Please accept this as my formal notice….

I wanted to write a post about the reasons why I left the police.  It’s hard to do this retrospectively as the final departure was a culmination of a huge number of things, some minor, some major and leaving was not a decision I came to lightly but I will try to summarise some of the main reasons here. 

Work-Life Balance

I remember when I was at Hendon, PC Bob said to us that one of the reasons he had found himself at the training centre was that it was the first time in twenty years that he actually had some idea when he would finish his shift.  At the time, I thought this must be an exaggeration but I now know that it really wasn’t.  In my time in the police I worked in three different units / departments: response team (uniformed); robbery / burglary squad (CID); and case progression unit (CID).  Without exception, and particularly in the  latter two, I never knew when I would finish my shift and regularly at the last minute I would find myself being stuck at work for another few hours.  At times, I would find myself stuck at work for a further 12 hours, for example!  I remember one particularly nasty shift when I was in the robbery squad.  The Governor, who I was very fond of and respected greatly, despite the fact he worked us in to the ground, had arranged a 6am set of raids for outstanding burglary and robbery suspects.  This meant meeting at about 5:30am at the station.  The whole team had to be there, regardless of what shift they were doing on the rota the night before or on the day of the raid.  I was unfortunate enough to have been on lates the night before, so finished about 11pm and was also on a late shift the day of the raids meaning that regardless of how the raids went or what time they finished, I was still going to be at work until at least 10pm the following day.  Armed with a couple of hours of sleep, I got fully involved in the raids, and they were successful, with a number of outstanding suspects arrested.  I then went on to do my normal late turn shift.  We were understaffed again and there were just two of us in and from memory, we were still dealing with some of the cases from the raids (at some point in a future blog, I will talk you through what is involved in dealing with a typical case, it brings tears to my eyes even thinking about it and all the red tape that has to be hurdled).  Then, disaster, a phonecall from Wimbledon station (in Merton Borough, not Wandsworth) saying that they had arrested two suspects who were suspects in a burglary on our borough.  My heart sunk, it was nearing the end of the shift and I had snapped every matchstick I could get my hands on to try to stay awake but I knew we would have to go and deal with this as well.  We hot-footed over to Wimbledon, interviewed and charged the suspects (this takes several hours by the way and mountains of paperwork) and finished off about 3am.  I then had to come back the next morning at about 8:30am to accompany the suspects to court as I wanted to oppose bail.  Anyway, by the time all this ended, I was a complete and utter mess.  I lost about a stone and a half in the police, completely accidentally, just from running around dealing with things like this and not having time to eat.  Don’t get me wrong, this type of shift wasn’t a daily occurrence but it wasn’t a once in a blue moon occurrence either and the difference to most other jobs is that you literally have no choice.  You have to stay on late / come in early / come in on your day off whenever you were ordered to do so or you would simply lose your job.

Added to the long shifts, meaning that on the few occasions I had arranged to see my friends or family I was late or ended up having to cancel, there was the fact that your ‘rest’ days, which more often than not fell on a week day, were not your own either.  There is a carte blanche to call whoever you like, whenever you like in the police, with little respect for their privacy or personal time as you are, apparently, a police officer 24 hrs a day and this is what you signed up for.  Particularly in the CID, rarely a rest day passed without someone calling me about a case.  Court cases were another thing that took your free time away from you.  Cases can be heard at different courts but robberies and burglaries are almost always heard at a Crown Court.  Crown Court dates are not fixed and the way it works is that you get given a two week period and told that at any point in that two week period, you may be warned to attend court the next day.  You get called the evening before, normaly between about 5 and 7pm and that is your notice.  Now, this may not sound too bad if you just have one or two cases going to crown court but I got myself in a position in the robbery squad where I had a huge number of cases going to court and I had two week court warning periods constantly for about three months!  In this time, you can’t really go anywhere or do anything as you need to be available to drop everything and come to court with less than 24 hrs notice.  The witness care unit who make these calls seemed to have very little understanding of this when they called you as they work Monday to Friday and always get their rest days (the weekend) off.  What’s worse is that fairly regulalry, the two week period would pass without the dreaded phone call and then you would get allocated another two week period where you could have no life!  Honestly, sometimes I was beside myself.  This continued well in to me leaving the police by the way as well, where upon I was expected just to drop everything and attend court sometimes with no notice at all when I was working back in a normal IT job with normal hours!  Clearly I wasn’t prepared to do this unless my attendance was absolutely necessary but it did lead to some rather interesting discussions between me and the witness care unit (where I was still being told I was ordered to attend and I reminded them I didn’t work for the police anymore and would only attend court with a witness summons so I didn’t have to use up all my annual leave at court).  What they failed to understand is that each time they called me, that wasn’t my only request to attend court that week, it was one of several and that to attend them each time (when I would say at least 75% of the time, you are not called to take the stand and you sit all day in the police room twiddling your thumbs) would mean I was never at my new job!  Thankfully, this has all stopped now but it took about 6 months.

The long and short of it was that being in the police meant I was unable to give the time to the things I really cared about in my life such as friends and family, not to mention the fact that all my hobbies and dreams went out the window.  I even forgot how much I love to sing when I was in the police,  What a travesty!  Phew, I feel exhausted just writing about it.

Paperwork

You will hear officers moan about paperwork until the end of time and I heard all this before I joined but nothing can prepare you for the sheer volume and the absolute lack of necessity for most of it.  I like to question things, it is in my nature, particularly if something just doesn’t appear to be working and a very common answer to my questions in the police was, “Natalie, it just works like that OK, I don’t know why it is like this but it is not for us to question it, just get on with it OK”.  I never stopped challenging things (hopefully in a constructive way), but I never got any decent answers to my questions either.  The frustrating thing about the paperwork is that there is just so much duplication.  There is all your paper notes and the special forms for each type of incident you attend and there is all the duplication of online forms you have to fill.  Is it any wonder most officers look so fat?  Most of what you perceive to be their natural body mass is just bundles of paperwork they have been forced to carry around.

Inefficiency

This follows on nicely from the paperwork issue.  If there is one thing I find frustrating in an organisation it is inefficiency and not challenging things that clearly lead to these inefficiencies.  Inefficiency largely comes from those higher up the chain not coming up to an alternative answer to the “Why are we doing things like this?” question other than, “because we just are, you’re only a PC, stop asking so many questions and just do it!”.  Inefficiencies are everywhere in the police from the duplication / triplication and so on in data needed for various forms all relating to the same case right through to how much time is wasted by officers being called for court when they are not needed (normally getting paid double time as it is likely to be on a rest day) to the lack of organisation in big events such as central aid (where you often start your shift about 4 – 5 hours before you are actually needed and then, when it invariably runs beyond the end of your shift, yet more overtime is dished out).  I could really expand on this section but this is already turning in to a longer post than planned so I’ll leave this there for now.

Culture

I’m not sure I ever fitted in to the police culture.  You have to be a certain type of person to do this and for whatever reason, I just don’t think it was me.  I don’t think in my whole working career I have ever been surrounded by so much moaning, bitching, cynicism, negativity, back-stabbing, the list goes on and I won’t exclude myself from having any of these traits.  At times I am sure I did (especially the moaning!), the police does this to you.  I know that all of my friends and particularly my family noticed how much I changed whilst I was in the police and how much I have changed again now I have left, for the better I might add.  I am so much calmer now than ever before and actually I find stress so much easier to deal with than a lot of people as nothing will ever compare to the stress of dealing with some of those robbery cases with 4 juvenile suspects and 4 juvenile victims, all requiring appropriate adults, section 18 searches needed on all four addresses etc. – again, I could go on.  All I will say is if you are thinking of joining the police, do so with a very thick skin or be willing to grow one very quickly, especially if you join at a more mature age and are not used to being in a school playground type of environment.

Wasting Time

I joined the police, naively, to help decent people and to try to stop bad people getting away with making decent people’s lives a misery.  I honestly thought that people wouldn’t call the police unless it was something fairly serious (as I was just going from my own experiences and what any of the people around me would do) and I was disgusted at the amount of time we wasted at a certain type of person’s address discussing how the lady two doors down had walked past (on her way out the block) and shouted ’slag’ outside the premises again.  In the beginning when I used to attend these all too frequent types of calls, I would say, “OK, so, then what happened” waiting for the real juicy part of the crime but I almsot stopped asking in the end as the sad realisation dawned on me that this was likely to be all that had happened, again.  I will try not to stereotype here about the type of person who calls the police for such trivial matters on a fairly regular basis (once or twice a week normally) but more often than not (and this is based on fact and not bias or prejudice), the type of person who does this has never worked a day in their life and therefore never contributed a penny towards this service that they tell me they are ‘entitled to’.  Now, I don’t mind trying to help people - this is also in my nature – but when dealing with these calls and all the associated paperwork that comes with having attended, despite the fact no crime is likely to have been committed, means that no units are available to deal with something far more serious where a person genuinely needs your help and burglars are getting away because you can’t attend until you have finished reassuring your current ‘victim’ that you will speak to the ’suspect’ to warn her about calling her a slag again, it can be very frustrating. 

The stark contrast in people’s attitudes towards calling the police was never more apparent than when I worked in the burglary squad.  I would often deal with cases of artifice burglaries (for example, someone posing as a gas man to gain entry to your home and then stealing things whilst within) and the victims of these cases, mostly, would be very elderly ladies or gentleman (it broke my heart to see what these poor people were put through by these shameless criminals).  The frustrating thing is that most of the time, they would only report the crime because a relative suggested it and / or normally several hours, but more often, days had passed by the time it was reported leaving sadly, little chance of catching the suspects.  Without exception, nearly all of these elderly people would say when I visited them something along the lines of, “Oh, I’m so sorry dear, I really didn’t want to waste your time” or, “I didn’t think it was serious enough to call you”.  Artifice burglaries, in contrast to 90% of the tripe police officers deal with on a daily basis, are a very serious crime and it is so sad that a lot of the suspects are getting away because the calls aren’t being made as soon as the incident has occurred.   If only everyone had the same respect for not wanting to waste police time – we would be in a far better position to help people and catch suspects if that were the case.

For a fuller idea on how much our time is wasted as police officers, I recommend you read PC David Copperfield’s ‘Wasting Police Time’ which reflects fairly well the experiences I too have encountered. 

Non-Performance Culture and Little Control over Career Path

I like to work in an environment where people are recognised for their hard work – not the number of arrests they make or the number of cannabis warnings they hand out – but by the way that they conduct themselves at work and by the way that the victims of their cases feel about how they have been dealt with.  In the police, you would normally find in each team / unit you work in that some people will work very hard and do about 80% of the work and some people won’t work very hard at all and will do about 20% of the work.  The problem is there is very little incentive for you to work hard and working hard for the sake of helping good people is difficult to do for the reasons I mentioned above as so little of what you do is helping good people.  I comepletly understood why people became lazy as why not if someone else is going to work twice as hard as you to get the work done but I could never have become like that and general poor supervision in the police means that nothing is done about it.  The way that performance is measured in the police is all about figures and statistics.  It goes without saying that I could have dealt with the 30 burglaries and robberies allocated to me at any one time far quicker if I had put less work in to them and not taken the time to write letters to the victims keeping them constantly up to date with what was going on but I could not have slept soundly at night had I done that (not thta I sleep much anyway!) and to know that I would be measured on volume rather than quality was a difficult environment for me to work in.  To get through the crimes I needed to get through, investigating them as thoroughly as they deserved to be and treating the victims as well as I felt they absolutely must be meant that I was constantly working at an unstainable pace and making myself ill.  It seemed there were two choices, keep going like I was or stop putting the same amount of effort in to solving the crimes and giving victim and witness care.  I was simply not prepared to do either.

You join the police thinking about all the opportunities there are to work in diffierent areas but in reality, it is actually quite difficult to move around and manage your own career.  So many things you do on your step towards your ultimate goals require you to commit to your borough for another two years, particularly ours, as so many people wanted to leave!  There are great opportunities in the police, there is no doubt about that, but be prepared for a lot of back stabbing from fellow officers if you want to be involved in the bunfight for  these few opportunities.

‘Blanket Bollockings’ and Knee Jerk Reactions

As someone who generally does things by the book and doesn’t cut corners and writes very thorough reports, I particularly objected to the blanket bollockings dished out in the police on a regular basis.  I found that we were treated like children the majority of the time.  The way it would work is that one or two people (out of hundreds of officers) would abuse some process or another and then we would either all in our briefings get told off for this one or two people’s behaviours or we would all receive an e-mail highlighting our bad behaviour!  Coupled with this was knee jerk reactions such as this: when I was in the burglary and robbery squad dealing with fairly serious crimes, the internet was an essential tool for part of our investigations and in this technological day and age, I find it hard to imagine how we could possibly investigate a crime properly without this aid.  I had managed to get internet access after submitting a lengthy form and waiting some weeks for approval and finally, on getting this, one or two people had been reported to be browsing sites at work that could not have reasonably been viewed for police purposes.  What happens?  We all get told off, a snotty e-mail gets sent to everyone and we all get our internet access revoked.  I was then in a position where I had to ask the Sergeant if I could use his computer for any internet enquiries which was difficult as he often didn’t work the same shifts as me and it meant asking him to stop doing his work every time I needed to do this!  All this just adds to the inefficiencies in the police and I’m afraid Senior Management, if you treat your officers like children, they will act like them.  Trust them to act like adults and deal with the very few individuals who wish to abuse this and your officers will undoubtedly behave like adults.

There is so much more to say but so little time so that’s it for now.  I’m exhausted!