Monday 6 October 2008

Op Blunt

Recently (after successfully avoiding it for a while) I have been doing a few shifts on Operation Blunt.

For those of you lucky enough not to be au fait with the practicalities of the operation for street PCs, here is a short summary.

On regular days response team officers (and occasional others) are warned for "Op Blunt." We will be taken off our already short teams, and given a parade time with operational orders. We will parade at our nick on that day at the given time, and have a short briefing.

Then the fun begins. We will then drive to a central parade point, and from then to whichever borough we have been assigned to patrol for Operation Blunt. Often we will pass officers from different boroughs heading towards our borough to patrol it.
We like to wave at them.












If this car I've stopped has people with knives, where is my back up? On the other side of London of course.



We then get a further briefing at the central parade point, and then all embuss and head over to the Division we are assigned to, and patrol there to proactively deter knife crime. We are encouraged to stop search, but we are not allowed to take the vast majority of calls that come out.
Not that we could, as we wouldn't know the way anyway.

If we get prisoners, we have the joy of booking them in and dealing with them in a strange nick.

Because of all the parade and briefing/travelling time/operational feeding/parade and briefing/getting lost on way to ground assigned/de-briefing at area/travelling time back to borough, we obviously spent a relatively small amount of time actually on patrol.

After doing our short hours on patrol, we then make our way across London back to our home borough, not forgetting to wave at the non-local officers leaving our borough. Then home for tea and cakes.

Of course, if we had been allowed to put these numbers on to OUR borough on response teams, we would have been able to have enough coppers to both respond to calls AND to proactively patrol. Most coppers regularly try to prevent knife crime given the time. We might even be able to use a little of our local knowledge to actually target our patrols, and get to places without arguing over the A-Z.












I didn't need an A-Z for this call. What I needed was a large amount of non-existent officers to help with the mad person waving a twelve inch kitchen knife around.


Anyway. Something I heard over the radio on Operation Blunt made me giggle manically for an inappropriate amount of time.

Control: "Units to assist on an I Grade please, robbery at Brixley bus garage in the past two minutes .on a number 37 bus."
Unit: "Bravo X-ray, show Bravo X-ray Two Zero One. Have you got a description?"
(Pause for comedy effect...)
Control: "Bravo X-ray Two Zero One, it's red with four wheels."


I can't help but find it reassuring that even in The Kremlin there are still long forgotten slightly eccentric people manning the microphones.
Long may their reign remain undiscovered by the people in the Ivory Towers.

45 comments:

Old BE said...

FIRST!

When will there be an Operation Police where everyone concentrates on responding to calls or going on patrol instead of sitting in offices thinking up Operations which shuffle officers around the city?

Anonymous said...

Damn, Blue eyes - thats twice you've pipped me to the post now!!! I was too busy giggling at "red with four wheels"
Was reading the london-gov site. Took me a minute to realise it didn't actually say "£27,000 from the Recycled Criminal Fund"
I was imagining all the things one could make out of recycled criminals? Toilet paper? Lovely stationary? Fixed Penalty Notices?
Lola

Anonymous said...

i'd be a bit careful with those pics, I can tell what you've taken them on, and when, down to the second.

And I've got GPS coords as well.

Kennyo said...

Hey,
thanks for putting the post up about me...I'll be checking back daily to see what your up to...I have had a few visitors from your site...thanks..I just did up a post saying thanks and I will be putting a link to your blog..thanks

kennyo

Old BE said...

Wait, just clicked the Blunt link, this operation has been going for four years and yet knife crime appears to be the same or worse than it was then. Would knife crime be worse or better, ASNT, if you were able to do your job in the area you know with the colleagues you know and should have to back you up?

Anonymous said...

Police Op Orders have to rhyme with a description of the person who created them. In the case of 'Operation Blunt' ... er, erm ...

Anonymous said...

Wow!! A control room with a sense of humour!! Don't get those too often!

Dark Side said...

Good to have you back Area, glad BT managed to excel themselves..xx

Anonymous said...

Shouldn't that be Op Blunt 2.
control room staff like this could be very dangerous, we might actually end up smiling at some of the customers, imagine the shame of it.

Anonymous said...

Common sense applied to policing? Don't be daft!

Anonymous said...

They tend to have the commedians (iennes) on "Support" where I am. Don't think that they've quite got the bottle to put them on the main channel.

You're right re: crossing London etc. We had a serial fom "P" district with us a couple of weeks ago. Won't say where I am but it's a lot quieter than "P" I can tell you! Madness

Anonymous said...

Louise:

Our control have been known to have a sense of humour too - take this example from a couple of weeks ago:

Control: Any units able to attend location X for a complaint?

No response from anyone. Control try several more times.

Control: Any unit test call?

Unit 6: 6 control I hear you just fine but cannot attend as I am in location Y [about three miles away from X] on foot.

Control: It'll only take five minutes on the bus...

loveinvienna said...

@ Afriendlyface: LOL! Five minutes by bus... hehe! That would cause a bit of a stir on the local public transport.

@ Area: If only the sense of humour would rub off on the powers that be...

Metcountymounty said...

In a blinding flash of common sense, we had an op blunt crew from an outer borough and were due to send one of ours out, our guv phoned their guv, and 15 seconds later they went home (thanking our guv profusely) and we kept our guys. You've probably had the same with L2 aid, not quite so easy to sort out and bloody ridiculous when you read the op orders and wonder if anyone at CO11 noticed/cared.

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Anonymous said...

Ahh! Operation Blunt! how I particularly enjoyed the briefing at NSY. That gung ho greasy pole climbing Chief Insp with the scouse (or was it Mancunian) accent that gave us the briefing. He tells the troops that op blunt is not about targets and that it was pro-active policing at its most effective. He then briefs the skippers and Inspectors separately and tells them he wants a minimum 50 stop/searches per carrier.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Does the left hand actually know that the right hand is playing with your wife's dick? Or are you really saying that the right hand is actually playing away in another borough, that it does not know, when somebody else's left or indeed right hand is playing with a dick that may or may not be your wife's?


Tony F I think

Anonymous said...

Ha,Operation Blunt.

Section 60 CJPOA is in force in most OCU's just go out and get hands in pockets.

Otherwise use s.44 POT. It's always in play!

PC Plastic Fuzz said...

You've got to love those slightly eccentric comms operators. We have a few in my neck of the woods, too.

Anonymous said...

I thought common sense was a prerequisite for the job. Its a pity that the powers-that-be do not display the same common sense when putting together these so-called ops. The last Op Blunt I did I spent in total four to four and a half hours on a carrier. Time patrolling 'preventing' knife crime? Approximately One hour. But at least a politician can say knife crime is being targeted.

Bobbi said...

'Red with four wheels'-Great!

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