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.

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.

Following a phone conversation this morning with the BBC, we thought this may be of interest to some of you. Please note that at this stage this is nothing to do with talking Blues, other than we have agreed to put the request to people visiting our site.

BBC Manchester are looking for people who are thinking about, or going through the process of joining the police. We would like to talk for a range of people, from different backgrounds, who represent the current crop of applications. We are looking to follow them through the process for a series of factual programmes to be aired on the BBC. If you are chosen to be filmed, the BBC would be willing to provide specialised training to help you on your way.

If you think you might be interested and would like more info, please e-mail Rick Murray on rick.murray@bbc.co.uk We are particularly interested in hearing from people who you wouldn’t usually associate with the force.

So, if interested, please contact Rick direct and not ourselves, but mention where you saw the notice.

Dfydd Powys pulled a sly trick this week on potential recruits. Their recruiting campaign has just finished its paper sift selection, and invited people to assessment centre. However, letters sent out to candidate’s sates that only 30% of candidates succeeded in passing the paper sift. This made a total of 235. However, only 96 were being invited to assessment. The lucky 96 were chosen on the basis of “being either the highest scorers at CBQ (Competency Based Questions) or being randomly selected”. I do not quite follow this. Either you pick people on the basis of highest scores, which is fair enough, or else you define a pass mark, and then randomly pick from the pool of people who have achieved that score or higher. Why do both? I would be interested to know what the breakdown of people who were invited to attend was by gender, sexuality and ethnic background. I would hope that the force did not cherry pick from minority groups, then have a raffle for the remaining slots. There would be a precedent for this. A few years back Avon and Somerset were taken to court by an applicant after all the white male applicants were sifted out. GMP went through a phase of not inviting males to the next stage of the process (a fitness test) whilst inviting females. This is how they managed to have the first all female intake (how did they get away with that!). The Met meanwhile have phases where they only hand out application forms to those attending open evenings, which seems fair enough. Anyone can go, in terms of gender, sexuality etc. Only thing was, they do not tell anyone who does not come from an under represented group the assessment evenings are on! I would look forward to Dyfdd Powys sending me the figures or explanation of their decision anyway.