Police constantly quoting “diminishing resources” as reason for rising crime statistics



Cut funding for police, social care, mental health provision, prisons, education, pretty much anything that might help people not turn to crime.

Blame Facebook.
 
Funnily enough I'm working at a house for a retired copper. He finished early, saying the exact same thing. He says they have full teams just sitting at HQ trolling through twitter facey and the like looking for "hate crimes". He said the world's gone mad and they couldn't give a fuck about owt else
There you go then mate. From the horses mouth that. I’m not surprised one bit.
 
You are right, the police are to blame for budget cuts equalling the loss of 20,000 police officers. To put that into context northumbria police 10 or so years ago had about 4,500 officers in the entire force. 20k would be like doing away with northumbria, greater manchester, merseyside and west midlands, and you would still be a couple of hundred short.

Come on then, lets hear how you would do it. Keeping in mind everything has to be proportionate, legal and accountable, has to fit in with what the PCC has deemed to be the policing priorities, has to ensure no sections of the community are victimised etc.



It is also making life easier for criminals, cyber crime is the fastest rising crime group.
Are you an expert mate?
 
You have to pay someone to watch all that CCTV video. Even the simplest incident can have hundreds of hours of CCTV footage - you have to pay people to sit there and watch it. Police don't have the bodies to take advantage of it.

Same with DNA processing.

Either OP is on a wind-up or he's an idiot/Tory press officer. :cool:

Evening all.

There is also the processing of that CCTV evidence to get it to a state where it can be viewed. When hard drive CCTV recorders first came out, they were treated the same as a computer in an investigation. The CCTV unit would be seized, a forensically safe copy of the disks were made, the originals locked away as evidence and it was the clones that were viewed. That means someone has to get the CCTV unit to the forensics lab, someone has to process all that, with all the paperwork to document the chain of evidence etc. The actual copy would take a number of hours too. It is a lot more work than just grabbing a VHS tape.

It has been 13 years since I was involved in anything like that, so they may have refined their procedures (hopefully because it means the site loses it's CCTV for a day or two), but finding out how much work went on behind the scenes before anyone could actually watch the footage was quite an eye opener.

It all felt like bloated paperwork, but with a procedure like the above it suddenly became very hard for CCTV evidence to be 'lost' or for the authenticity of it to be challenged, so it did serve a useful purpose. Bloody tedious, which is why I'm not involved in anything like that any more.
 
There is also the processing of that CCTV evidence to get it to a state where it can be viewed. When hard drive CCTV recorders first came out, they were treated the same as a computer in an investigation. The CCTV unit would be seized, a forensically safe copy of the disks were made, the originals locked away as evidence and it was the clones that were viewed. That means someone has to get the CCTV unit to the forensics lab, someone has to process all that, with all the paperwork to document the chain of evidence etc. The actual copy would take a number of hours too. It is a lot more work than just grabbing a VHS tape.

It has been 13 years since I was involved in anything like that, so they may have refined their procedures (hopefully because it means the site loses it's CCTV for a day or two), but finding out how much work went on behind the scenes before anyone could actually watch the footage was quite an eye opener.

It all felt like bloated paperwork, but with a procedure like the above it suddenly became very hard for CCTV evidence to be 'lost' or for the authenticity of it to be challenged, so it did serve a useful purpose. Bloody tedious, which is why I'm not involved in anything like that any more.

The County Council I worked for we had a cctv control room that had about forty site feeds coming in all with multiple cameras on each premises, large schools could easily have 20.
The control room was manned by two people 24/7 and in the couple of years I managed this function we caught two incidents live, one graffiti artist and two lads taking the engine from a Council transit van.
We used to wait for reports to come in and replay the tapes, cut and edit them for the Police to investigate usually without success.
Non of our buildings were insured and rarely the contents as the costs were so prohibitive because of damage and vandalism. My boss reckoned it was cheaper to replace a arson hit school than insure all our property portfolio.
 
Absolute bollocks IMO!!!!

Surely with the technological advances made over the past 20 years, internet, cctv on every street corner, DNA etc etc surely solving crime has never been so easy. What must it have been like 40 years ago when a bobby had a notebook, truncheon and handcuffs yet he still had time to patrol his beat and solve complex crimes!

If there is no link between police numbers reducing and crime rising why do we have a police force then?

Mutton Shunter on Twitter

Ethical crime recording has seen a massive increase in the recording of crime.
The HMIC insisted that crime was recorded accurately which has become a f***ing nightmare for cops.
An example would be a group off lads ringingg peoples doorbell and running away Cops turn up and everyone has gone their separate ways and there is no one around . At one time the cop would just write the job off. Now a crime has to be recorded which incidentally can take up to twenty. Minutes.
There are even a team of cops who look at all the incidents that come in and if there isn’t a crime recorded, They phone up the caller or listen to the call and if there is any hint of a crime it’s recorded. A cop has then got to deal with it or justify writing it off.
Each cop On the beat will have a minimum of around ten crimes on their screen to investigate (that’s being very conservative) along with the radio going off all day adding to their workload.
The whole system is totally unmanageable at the minute

This. Some of the jobs that come in a amazing.

Jimmy pushes tommy over at school. Do the sensible thing and ask parents if school are dealing? No. Call handler crimes it as an assault. 30 minutes to either update crime details or negate it.

Not only that but jimmy also called him a nasty name last week. The call handler identifies this as being a course of conduct for harassment. 2nd crime. HMIC new rules mean 2 crimes need recording. Another 30 minutes.

Out of that one call, thats a cop 1 hour behind a desk

I can verify on a weekend night shift, 4 polis to cover whole of Washington.
Ne wonder the burglars are having a great time lately.

I could give you better than that. But its the police not managing their budget correctly dont you know. Ignore the 20k cops no longer there

Funnily enough I'm working at a house for a retired copper. He finished early, saying the exact same thing. He says they have full teams just sitting at HQ trolling through twitter facey and the like looking for "hate crimes". He said the world's gone mad and they couldn't give a fuck about owt else

From what i know, the retired cop is fibbing
 
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There is stunning ignorance and stupidity on this thread by people who think they know it all but know absolutely fuck all.

It’s always the same mux. The SMB would’ve found Madeleine McCann before her parents even knew she was missing, would reduce knife crime while also reducing stop and search, would stop active shooters by shooting off their trigger finger, to name but a few.
 
You should know by now that knowledge and experience count for nothing on here. We have already heard from someone who is working on the house of a retired policeman that they are all looking at twitter and facebook so your first hand knowledge and experience is obviously wrong....
I'll take it up with him today mate, I'll tell him he's a liar , cos someone in the fareast reckons its bullshit.
 
You are right, the police are to blame for budget cuts equalling the loss of 20,000 police officers. To put that into context northumbria police 10 or so years ago had about 4,500 officers in the entire force. 20k would be like doing away with northumbria, greater manchester, merseyside and west midlands, and you would still be a couple of hundred short.

Come on then, lets hear how you would do it. Keeping in mind everything has to be proportionate, legal and accountable, has to fit in with what the PCC has deemed to be the policing priorities, has to ensure no sections of the community are victimised etc.



It is also making life easier for criminals, cyber crime is the fastest rising crime group.

Well I obviously don't know all the answers. But from my point of view the police were caught massively short at the back end of the 90s when the Internet took off and have never really caught up...

A lot of policing is about perception - I don't think the staff you do have are visible enough, your PR team is shocking considering I rarely hear about the good work you do and any that I do hear about is massively outweighed by negative police stories.

Loss of staff isn't the reason the crime figures have gone up - different types of crime you don't know how to handle is, in my opinion.
 
If there is no link between police numbers reducing and crime rising why do we have a police force then?

Mutton Shunter on Twitter



This. Some of the jobs that come in a amazing.

Jimmy pushes tommy over at school. Do the sensible thing and ask parents if school are dealing? No. Call handler crimes it as an assault. 30 minutes to either update crime details or negate it.

Not only that but jimmy also called him a nasty name last week. The call handler identifies this as being a course of conduct for harassment. 2nd crime. HMIC new rules mean 2 crimes need recording. Another 30 minutes.

Out of that one call, thats a cop 1 hour behind a desk



I could give you better than that. But its the police not managing their budget correctly dont you know. Ignore the 20k cops no longer there



From what i know, the retired cop is fibbing
I know of two people who got a knock on the door from comments made on social media. One in the middle of the night, 1 hour after posting. Nothing racist, just banter. This copper seems the decent sort mind.
 
Well I obviously don't know all the answers. But from my point of view the police were caught massively short at the back end of the 90s when the Internet took off and have never really caught up...

A lot of policing is about perception - I don't think the staff you do have are visible enough, your PR team is shocking considering I rarely hear about the good work you do and any that I do hear about is massively outweighed by negative police stories.

Loss of staff isn't the reason the crime figures have gone up - different types of crime you don't know how to handle is, in my opinion.
There's a direct correlation with less police and rising crime. Obviously like.
 
Well I obviously don't know all the answers. But from my point of view the police were caught massively short at the back end of the 90s when the Internet took off and have never really caught up...

A lot of policing is about perception - I don't think the staff you do have are visible enough, your PR team is shocking considering I rarely hear about the good work you do and any that I do hear about is massively outweighed by negative police stories.

Loss of staff isn't the reason the crime figures have gone up - different types of crime you don't know how to handle is, in my opinion.

Staff aren’t visible because they are doing other things elsewhere that someone else would’ve been doing prior to the cuts. All of the civvie staff who were made redundant, who do you think does their job now?

Are you aware that only about 1/3rd of an officers time is spent dealing with crime? Missing persons, mental health, neighbour disputes, events, welfare checks, concern for safety checks, coroners files, none of these are crimes but take up twice as much time.

Crime has gone up for a variety of reasons, thd cuts being the main and by far the largest one. Ask anyone who has first hand experience and they will tell you that.
 
I know of two people who got a knock on the door from comments made on social media. One in the middle of the night, 1 hour after posting. Nothing racist, just banter. This copper seems the decent sort mind.
There are no cops sitting looking at Twitter and Facebook for offences.
However there are thousands of people who contact the police to say they are upset, harassed or have been racially abused on these platforms and as said already above once this is done the incident is recorded as a crime and the police then have to investigate them.
Investigation of a simple complaint of this type can take days to resolve due to human rights legislation around proportionally, right to privacy etc and the fact The companies running these sites are extremely difficult to deal with.
Technology might help the police in some matters but it has created far more work than it solves.
 
I'll take it up with him today mate, I'll tell him he's a liar , cos someone in the fareast reckons its bullshit.

I don't think he is a liar just mistaken and out of touch - as @Invictus said people contact the police with complaints and they have to look at them, hardly Police scanning Twitter and Facebook looking for crimes nobody has complained about. I suspect the retired copper is "old school" and a little out of touch maybe? Also I am sure the Police do have a fairly big cyber crimes division but looking at financial crimes, grooming and the like not that someone has called someone else fat on Facebook.
 

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