The Least We Can Do

Peaceful Protest

A Peaceful Protest In our beautiful capital.



























































Our Commissioner says he is 'embarrassed' and that it was all unexpected.
Not unexpected by the troops on the ground, obviously. But I'm sure that penny pinching had nothing to do with parading the bare minimum of officers to try and cope with the thuggery that we suspected would happen. I actually have sympathy with the ideology of the 'real' protestors today, but not the mindless idiots that spoilt it. Or the mindless idiots that supported the violence when they should have been rejecting the actions of the thugs who have done a disservice to the genuine fears many currently in education have.

As one of my mates said whilst we tooled around in a public order carrier last night: "Lack of an overtime budget isn't going to stop them kicking off tomorrow. I mean, we can't just tell them there's no overtime available so they have to go home now. That's not the bosses plan. Is it?"

Gadget can probably put it better than me, and possibly with a hint more objectivity.

I do suspect that this is just a taste of things to come, and that we may well be about to experience a winter of discontent. I know I'm not alone in thinking that, most of my colleagues are also resigned to more protests, and more violence evident in them.

Canteen gossip today is suggesting that the havoc today was planned by our senior management. That we have been hammered in the press so much recently when it comes to public order policing, and the bosses have finally said "sod it, let them get on with it without our interference and see how it works out."
I of course have risen above this level of cynicism - but it'll be interesting to see our future approaches to public order incidents/demonstrations.

Question

Question:

When you get back to your house at 0630hours from Night Duty, and you've been so busy dealing with Friday Night Fight Club that you haven't eaten for the duration of the shift, and you have a bite to eat on returning home before bed....

Is it Breakfast, Dinner, or something so far undefined...?

Goodnight.
Or Good Morning - you know what I mean.
Sleep beckons.

AID

As the silly season continues, so our Aid requirement grows.
Police Officers throughout the UK will no doubt be very familiar with the idea of Aid warnings. The basic premise is that when the Farce you work for has an operation on that a normal division cannot handle, officers are pulled in from various places and departments to help out.

This can be in the form of going 'down Londontown' for some yellow jacket reassurance, policing protests, funkily named operations or - more often than not - sporting events such as football.
What this mens is that you get the dreaded email and discover that once again you have lost your rest day so you can spend it babysitting various groups around London. No, before you ask, there is no overtime available.

As a public order trained officer, it means a lot of time travelling around the Met in a battered public order carrier with a vanload of officers, all carrying a kitbag full of robocop gear that smells slightly of mustiness and sweat.

So a plea, from me and the rest of my carrier if the people in charge of operational feeding are reading this: Cabbage? You feed nine officers who will be spending the next ten plus hours trapped in an air tight carrier cabbage!?
Seriously now. Never again.

Peelian Principles

Simply because they're talked about a lot, the Peelian Principles of Policing:

The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.

Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Ooh, Nurse

I wasn't intending my first post proper after writing again to be a rant. However, I posted a reply to a blog post that turned into such a long one it probably belonged as a post in the first place.

Hogday wrote a post about his medical history during his Police Service, whilst dwelling on the possibility of serving Police Officers having our pension cut or cut back.
It made me think, and I reckon my medical notes (if the job have kept them all) would be interesting reading for me. They'd probably bring back some nasty memories.

I know that I personally have physical scars - with me for the rest of my life - that remind me of some nasty incidents and will continue to do so every time I go swimming or make the mistake of exposing my pallid naked torso to the general public.

I've also had at least one injury that required six months of treatment - although I was back at work days after the injury occurred.

For me the most traumatic have been drugs treatments for HIV/Hepatitis/nasty junky diseases when I've been forcibly exposed to unpleasant bodily fluids.
Months of no sexual contact, no open wounds, scared to kiss family members goodnight in case you infect them with something painful or potentially fatal... a really horrible experience, and it's happened to me twice so far. Despite those not being as long lasting physically (once the all clear has been given) they are definitely the hardest to deal with.

It's not easy being a month into a new relationship and having to have a sit down conversation with your new squeeze and explain that sex, kissing, sharing toothbrushes are all out now, and that I need to check for cuts and scratches before holding hands. It's something that more than one young copper on my team has had to do.

I know people say some of those things are OTT - the holding hands thing for instance - but I'm not alone in taking it that seriously. I've taken the Queen's shilling so I take the hits, but my family and loved ones haven't and shouldn't.

The not insignificant 11% plus that I pay from my pay packet every month is part of the compensation for going through that. We're not in Basra, and I don't pretend to have the same risks as an active serviceman. But we do go towards the dangers, rather than away. We do this voluntarily, and put ourselves, our families, and our friends through the mill numerous times during our career. I don't think our pensions have been gifted to us, we've paid for them in money and sweat.

Babcock? Present!

Breaking news: albeit entirely expected, the coroners court has found that the officers who shot Mark Saunders were justified.
Good to see the result, and it appears the AFOs involved spoke honestly and openly about the situation they faced. I hope the Saunders family can start to move on with their lives now, and put the incident behind them.
I also hope that the firearms officers involved can do the same, despite the stresses they've obviously been under since the incident.

In other news- ok, in my life - there has been a long and so far unexplained absence since my last significant post.

DUring the past few months (and before the last post I made) I have been subject to a false complaint from someone I had dealt with at work. Sadly, the complaint was serious enough to be dealt with by our Department for Professional Standards rather than dealt with on Division.
I've now been given the all clear after the long and uncomfortable wait and the investigation.

I obviously can't talk about the details of the complaint, but my job and mortgage comes first, so during the investigation blogging came to a screeching halt. Apart from the slightly drunk post about The Bill of course.

Suffice to say that during the complaint, I was fully supported by both my senior management, and by my immediate management in my current team and my last.
No one backpedalled desperately on finding out I had a complaint, no one refused to associate themselves with me, and no jobs were put at risk or dropped as it was easier than dealing with the fact I had a complaint against me.
No opportunities to apply for promotion or transfer were denied to me through having a malicious complaint ongoing, and I was fully supported all the way and wholeheartedly by the senior officers who I talked to.
And of course, at the end of the complaint after being informed that the complaint was foundless, I was then naturally told that the complainant would be spoken to regarding their repeated attempts to muddy the waters around an ongoing case and make scurrilous accusations.

Some of the above paragraph may not be entirely accurate.

The Bill

The Bill - embarrassingly, I shed a tear.

Sgt Smellie and ex-Commander Dizaei

So today has been an interesting news day for the Police.

In one article, we see that ex-Commander Dizaei has now been fired by the met.
Good riddance, and it's nice to see that we've finally rid ourselves of him.
Incidentally, the Met stopped paying him as soon as he was convicted - so at least he hasn't been adding to his nest egg whilst in prison.

Also, a verdict (and hopefully some closure at last) for Sgt Smellie.

When this News Story came out, I was uncharacteristically silent about the matter.
This was partly because I was actually at the G20 and so couldn't pretend to be objective so close to the incident. It is also because I know some of the people involved in this investigation.

My opinion now (for what it's worth) is that the courts made the right decision.
The video of Sgt Smellie striking Ms Fisher is uncomfortable viewing, and is not pleasant to watch at all.
Unfortunately, many actions within a public order environment are not pretty. Our sensibilities are understandably designed so that a woman being struck is not something we want to see.
But British law provides for the person using force NOT to be omnipresent, and NOT necessarily to be able to judge all of the facts in the cold light of day. Sgt Smellie was in the middle of a very long tour of duty (I did something like seventeen or eighteen hours on both days), surrounded by a shouting mob, jostled, objects being thrown, and attempting to protect the officers behind him who had their backs turned - and were dealing with something else and so unable to assist or defend themselves.

The thing that struck me throughout the video was how calm the Sergeant is - he does not look to me like a man panicking and unable to make reasoned thought. He looks like an officer in a pile of shit who calmly uses approved officer safety methods to build distance and space and to prevent either an aggressor or potential aggressor from attacking him. His serial are behind him and afterwards he goes back to staying at the back of his serial - Sergeants are trained during public order training to do exactly that, and to make judgement calls about whether to split or even turn the serial to deal with threats. He made the judgement call to protect his serial and allow them to continue to Police.

Have I ever hit a woman with a back hander? No. Have I struck a woman in other ways? Yes, absolutely.
Although we deal with hundreds (thousands?) of peaceful protests in the Met, we also deal with numerous public order incidents of varying description. Sometimes officers have to use force - and they should only be judged (as law states) by the information available to them and the situation they were in at the time.


EDIT - for my views on the G20, written after my policing experience there, see HERE