Sadly the police, at least the force I work for, can't seem to say no to anything. We seem to be the dumping ground, and as my colleague put it "if it isn't on fire, call the police."
My supervision (not just middle management too) seem terrified of risk so they prefer to send the troops to everything, rather the 0.01% chance of something going wrong.
All whilst dealing with mental health, mispers and non-crime related domestic disputes where police are being used by aggrieved parties to get a one up on their ex-partners to help in custody battles.
And people wonder why there's nobody to attend their burglary! Policing in this country is in such a mess and many on the ground are frantically trying to apply for specialist roles or quitting entirely. Sad.
Very very true. But how can we blame your supervisor or middle management? They're terrified that if they make the wrong decision, even in good faith, the IOPC will march down there and had them a gross misconduct notice, because the IOPC seem to think that everyone has a crystal ball.
I also like it how *everything* is a "force priority".
Vulnerable mispers, CSE, burglaries, sexual offences, mental health, domestic abuse, hate crime, anti social behaviour, violent crime, knife crime, drug dealing, vehicle crime, counter terrorism - they all are a "force priority". Unfortunately, when everything becomes a priority - nothing is a priority. That's what the government can't seem to get their heads around. If they want everything to be a priority - great! Who wouldn't want all of those areas addressed and dealt with effectively? But it's gonna cost you. If you took the current budget and multipled it by about 10, that would probably mean that everything could be as the government wants it to be.
Year on year, the government seem to load up forces with more responsibilities, and in the same breath reduce their funding. Shock horror! It doesn't work!
It's difficult to lay the blame for this at one persons foot, but Theresa May as the Home Secretary brought a *lot* of this stuff in and IMHO, she will go down as one of the most incompetent Home Secretaries of all time. I don't mind change at all, and hate it when people say "but that's how we've always done it", but my God did she have her head in the clouds. She'd seemingly come up with new idiotic ideas on a weekly basis in which everyone was screaming at her would not work, but she would force them through. And it all came down to the fact she had no understanding of policing and most importantly, her utter arrogance meant she had no desire to understand it either - preferring to go to war with the police than accept that a lot of her ideas *may* *possibly* have been utter dog ****.
