News hot off the press from my buddy in Cheshire is that their police assessment centre dates will be the last two weekends in June. BUT they are only giving people two weeks notice. So, if you are waiting for your assessment date, that is when it will be. I have no idea what justification forces have for not giving people more notice. It takes a lot of organisation to sort out rooms and staff, especially over a weekend as these dates are, so the force knows well in advance when these dates will be. Why they cannot have the common courtesy to notify people earlier is beyond me. To make their own staff work weekends, they will need to give weeks and weeks of notice. They seem to forget that the candidates also have lives, and will have to book time off work (not always easy to do), or make travel arrangements, or arrange childcare or whatever.  In fact, on this subject of preparation for police interviews and recruitment, I could imagine that the lack of notice is a deliberate ploy to limit peoples chances to prepare. Candidates (usually poor candidates) tend not to start preparing until they get an assessment date. So, giving them two weeks notice limits how much advance prep many candidates will do. This of course works in the favour of our students, who we prep up mercilessly, and so perform even beter in comparison to candidates who only started working 2 weeks before the assessment date. That is probably a factor as to why we do so well in getting people into Cheshire.

In any event, the moral of the story is that you need to be aware of the act that a lot of forces whether through inefficiency, incompetence or malice, do not give much notice of assessment centre dates. So, my advice is to work on the basis that you may only ever be a few weeks away from your assessment, and prepare on that presumption.

The same of course goes for the fitness test and final interview (if your force has one. Not all police forces do). I am always amazed when people say to me on courses” I have just been told I have my fitness test, and I only have a week to prepare.” Well, actually , no you haven’t, you lazy bastard, you have had since the day you decided to join the police to prepare, as you always knew you would have to do a fitness test! Same goes for final interview as well. Some forces will call you for final interview within ten days of telling you that you have passed your assessment day. It is no good crying about this, as you should be working on the basis that you may get called at any time anyway. Such is police recruitment, but if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined!!

Following on from the last blog entry, many of you have emailed me saying you are not entirely convinced by the story about integrity. That’s okay, it is good to be a cynic, but ask most operational officers and they will be aware of similar stories. I had one officer on my shift in Cheshire Police who moved to another shift for career development. Within a week, he and a “colleague” locked up a drunk in the town. In the cells, something happened, and the drunk received a facial injury. The result of this was that the officer (who had an outstanding arrest record, and was a person you wanted next to you in a disorder environment) ended up in crown court on a very serious assault charge. He was cleared. Cheshire however then put him in front of a discipline panel, and sacked him on the basis that he had asked other officers to lie for him. As a crown court jury had found him not guilty of the crime to begin with, I am uncertain how he could have asked others to lie (as he had not done anything wrong to begin with), but such is life at police discipline panels!

This same double think is carried on in police recruitment. Using Cheshire as an example again, a few months ago one candidate got fed up (not unreasonably) with waiting for an assessment date and being fobbed off by recruiting. He expressed this frustration on one of the unofficial police forums, such as www.police-information.co.uk, calling Cheshire recruitment arrogant and unhelpful. When he phoned again a few weeks later to see if there was any update, they informed him that his application had been terminated. When he asked why, it was because of his comment on the forum! Naturally, no one in Cheshire recruiting had the courage or decency to call him and tell him this! Personally, whilst he was unwise to put enough information in his forum entry to identify himself, I think he was another victim of high handed bullying. This is why the same force lost 11 recruits a while back, ten of whom were female. This caused such concern that the Police Federation actually highlighted the issue in their magazine. It is a problem in some small forces, the bigger ones tend to be fairer and even handed. Cheshire never saw the link to this, which is probably why in my time with Cheshire I only ever saw two black officers. A staff survey the same year in Cheshire showed 75% of staff felt they were not valued (this was quietly buried after a big fanfare about how important it was to take part and have a say in the future of the force.)

In my time in the job, I cannot ever recall officers coming in and complaining about the residents in such a place, or the attitude of the criminals. No one minded agro from them, it is after all part of the job. What everyone complains about however is the attitude of bosses sometimes, especially those who have never spent any time on the streets.

Still, one can only be thankful that there are still people willing to do the job, not because of the leadership, but in spite of it!

Two incidents this week throughout the national press which made me think. Firstly, the death of the guy in London at G20, after being pushed by a bobby. I clearly was not there, but I wonder if the scenario went like this. I wonder if this guy was giving the officers a bit of stick, and instead of being locked up as would happen normally, bearing in mind they were in the middle of a public order situation, the officers have pushed him out of the way instead (a legitimate public order tactic). They cannot just walk past him, as the first rule of public order policing is NEVER leave potential hostile sbehind you ( as they have a tendency to throw things at you). So, the officer pushed him (another legitimate public order tactic), and the net effect is he falls over. Big deal. Unfortnately, as he is an alcoholic, his heart can’t stand up to the sress (that he himself created by geting involved in, or at least not going away from the scene) and he dies. If there ha dbeen no underlying medical conditon, this would not have been of any consequence at all. Never the less, I bet this officer gets crucified. he has aparanetly gone off sick, probably with stress, and there will be criticism over that. If you were on duty, gave someone a push, and suddenly found yourself being blamed nationally for someones death, would you not be stressed?

On another point, Newcastle crown court this week found an officer guilty of causing death  by dangerous driving, He hit a girl travelling at 70MPh trying to catch up with a suspect vehicle that had come up on anpr. he had shortly before been ravelling at 94MPH. I do not know the full facts of this tragedy, but wonder if the reason he was not using blues and twos was because he was trying to catch up with the car without warning it he was coming after it. A bad decision in hindsight, but one that bobbies make all the time. I also don’t know whether 94 was safe to travel at through a 30. Some 30’s you can do a hundred through safely, some you cannot. On that basis, maybe the conviction was fair, I do not know. What I do now is that the officer was remanded in custody, and told he faces prison.  This is what I object to. Some scumbag car thief kills someone and may or may not be given prison. A lorry driver watching a DVD on a laptop drives into the back of a family of 6, killing them all, on the M6 and gets 2 years, but will not be remanded in custody at his trial. The officer here may have been misguided, or foolish, or over eager. They will however live with what they have done, as most cops care about the community they serve. His career had ended, he is sacked, he faces all the mental consequences, none of which I accept makes up for the girls death. I just question whether prison was necessary. Had he been a speeding, disqualified driver who has no insurance and never passed a test, he would probably have got away with careless driving. I accept the police must abide by higher standards than everyone else, but this crucifixion of officers is unjust beyond boundaries. problem is, the public just do not care.

But just another story about the cops in the Mail this sunday which should make us think. A firearms officer blocks in a car after a six mile chase, which then rams him. he is currently in hospital with serious head injuries. Aparently he did shout stop armed police before he got hit. I wonder if if the thought went through his mind that if he pulls the trigger, he will face a huge investigation, and have the press hounding him in the same way as the above two examples. I wonder if he spent a second weighing up his options, and in that time was hit by the car. If so, society should be ashamed of itself. In America, officers would have opened fire staright away. Here, fire, and you are effectively teh subject of a murder (or attempted murder) investigation. This is why i was never interested in being a firearms officer. One can only hope that there remain enough officers willing to take the risk, or else that society recognises that split second decisions by people trying to do their best need backing, not villification if things do not go right.

Just heard this interesting peice of news. Norfolk Police have decided that for candidates who have passed the national police assessment system, they want them to do a presentation on how they will put into effect the force values and objectives. What  a complete load of rubbish. Lets just think about this for a minute. Lets ignore the fact that these candidates have just passed a national system, which, weak and flawed though it is, has been adopted by all English and Welsh forces, as well as BTP etc. This is the system which means in most forces, you will have been classed as having proved yourself as having the skills to be a police officer. But let us ignore it. Norfold clearly feel that this does not evidence clearly enough these skills, otherwise they would not feel the need to do something else QED. But why  a presentation? Why on that topic? This is the kind of presentation topic that would form part of an Inspectors board, not a poor bloody PC. How many average people give presentations? Especially if they are young, or from a disadvantaged background and are in the process of clawing themselves up? This presentation merely gives a big advantage to Specials and CSO’s (whihc may be no bad thing), while being exclusionary. Unless you hapen to be  asales rep, most people will not have  a clue how to start this. And before Norfolk police recruitment say this is the point, why don’t any other forces use presentations? Is it harder to police Norfolk than Merseyside or Manchester? Do Norfolk officers need to be better communicators than those working Brixton or Toxteth? No of course not. This is just someones bright idea to cut down numbers of successful aplicants, and has not been though through fully. I bet you this daft idea disappears within a year, and is never used again. Any takers?

Integrity is an issue that crops up all the time in the police recruitment process (and indeed the police). Whether at the police national assessment process, or at a final police interview, the issue is constantly being monitored. The theory is that any behaviour that is unethical is completely unacceptable, and that is what you must strive for. The reality in many forces is a bit more flexible. In Cheshire police, a little while back, images from the LAPD were circulated around the force by a control room operator. The images were LAPD crime scene photos of an incident where someone was being chased by the police, and had jumped off an elevated freeway to try and escape. Regrettably, they had missed the other freeway they were trying to jump onto, and fallen. In doing so, they had fallen onto a metal spiked fence, like that outside a park or church. The photos showed the persons head actually mounted in effect on the spike from the fall. The body was sitting at the base of the fence. The guy didn’t have a long neck, the fall had detached his head from his body. To make matters worse, he happened to be black. Another force had quickly taken action against everyone who had received this email. Cheshire however in the main had quiet words with people (the original source in the control room resigned). The point is that Cheshire Police took a very softly, softly approach to this, presumably hoping that they would get away without any adverse publicity (which they did). Other forces who were more honest about what had happened caught a lot of publicity. There was a rumour going about at the time that the main reason for this was that one of the control room operators involved was the daughter of a very senior officer (hence informal and non career damaging advice), but even I am not convinced that the force would be this blatant!

My point is that in police role plays and in interview, you need to be seen to be actively challenging inappropriate behaviour of any kind. If you do not (unless your dad is a senior officer), then you will be on your way to failing.