Numbers game

There was one of many emails to plough through yesterday that I found particularly amusing. It was from the chief supt, which is not normally an indication of humour.

So far, the funniest email I've ever seen was from a friend of mine, who is not particularly IT Aware, and is forever leaving his email logged in. Foolish boy.

Last time he did that, an email was mysteriously sent to our inspector saying ' Dear Sir, please could I sit and work in a corner of your office, as I think you're really good at the job, and I want to learn from you and be more and more like you every day. I will iron your shirts and shine your shoes into the bargain' or words to that effect. Chuckle chuckle, especially when a second comedian forwarded this email to their sergeant, saying 'Please can I have your support in this application?'. Boy, did we chuckle when the inspector said the next day that he was quite happy to continue ironing his own shirts thank you very much.

Anyway, I digress. This email from the C/supt stated that we do not manage logs professionally, we must be more proactive in dealing with them. His was of helping us to achieve this? By telling us that by 6 o'clock that evening (the email being 3 days old at most at this point) we had to get the number of logs down to 30 (running at 78 when I read it), and that no log should be more than 8 hours old.

Which is really helpful when people ring you up for help and then don't stay in one place long enough to be seen and don't answer the phone to make alternative arrangements, and then break the arrangements they do make.

The duty inspector, as presumably did the ones before him, give us blanket authority to use and abuse the neighbourhood teams as we see fit, regardless of their objections. Forget about the paperwork that has build up, the routine enquiries that have been put on hold while we parade about proving the reassuring power of fluourescent yellow and the suicide bomber deflecting powers of an orange traffic cone. "Use them, f*ck what they say." were his exact words. He hates it as much as we do.

The only way this will work is if I am allowed to dynamite the local telephone exchange and cause a fake anthrax scare in the front office, so no fresh work will come in, but I fear somehow this is contrary to the ethos of modern policing.

Needless to say, we handed over to lates with the same number of logs, give or take a few, that we walked into at 7am. I almost regret that I wasn't working lates, as I'd have loved to see the big mans face when the holy grail of 30 logs fell from his grasp. His deputy recently admitted to the troops that he has no idea how an operations centre works, and was shortly going to spend some time sitting in to familiarise himself with it. I shall gently suggest that he get the C/supt to do the same.

The irony of the fact that he's effectively admitted that we cannot provide both neighbourhood policing and a decent response service is clearly lost on him. The troops have worked like mad, but quite simply people will ring us faster than we can deal with them.

The remarkable similiarity of the description of British troops in World War One being 'Lions led by Donkeys' to the current situation is almost unbearable. One hopes that when he realises that his figure plucked out of the air has not been achieved, he might sit down and ask himself why. If his approach is to start talking discipline, it's probably a good job he joined the Police and not the army, as the practice of troops shooting lunatic or deeply unpopular officers did not die out in the days of Sharpe.