If you click the link on the title, it should take you to a Daily Mail article about people visiting stations in the Thames Valley Police area. Visitors who wish to report a crime are directed to pick up a phone and get in touch with one of two call centres in TVP, as opposed to an officer at the station dealing with the report.
This system has upset a few people, who believe that they should be dealt with at the front desk. These are probably the same people who complain that there are no officers on the beat and it took three hours for an officer to call round to investigate the theft of a pint of milk off the doorstep.
At first glance, you think it would be quite reasonable to expect to see a police officer in a police station, or at least a member of police staff? Unfortunately, 99% of the population have mobile phones and a large proportion of them seem to use their phones exclusively to call the police to sort their lives out. This means that a huge number of people have to be employed to answer the phones. Whenever there is a collision on the motorway, you can expect at least 20 calls on the 999 system. All these need to be answered.
To compound matters, the government, in their infinite wisdom, have set all forces a target to answer all calls within a certain time limit. Due to the unhealthy obsession that chiefs seem to have with these targets, this means that they feel obliged to set up massive call centres to ensure that 90% of calls are answered within three microseconds of it being connected (there is a rumour that the government will change the target so that calls have to be answered before they are even made, thereby saving the caller the effort of dialling. Anyone with a qualification in telepathy should make a fortune, but you knew that already)
Although there is a target time in which to answer the call, there is no target concerning the quality of service that the caller receives. It’s all very well having a call answered quickly, but if you are then fobbed off within the next 20 seconds so the operator can answer another call, it doesn’t really satisfy people, does it?
Back to the subject. Because there are all these people in call centres, they have to justify their existence. It also means that there aren’t as many people in the front office to deal with visitors. TVP have come up with what they believe is the perfect solution. The beauty of it is that all those calls from the front office are internal calls, which are not subject of targets,so if it gets busy because a couple of eight-year olds have just walked down a road wearing hoodies, the call centre can ignore the calls from the front offices and make sure that the external calls are answered.
The next part of the problem is that when the calls are all answered, logged and promised a response, it falls to an ever-dwindling band of officers to deal with an ever-increasing demand. Calls to the police have increased exponentially over the last thirty years, but the numbers available to deal with them haven’t gone up by the same amount. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out the solution to this equation. As you all know, there are no mathematical geniuses in the government. The only things they can add up are their expenses claims - even those have a certain element of fiction about them.
The police are now trapped in a vicious circle. The only way to increase resources is to demonstrate that there is an operational need. This means that forces have to make sure they record each and every crime and incident that occurs, to show how much demand there is. By making it easier for people to call in or phone the police, the number of calls increases and people report stuff that they would ordinarily have sorted out themselves. This in turn leads to more calls of the “my neighbour has been giving me filthy looks” variety. Resources are allocated to domestic violence units, antisocial behaviour units and other little task forces, to sort out all these issues, leaving less officers on the front line. Because no-one can rely on seeing an officer on patrol who they can discuss their problems with, they end up making a call to the police. It goes on and on, but the fly in the ointment is that, regardless of how many targets the government introduce, how many initiatives they devise, how many amnesties they instigate, the one thing that they won’t do is have the courage to increase the number of officers by sufficient to make a significant difference.
Labour will make a big issue of the fact that numbers have gone up from around 128000 officers to about 140000 officers during their time in office. This works out to be around 280 officers per force. These extra officers aren’t all on duty at the same time, so it is obvious that this increase will have next to no effect on results. Give us another 60000 colleagues and we might start to make an impression on some of those long lists of unactioned jobs.
I think this makes up for not posting for a while, doesn’t it?
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Posted by Stan Still
