To our friends in the North

This blog encourages its readers to direct their thoughts and best wishes to the friends and family of out colleague PC Bill Barker who has died serving his community in Cumbria. To members of all the services still out working, this blogger says: stay safe.

Taxi Driver

A clear evening attracted large numbers into town. The town square was busy with revellers and their inevitable stalkers. I spent most the evening zipping from one reported bag snatch to the next cash point distraction theft and back again. The owner of the Lion Bar told me that customer numbers were sky high - nearly back to their pre-crunch peaks. December is, apparently, "looking good".

I wonder if so many people would have turned out in town if they had anticipated the arrival of our new swash-buckling colleague. There is an old joke that PC Rain scoops the awards for crime prevention. I wonder what the participants in the night-time leisure industry made of Sergeant Torrential Downpour?

Sgt Downpour booked on duty while I was writing up my crime reports, and by the time I decided it was time to go home the streets were cleansed back to their clean and shiny preferred state.

Tip of the day: to avoid unnecessary discomfort, check your jacket zips up properly before starting the duty.

Fit for purpose

It's well known that the police basic fitness test is laughably easy to pass. Any recruit with four limbs and a pulse who fails to reach 5-4 on the bleep test and to push/pull the required force should be ashamed of themselves. Most keen new recruits start out in good shape, but once in the job, there is no requirement to keep fit.

My own personal fitness goes in peaks and troughs. I am currently in the deepest trough in living memory. I have been a bit busy with day job stuff lately and so I have had the double whammy of no policing and no fitness regime for several weeks. So although I was raring to go on Friday night I was more than a bit concerned that my lack of physical prowess would let me down.

My team was assigned to patrol the town square, focussing on a particular corner where alcohol-fuelled mayhem ensues pretty much every night of the week. One particular chap came to notice as he was turned away from Air Bar (a bar which in my old age I would regard as my worst drinking nightmare, I think I might have been there once as a naive eighteen year-old). The way he stormed off from the bar made me think he was developing the kind of mood which leads to a spoiled night. Sure enough a while later my skipper decided he needed to be arrested. Not wanting to wait for a van, this lad made a run for it. I've never seen a drunk person move so fast. From where I was standing - quite a distance away from the scene - I thought I should be able to head him off before he got up to full speed. How wrong I was.

I've never run so hard in my life. I didn't know I could move so fast while fully kitted up. But our would-be prisoner was faster. Much faster. As I tilted my way around the first corner, he was already a long way ahead. It didn't take him long to lose us in the narrow streets. The chase was eventually called off and I headed back to the square. From then until the end of the shift I seemed to be literally running from one ridiculous scuffle to the next with barely time to catch my breath.

It's now late on Monday and my legs still hurt. New, punishing fitness regime required...

This could be a great idea

The family of G20 protest victim Ian Tomlinson have said they have been left frustrated by the police response to his death.

Mr Tomlinson, 47, died after he was struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by a police officer during G20 protests in London on 1 April...

The Metropolitan Police Authority's civil liberties panel held an open meeting at City Hall to hear opinions about how public protests are policed...

Representatives of environmental and personal freedom pressure groups attended the meeting, as well as protesters, solicitors and residents.

The panel heard a wide range of views from calls for police to wear football-style vests to make them easier to identify to first-hand accounts of violence.

After all, it is an important part of our accountability as police officers to be able to be brought to justice if we step outside the law. If we are seen to be beyond the reach of the law, everything we stand for is undermined. The thing is as far as I know, identifying the officers involved with the G20 controversies has not been a problem. It is common knowledge that officers have been suspended and are being investigated. One has already been charged. Much has been made of the lack of epaulettes in some photos, but apparently they were missing in only a tiny number of instances. Would "football-style vests" have made any practical difference?

Take me away

Poor driving gets on my wick. And I don't just mean aggressive driving, careless driving seems worse. There are a lot of drivers out there with little consideration for other road users (including pedestrians).

The official figures tell a shocking story of the number of people who drive without insurance. In fact the situation is so bad that Parliament recently gave the police draconian powers to deal with the situation. If you have not got insurance (easily checked by us on the DVLA database) or you are driving without a suitable licence, we can seize your car.

I have done this once. My colleague stopped a car and after a few words with the driver about the standard of his driving we did some document checks. It took us a long time to ascertain who he was, but once we did we discovered that a) he was not licensed b) he had no insurance c) it wasn't even his car! He had borrowed it from a mate who did not know that the driver didn't have a licence! The owner was unimpressed when we told him that the car would be waiting for him at the pound on the outskirts of town.

The powers are draconian, but they serve a purpose. There is no human right to drive unlicensed or uninsured on the roads. Far too many people get hurt or killed on our roads due to preventable driving errors. Taking a bad driver out of circulation is immensely satisfying. It is also quite time consuming. In Urbis once we have decided to seize someone's car, that decision has to be ratified by a dedicated traffic officer. They are few and far between. Once the paperwork has been done we call up for a tow-away vehicle.

As I set out for my twice annual jog around the block this evening, I spied a motorcycle cop chatting to the driver of a car stopped on the main road outside. As I hobbled back towards home the driver had gone and his car was half way up the ramp onto the tow truck.

A job well done.

Stupid people

People who don't like the police try to keep in the mind of the public certain negative stereotypes. My least favourite is the idea that all coppers are stupid. This one rears its ugly head whenever there is a police cock-up. Our favourite commentators do that classic thing of generalising from the particular and conclude that because a mistake was made, we are all as thick as two short planks. This is oh-so-cleverly backed up by pointing out that the police service has no particular recruitment requirement for educational qualification.

This is rather a banal criticism. The Urban Police Service certainly put its volunteer recruits through their paces with "academic" as well as "practical" tests before letting us into training school. Full-time officers must leap a taller hurdle. So while there is no formal requirement to have X number of GCSEs or a degree, the service does not let in any old fool. There are skills required by the police service and there are paper educational qualifications. The two do not necessarily bear any relation to each other.

Of course no recruitment system can be entirely fool proof. Clearly coppers do sometimes make mistakes and occasionally they are tragic and, with the benefit of hindsight, often preventable. The indefensible should not be defended.

But none of the officers who I have had the honour of working with have been anything close to stupid. Far from being the meat-headed morons of the caricature, everyone I have met has been articulate and thoughtful. Ask a colleague about the grounds threshold for doing a Section 1 PACE search and the potential impact of lowering those thresholds and you won't get an answer out of The Wire's script. Perhaps there are "pockets of stupidity" but not where I work.

There are highly educated people on the front line and throughout the ranks. There are Cambridge graduates answering 999 calls alongside colleagues with fewer formal qualifications. Each will have his or her own set of skills which will be suited to different jobs. An officer's former ability to integrate over a surface will not have much practical use on the street.

A while back I was providing a high-visibility presence at a particular event. There wasn't much going on and I fell into conversation with a lady from a more experienced generation. After a while she asked me whether I had grown up in Urbis. I told her which part of the concrete jungle I was from and she said "oh, I assumed you were from Surrey". "Why is that" I asked. "You're far too polite to be a police officer".

As with so many things, the caricature does not reflect reality.

This term's must-have