A Reasonable Response

Inspector Gadget's got a good post up about response times, and a video of one of our regular customers.  The video could be from any supermarket up and down the country.  Well, apart from M&S.  M&S shoplifters are not just any shoplifters.

In Blandshire, we've invented a brand new classification that has an open-ended response time, so anything we're not likely to be able to attend soon, gets reclassified as "non-urgent".

Other methods we use to meet targets for attending and closing jobs:

• Arrest requests from other forces get printed out and left on the desk in Blandmore's main report writing room, then the log closed.  If a sergeant forgets to write it up on the board, the arrest may never get done, and the force never updated that it will never be done. There's no sensible place to log arrest attempts and there's a small chance that if it isn't rubbed out when the arrest has been made, the person could be arrested again. But on the plus side, the job gets closed within 5 minutes of arriving.
• Jobs that can be dealt with by way of appointment get logged in a separate diary and closed.  If the appointment is never dealt with, due to redeployment, victim forgetting, or outside circumstances, it can be days before it is re-booked because there isn't a "live" job on the computer any more.
• Crimes that are not "priority crimes" (these are crimes with a much more important target than the response time target) do not even go onto the computer.  They find their way through various departments and offices, before being allocated to whichever sergeant happens to be on duty that day.  If and when the sergeant notices the crime has been allocated, they will allocate an officer to deal with it.  It can be 2-3 weeks before the victim is contacted, and that's for cases with named suspects and outstanding property to find.  It's a helpless feeling when you ring up the victim to say, "I know, I wish I'd come straight round but your report was in the ether".  Other examples of "slow-time" crime reports can include shopliftings where the offender was still outside for 20min consuming the goods he had just stolen, but the job went "slow-time" because he had left the store - meaning it never went onto the Incident Control System to dispatch a unit.

On the plus side, Mother Theresa has abolished all targets for the police, so no one can do anything if we ignore the above system and use commonsense to resource jobs.

The truth about systems like these is that it is not just about targets, although they do figure.  If every crime requiring a physical presence and investigation appeared as a "live" job, response teams would simply drown under the weight of them.  Yesterday in Blandmore we had in excess of 40 jobs requiring attendance by 10 officers at one stage, and that's WITH a system that diverts a lot of jobs elsewhere.  Under the above system, a lot of investigations are closed that were solvable, and a lot of victims lost interest who would have provided evidence.  While we run around attending reports of racism and domestics where we are not wanted.

As with everything, it's all an excuse to make less officers do more, without any lessening of quality.

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