallen.