This article was in the Guardian yesterday and was written and paid for by its author Mike Ledwidge. Clearly Mike was angry enough to fork out a significant amount of his hard earned wedge and deserves to be heard.

Our public services have been devastated over the last 25
years and the reasons have been hidden in the complexity
of detail. I am so angry about what has been done that
I have actually paid for this page out of my own money.
How angry have I got to be to do that! And yes, I do know
what I am talking about.

I can remember when I was first working as a response officer and a flat tyre was nothing more than an inconvenience, having to change the tyre myself was  necessary and the only way to continue driving, after all is that not why we have a spare tyre in the first place?

A detective colleague of mine  recently got a flat in his unmarked car so he called the control room on airwave to request the AA to attend and change his flat tyre, he correctly assumed changing the tyre himself was not going to be an option since the death of common sense, some time ago. The response was “that will cost about £90 and is not cost effective”, call the force garage and arrange for them to fix it”.

He did this and waited until 2 mechanics eventually turned up with a low loader and took his car away to replace the failed tyre because the wheel nuts have to be torqued appropriately with a torque wrench at the workshop. Some 4 hours later his car was returned to him by the same two mechanics, one to drive the car back and the other...

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Some sick individual has created a facebook group depicting Raoul Moat as a legend! Sky News reports this sick idea with over 3000 people signing up to be members of the group. I say Facebook should have this group removed immediately as an offensive publication that disrespects his victims and their families. Moat was a cold blooded killer and should he have been arrested was looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars, right where he belonged.

In my force we seem to have a large team of people, mainly civilians who’s primary role is to gather statistics and punch data into a computer. They produce information informing the SMT (senior management Team)  about how poor or how well we are doing in certain areas, I don’t really know who these people are! they are just names at the end of an email or in a PowerPoint presentation.

I am told things like we are the worst performing station for carrying out things like stop searches and that we need to do more to get inline with other stations across the force and the rest of England and Wales.

We are told that we are one of the worst for detecting a certain type for crime, maybe theft from motor vehicles or violence against the person and that we MUST improve in this area!

We are constantly reminded of what percentage of a crime group we have managed to detect over the past 12 months compared with the previous 12 months!

As a uniformed frontline police officer do I need to know how we are performing...

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http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2233878.ece

At long last the latest episode by Charlie Owen is out in the shops and my copy arrived today. If this book is as good as Charlie’s first two books I am in for a real treat.

The last two books had me in stitches of laughter throughout so I cant wait to get stuck in!! My advice is get your copy ASAP and enjoy the idea of Policing that would have the criminals shaking in their shoes.

I don’t think so, looks more like the officer was trying to give this guy a dead arm in order to get him to release his arm. Hardly a beating in my eyes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7757229.stm

First I want to say that I had some serious help with this post from a close friend and colleague, who is a far better writer than I. My thanks to him for saving me here as I was lost for words.

Don’t let the Home Secretary ‘blind you’ by talking nonsense. On one hand she makes grand claims regarding ‘stop and account’ and how she is reducing the burden of paperwork on operational policing by removing this burden in a trial 10 forces – oh don’t rush there are 43 forces you know. Lets not forget that this is the same Government of which this would be minister belongs that introduced ‘Stop and Account’ in the first place. As is usual with ‘Nu Labour’ this was contrary to the fears of the service (or as I preferred to call it in it’s heyday ‘Force’). Why did they introduce this process initially? It was to appease some unproved belief that the police were somehow institutionally racist. Do me a favor; nobody other than the author of that ‘famous report’ even knows what that term means.

The fears about the introduction of this...

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