It’s all very well politicians saying they know what is best to help the police do their job. The only real way is to talk to police officers and to go out on the streets with them. So that is what I did last Friday 4th November as I joined Green shift for their 4pm to 2am shift as an observer.
The dedicated and very professional shift of officers worked hard all evening and into the earlier hours going from one incident to the next, yet still at midnight there were 18 reports that they had not managed to deal with. Fortunately none of them were life threatening and the police control room had managed to get the priorities right.
The police shift started with a briefing by the shift Sergeant Tim Boennic during which the officers were :-
I went with the area car team to see what they did, and they did a lot. Between the start of the shift and midnight the area car did the following:
In between the above incidents, if there was anytime at all, the area car officers tried to deal with any ongoing investigations and keep their eye out for drivers driving too fast, driving without a seat belt, driving with mobile phones or parked dangerously.
At midnight it was back to the police station and time for a well-earned ‘lunch break’ with one half of the shift. The problem was, between ordering the kebab and chips and getting it, a call came in and some officers attended the incident. They got their reheated kebab and chips later.
After lunch break and sometime on paperwork it was back on patrol at 1am, this time in the CCTV van. Almost immediately the call came to go an incident involving a stabbing and a very young child. Fortunately the truth was not as dramatic, no one was stabbed, the child was safely placed with a neighbour by its mother, while the police sorted out the details of the fight between this mum’s brother and her partner.
Finally, at quarter to two, it was back to the station for the end of the shift, but then this:
At 3 am we went back to the station for the end of the shift for most and the start of the paperwork for some. A standard 10-hour shift had turned into an 11-hour plus shift. The overtime budget for the week had been blown in one single evening, but the thin blue line had held.
The problem is the thin blue line is very thin.