Posts Tagged 'police'

From Hard times to Hyperlocal












As ever, I value your thoughts…

It’s a great life really……










As ever, let me have your thoughts…

Policing:Further adventures on Twitter

Over the past 24 hours, the Local Policing Unit from Birmingham South have been tweeting live incidents and their officers’ responses to them. Armed only with a hashtag (#bsp24) and a new twitter account, they have ventured out into the world of social media. Judging by the excellent feedback they have received, I am sure they will be  extremely pleased with the results.

Two weeks ago, I spoke to the Commander from Birmingham South, Phil Kay, and discussed the idea with him. He is really forward thinking and had already set the ball rolling with his communications team. At that point they had around 70 people following them on Twitter. By the end of the 24 hour output they had well over 1000.

I have blogged before about the need for police forces to engage more pro-actively in the area of social media, and the example above really does illustrate the point.  The communities of South Birmingham clearly want to engage with and talk to the Police. The Commander and his staff now have the ability to communicate with 1000 more people than they had at this point two weeks ago, and perhaps more importantly (and this is the key strength of social media), the community has a way to talk back.

Throughout my years in the Police, we have always struggled to get some communities to engage with us. We labelled those communities as ‘hard to reach.’ It turns out that they were not that hard to reach, we were just reaching in the wrong places. Social media platforms provide us with an absolutely fantastic opportunity to have conversations with people, to recognise their problems and to tell them what we are doing about them.

In the 18 months or so since I first blogged about this issue, the situation in UK policing has improved significantly, there are now some fantastic examples of officers using social media in new and innovative ways. However there are still large areas where there is no social media presence, where officers are actively prevented from engaging by force policies which have simply not caught up with the technological advances of the last decade.

There are now hundreds of officers up and down the country using social media. To my knowledge no riots have been triggered, no officers have been sacked, we have not had to spend huge amounts of money and there have been no breaches of the official secrets act. What we have had is lots of conversations with the people we police and forged some really positive relationships.

To those police areas not currently engaged, I ask the same question as I did in my first blog; Why are you waiting?

Drugs; dealing with the dealers

This week my officers swooped on a large scale drug supplier, we recovered about 4 kilos of class A & class B drugs, together with several thousand pounds cash. The dealer and his accomplice have both been charged and remanded. The week before that the courts granted an order taking £56,000 off another dealer and a further order setting out a repayment order of over £800,000 against him.

I tweeted the result and got a great response, people seem to enjoy seeing drug dealers locked up. I also got another familiar response, ‘Great result but what about the drug dealers where I live?’  Communities see people dealing drugs outside their houses every day, and understandably get frustrated when they don’t see the police taking action. As somebody who has run a drugs job or two, I thought I might set out some of the issues that we have to address when we are dealing with the dealers.

Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, we have to prove that they have actually dealt some drugs, or intend to deal them. This is not as easy as you might assume. People caught with relatively large quantities of drugs will often claim they are for personal use, but as they are regular users they have ‘bought in bulk.’ Although this might seem ridiculous to normal people, you need to bear in mind that we have to prove everything to a court ‘beyond all reasonable doubt.’ All the prospective dealer has to do is establish that doubt and they know they will get away with a simple possession of drugs charge which carries much lighter punishment. Therefore any dealer worth their salt will only carry small amounts at any one time, going back to their stash to stock up on a regular basis.

So if just finding somebody with quantities of drugs is not enough, we have to use different techniques to prove they are dealing. We will often watch several deals take place, arresting the buyer out of the sight of the dealer, to prove to a court that there is a course of action taking place. As you can imagine this carries quite a large risk of compromise. Dealers will tend to sell drugs in areas they know and where they are comfortable. Police activity in these areas will quickly get reported back to the dealers and they will shut up shop.

When we are told about a dealer, we often execute warrants at their houses. Again this does not always bring success. They do not leave their drugs lying about for us to stumble across, they hide them, and they actually put quite a lot of thought into it. The dealer who we took the £56,ooo at the start of this blog was burying his drugs in an old lady’s back garden which was insecure.

Taking out a good drug dealer often required many hours of painstaking surveillance and gathering of evidence. This is expensive and difficult. It requires the completion of reams of forms to get the authorities and the painstaking compilation of the evidence gathered. Drugs are exchanged in very small packages, and it is not always obvious when a deal has taken place, again the ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ argument is applied, we have to prove that our potential dealer is not a raging socialite who often meets up with 200 people a day for around thirty seconds at a time.

There are few things more satisfying than unearthing a dealers stash, knowing that you have the evidence to link them to it. Police officers continue to arrest dealers and enforce the law, but it is not as straightforward as you might think. I hope this blog has given you an insight into the day to day battle that we have with dealers, and the reasons why it might appear that we aren’t taking action.

It is really important that people work with us. If you suspect somebody is dealing drugs, tell us. You might not see immediate action, but it starts the ball rolling, and is sometimes the little piece of knowledge that we need. We know communities want to help us, they don’t want dealers on their street corners or outside their kids school. The best weapon we have at our disposal is information from the public.

Thanks for reading, let me have your thoughts…

Murder: From the inside out

There is a widespread fascination with murder investigation. Turn on your TV tonight and see how long it takes for a fictional detective to become embroiled in an investigation. Walk into a bookshop and see how many of the titles are thrillers where somebody is killed in the first chapter, and the rest of the novel features our very clever (but troubled) hero solving the crime.

I have spent a large part of my career as a Detective and have worked on and run plenty of murders. I thought it might be interesting to blog about the reality of murder investigation.

Each murder investigation is different, but there are threads that run through all of them.

The most obvious thread is that every murder is a tragedy. Victims vary from housewives to criminals, young to old, but every one will have a family and a story.

One of the most difficult but important jobs at the outset of an investigation is meeting the family. These are incredibly challenging and emotional meetings. Just imagine meeting somebody for the first time and telling them that you are responsible for solving the murder of their son, daughter, husband or wife. I have done this many times, and it never fails to have an impact on me.

During the initial hours, the pressure on the SIO (senior investigating officer) leading the investigation is immense. You are thinking about setting up the teams, preserving the scene, meeting the family, managing the media, setting up house to house trawls for witnesses, arranging the post mortem, starting a CCTV trawl, searching for offenders, securing vital evidence, setting a budget, talking to the coroner and a million other things.

You must also prepare to tell your own family that you probably won’t be at home for the next week.

I always visit the scene. I meet the forensic manager there, and always walk through the scene. Not all SIOs do this, but it helps me to get the lay out in my head, together with any blood splatter areas. On my last murder, analysis of the blood splatter patterns in the scene was crucial to understanding what went on. I try to keep the body in situ, as that often tells a story. I sometimes call the pathologist to the scene if I need an early opinion.

Dont believe any TV programme that shows simple post-mortems. They take hours, and they are always extremely unpleasant. Pathologists can’t generally give you reliable times of death, that is TV fiction.

Once the initial frenzy has died down and you have put some structure in place, you start to turn your attention to actually investigating. Almost all murders are solved through detailed examination of the evidence and forensics. The SIO has to make sure that they are aware of the detail of a huge amount of evidence. You reach a point where you feel as though you cannot absorb a single further piece of information, but you must because it may just be the vital link.

Once you have established your team, you need to brief them, I like to brief first and last thing, the amount of breakthroughs that occur when all the officers involved are in the same room is incredible.

The pursuit of an offender can last for minutes or months. I have recently had officers all over the country chasing down suspects and following up leads. I have run two protracted manhunts this year. They involved really long hours and require me to make dynamic and difficult decisions. Once you have located the offenders there is very often a requirement to run a firearms job to actually arrest them, if they have killed one person, how much risk are my officers at?

While all of this is going on, further demands are thrown at you; Who was the victim? What was their ethnicity? What is the impact on the community? Are more people at risk? What are the media saying? Are you prepared to speak to them? The pressure that I feel at this stage of an investigation is immense. Everybody is looking to you for answers, and it is really important to build in some time to actually think and plan.

Normally at this point you will realise that you haven’t eaten since breakfast and you will send somebody out to get the first in what will become a series of takeaways. Murder rooms are not healthy places.

Once the suspect is under arrest, the pressure continues to grow as the clock starts ticking. My interview teams will have been working on an interview plan whilst the hunt for the offender has carried on. There will be plans in place for the forensic recovery off the offender, doctors are called to assess their health, and the defence solicitor lands ready to be briefed.

There is a strange relationship at the best of times between police officers and defence solicitors. This is magnified during murder investigations. Partly this is because of what is at stake, but also officers investigating murders find it difficult to remain detached. You meet the victim’s family, find out every detail of their life, meet their friends, examine their movements, look at their phone messages, visit their workplace, and really do feel as though you know them. The defence solicitor has none of this, and it is their job to help the suspect. This is of course entirely right and proper, and officers and solicitors are professionals, but nonetheless these relationships are often awkward.

Once the interviews are finished, the Crown Prosecution Service enter the fray, as we engage with them regarding a charging decision. These are always long and complex discussions, but if the evidence is there (and it should be after all the effort) the suspect will be charged. The initial paperwork is put together and submitted (there will be months of follow up files to be submitted) and the suspect is sent to the cells waiting for the next court session.

In my opinion murder investigation is amongst the most demanding and rewarding work it is possible to do. I am waiting to be promoted, so I may have run my last investigation, but there is nothing more exhilarating, frustrating, exhausting and satisfying than investigating and solving murder . I hope that this has provided you with an insight into the reality, from the inside out.

Ashes to Ashes?

There was a remarkable symmetry to the past week or so for me. Ashes to Ashes returned to our screens, Detective Inspector Frost retired, and I returned to the investigative arena, as  a Detective Chief Inspector running three major crime teams in the West Midlands.

 DI Frost and DCI Hunt are fictional detectives. They are both rebels who bend rules on a regular basis to ensure that the bad guys are locked up by the end of the programme. They have become folk heroes as a result of their maverick approach to fighting crime, harking back to the ‘good old days’ when police officers seemed to resolve almost every crime with a ‘clip round the ear.’

Although there are clearly large elements of both programmes  dramatised for TV purposes, there are some elements which I am sure many officers will recognise. Frustration with form filling, solicitors, needless dictats and bureacracy from organisations set up to monitor ‘throughput , output and productivity.’ (Don’t ask me I have no idea what they mean either.)

I have been a Detective for the majority of my career. I will be blogging about some of my day to day experiences and jobs.  I have previously investigated (and solved) numerous murders, tackled drug networks, taken guns off the streets and dealt with a whole host of serious crime. I love my work, and can’t wait to get stuck back in!

In the past, police forces have invested lots of energy telling people about neighbourhood policing and uniform patrols, whilst keeping some of the more complex work, often carried out by Detectives,  shrouded in mystery. If we are to actually make people feel safer, it is really important that we are open about the level of protection that goes on behind the scenes keeping them safe.

Future blogs might not be as exciting as DCI Hunt, (‘Fire up the peugeot diesel’ doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘Fire up the Quattro’), but it will be real and it will allow you access to an area where your previous opinions will probably be based on a combination of The Bill, Silent Witness and Morse.

Hopefully you will find it interesting, let me know if there are specific areas of crime investigation you are interested in reading about.

Twitter on the frontline

On 3rd April 2010, the English Defence League staged a protest in Dudley. Unite Against Facism were also in Dudley on this date, taking part in a multi-cultural event. These two groups are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their views, and on previous occasions when they had met there had been disorder and violence.

Both of these groups use social media as their preferred form of communication. In the past, supporters from both sides had used twitter to spread misinformation about the other, increasing tension and stoking up hostility. I was in charge of communications on the day and took the decision to work from the scene of the protests, armed with an i-phone to compliment the rest of my equipment. ( Not much help in a traditional ruck, but essential for mobile communications.)

Using the i-phone I was able to use tweetdeck to monitor a range of messages from all sides of the argument. I was in touch with the command cell, and able to dispel rumours instantly.  Before the start of the protest, there was a message posted on Facebook that EDL members had smashed the windows of a mosque overnight. I checked, found it was not true, and tweeted a message to say so. Then a tweet was circulated that an EDL steward had been stabbed by UAF supporters, again after checking I was able to refute the allegation. This carried on throughout the day. When the EDL broke through police lines, I was able to update people straight away, and all significant events during the day were subject to messages.

This is groundbreaking stuff for policing in the UK. We have used social media as a broadcast platform during protests in the past, but we have not had immediate updates from officers on the ground, enabling two way conversations. Of course I was subject to the usual abuse from a minority, ( I still don’t understand why people bother to swear at police officers, I was immune after about 20 minutes in the job.) I also had a number of queries about why the police were paying somebody to monitor twitter, as though I did nothing else but tweet all day.  The overwhelming majority were however really positive, and I have had fantastic feedback.

Couple of health warnings, with immediate messaging it is much more difficult to corroborate facts. I put out a message disputing a chant had taken place, when in fact it had (sorry @NMEC) confusing a legitimate journalist with an agitator. Also, once you commit to this, you have to have the capacity to maintain it, and the battery on my i-phone came perilously close to running out twice (thanks @skynews for the recharge)

It is really important not to use social media in isolation, but as part of a wider strategy to get messages out. Whilst I was tweeting I was also updating  traditional media, providing interviews throughout the day and getting messages out to the communities of Dudley through our comms network. ( I also did a fair bit of actual policing, nice to be out of my office.) Social media will only ever be one form of communication, but the unique two way nature of it makes it increasingly important to policing.

Throughout the day it was also clear to me that lots of traditional journalists were following my twitter feed, and there is a real overlap between the two mediums now. I was able to answer questions from journalists in realtime, and they were able to check on the accuracy of their reports. On the day new and old media complemented each other.

Overall for a first try, despite the hiccups, I was really pleased with both the use of twitter, and the reaction I got to it. I would be interested to hear your views…

Web Cops?

Right then, it appears we have caused a bit of a stir by saying that we are thinking about having somebody in post to try and expand our use of social media. The interview, given by ACC Scobbie, has been widely reported as West Midlands Police employing a ‘Cyber Cop’ type person. http://bit.ly/8uTBcU

The media seem to be under the impression that somebody is going to explode out of an unsuspecting critic’s laptop, cuffs in hand to march the offender off to the station. I can fully understand the concerns people have expressed if that actually was our intention, but as I was the officer who came up with the idea, I can say categorically, that it wasn’t.

People may occasionally doubt the intellectual capacity of police officers, but I can safely say that if we were planning to launch a spy in cyber space, we wouldn’t put out a press release and conduct interviews about it!

The idea is really very simple. Police are often criticised for being difficult to get hold of, or not listening to what local people are saying. We try all kinds of ways to communicate with the public, meetings, newsletters, traditional media, talking to people we meet and anything else we can think of. There is clearly a huge amount of conversation taking place online and, where people are talking about policing or crime issues, we want to be part of the conversation.

Until recently, our officers were prevented from accessing the internet at work. We have recognised that situation is a bit ridiculous in the modern world, and now all our officers have access.

The role that we are thinking about will not be a police officer. It will be somebody who understands the world of social media, and who can help us develop the ideas that we have, and make our officers more accessible to people.


I have been actively engaged in the social media world for a while now, as a police officer. I have been warmly welcomed by most, some have queried what I am doing there, but many people have responded really positively. I firmly believe that if we go ahead and employ somebody to help us engage with people online, it will help us to get closer to people, and it is the right thing to do.

I would welcome your thoughts……….

Warm Police Stations? Jack Straw must be joking.

As I sit and write this, I can actually see my breath in front of me. I have singularly failed to get the maintenance people to turn  the radiators on in my office for the past month, meaning that every day people make excuses to leave my meetings early, rather than subject themselves to the arctic conditions that I have to endure. (At least that’s what they tell me.)

I was therefore amused to read the comments of the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw over the weekend, saying that some officers would rather sit in warm police stations than go out and catch criminals http://bit.ly/8OD5op. I wondered if my radiator problem was the direct result to a new Home Office policy to freeze officers out onto the streets!

In all seriousness, I was really surprised by the language that Jack Straw used. He is after all a former Home Secretary, and current Justice Secretary. He has been at the heart of Government for 12 years. Is this honestly what he thinks about police officers?

I would be the first to acknowledge that there are some lazy police officers around, just as there are lazy teachers, doctors and council officials. ( It cannot have escaped his attention recently that there are a number of politicians facing some difficult questions about their productivity and expenses!) The vast majority of police officers however are committed to arresting criminals and keeping people safe. I can personally testify that nothing makes officers feel better than a catching an offender in the act, and making a positive arrest.

I understand the point that Jack Straw was trying to make, that performance varies around the country between forces, and that the worst performers will blame bureaucracy rather than do something about it. To my mind however, this is over simplifying the problem. Every area faces different problems, and socio-economic challenges, which require forces across the country to use different methods and techniques to resolve. Blunt performance measurements can never hope to capture the complex nature of policing different communities.

At the heart of Jack Straw’s comments was a refusal to acknowledge the layers of bureaucracy that exist within the legal system. Having operated at the front line of that system for the majority of my career, I can assure Mr Straw that this is not something made up or exaggerated by officers, but a very real issue. Most police officers that I know would prefer to do anything other than fill out paperwork. They do not like being in the station, under the scrutiny of  senior officers.  They would much rather be out on the streets locking up criminals and keeping people safe. I have often had to nag officers to come in off patrol and complete a file for court,  crime report or missing persons papers.

Paperwork is a by product, generated as a result of the level of scrutiny that officers find themselves under. Every arrest must be justified, every search documented, every item of property seized must be booked in and logged. Failure to complete the requisite paperwork means that officers can find themselves exposed at court, in legal proceedings or in a disciplinary hearing. This article from the Times online sets out the layers of paperwork following arrest better than I could hope to http://bit.ly/8k82VH

There seems to be an industry of scrutineers and regulators across the public sector. They all require performance reports, complex levels of data and regular updates on compliance with the latest directive. This stuff does not just appear out of thin air, it is generated by officers filling out paperwork. There is no point politicians pretending the problem does not exist, to a large extent it is of their making. When Jack Straw was Home Secretary, he would have had the opportunity to have impacted on bureaucracy, but I cannot recall any startling reductions under his lead.

I really hope that the debate that has been generated since Jack Straw’s comments leads to a further examination and reduction of bureaucracy, but I cannot help but feel that until politicians trust public servants, rather than relying on batallions of bean counters to reassure them, we will not make a great deal of progress.

Police and the Media

I tweeted about an interesting article in the Guardian last week, http://bit.ly/5WmBSH . The thrust of the argument is that police forces are pumping out PR based press releases, which papers print unedited due to lack of resources. Police are therefore writing their own headlines, and not telling the public about crime. Using my newly acquired media monitoring skills, I noticed that this link had created a huge amount of interest, so I thought it might be useful to give people a personal insight into the relationship between the police and the media.

Firstly, it is right to state that society in general would be a worse place without journalists, both local and national. The role they perform in holding public authorities to account is crucial to a democracy, and as we have seen with the recent MP’s expenses debate, they can foster change on a grand scale. I would not want to live in a world where the media is supressed or controlled. Although nobody likes to be caught out or embarrassed by the media, it beats the alternative where public bodies do what they want without fear of exposure.

Although I now run the press office for West Midlands Police, I have spent most of my career as a Detective. I have investigated murders, rapes, serious violence, taken guns off the street and dismantled drug rings. I am therefore well placed to offer a rounded view on the police relationship to the media.

I have first hand experience of working with the media at the coal face  with varied results. For example, I used a newspaper appeal to trace a crucial witness to a murder, and I have also found the media to be really accommodating when there are important messages that we need to get out to the public. I have also found myself on numerous occasions having fairly heated disagreements with journalists when they want to publish stories that would have a detrimental impact on live investigations.

I have always struggled with the concept of a journalist insisting they want to publish a story, when the police are telling them that doing so would make it more difficult to either arrest or convict the offender. My instincts as a police officer are all about getting the bad guy locked up, whereas journalistic instincts tend to be to get the story out before another media outlet. This is often the cause of friction between police and media.

In the time that I have been in the press office (approaching 18 months) there has been a marked change in the media world. There are many fewer journalists, and less local papers. Although the media are still an important part of our communications plans, we now place greater emphasis than before on local communications, delivered by way of officers contacts in the community, newsletters, local meetings and with web based communications. This is not because we are trying to provide less information to the public, just a recognition of the changing landscape.

One of the assertions in the Guardian article is that police do not tell people about crime. I would argue that there is more information available than ever before. If you click on this link http://bit.ly/54BEsF and type in your postcode, all of the information about crime in your neighbourhood is available at the touch of a button. Even in the halcyon days to which the reporter refers, there was never this amount of information available, so it is a little unfair to suggest we are hiding crimes. What I think the article means is that we are not giving it to journalists in the way they would like to receive it.

In my current role, I have daily conversations with a wide range of journalists. They are generally easy to get along with, and we have good relationships with most local papers. There are clearly competing demands and occasional fall outs over stories, but on the whole the relationship is positive. Often queries from journalists will make us look again at an issue and ask whether we have actually done the right thing. Where we haven’t I encourage officers to say so, and put it right. This seems to me to be a quite healthy relationship, and one that I encourage.

It is not our role to fill the newspapers with stories. We will issue a press release if there is a policing purpose behind it, for example, we want public help to identify an offender, or want to warn the public about a specific crime type which they can guard against.  We will also issue press releases where there is good news to report, so that the public get a balanced view, and are not left afraid to go out at night.

The relationship between police and the media will continue to evolve. I remain optimistic that the traditions of policing and journalism can continue to co-exist for the good of everybody, and I will continue to look forward my local paper every week.


RSS West Midlands Police Latest Appeals



Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.