A-hole in a van.

Commuting, Day rides, Audax, Incidents, etc.
Pugwash
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Pugwash »

Thankyou. You have described my sons job perfectly. He is an experienced response officer. He says it never stops. While he is dealing with one urgent situation, the radio is screaming for him to attend another. Most of the work tends to be drink related domestics. The last thing he wants to do is make an arrest, as he is then stuck back at base for hours writing it up while the mayhem continues outside. The job has been cut and cut.
Most of the time he is single manned and of course at great risk. On the subject of mobile phones he says you cannot keep up with them. He does issue penalties when he sees it, but he is usually on the way to another urgent violent incident. Often he has to just tap on the window and rollick them as he moves on.
I think he would leave in an instant if he could get something else.


I really don't see why officers see that it is their responsibility to manage their own workload by skipping an arrest, they should do their job properly and let their highly paid superiors concern themselves with lack of resources.
Bicycler
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Bicycler »

Pugwash wrote:
Thankyou. You have described my sons job perfectly. He is an experienced response officer. He says it never stops. While he is dealing with one urgent situation, the radio is screaming for him to attend another. Most of the work tends to be drink related domestics. The last thing he wants to do is make an arrest, as he is then stuck back at base for hours writing it up while the mayhem continues outside. The job has been cut and cut.
Most of the time he is single manned and of course at great risk. On the subject of mobile phones he says you cannot keep up with them. He does issue penalties when he sees it, but he is usually on the way to another urgent violent incident. Often he has to just tap on the window and rollick them as he moves on.
I think he would leave in an instant if he could get something else.


I really don't see why officers see that it is their responsibility to manage their own workload by skipping an arrest, they should do their job properly and let their highly paid superiors concern themselves with lack of resources.

"I'm sorry mrs x, I appreciate we were a long time responding to your 999 call. Unfortunately we encountered a litterer, an illegal number plate and a pavement cyclist without pedal reflectors on the way here"

I'd want police to prioritise more urgent cases over more minor ones
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bigjim
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by bigjim »

I really don't see why officers see that it is their responsibility to manage their own workload by skipping an arrest

Who said that? Can't see it anywhere.
let their highly paid superiors concern themselves with lack of resources.

Yea. Okay. Good luck with that one. Now back in the real world.....

they should do their job properly

Maybe having a highly visible presence on the streets dealing with and defusing situations, rather than being closeted behind a desk would, to some people, be thought of as, doing the job properly.
kwackers
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by kwackers »

Bicycler wrote:"I'm sorry mrs x, I appreciate we were a long time responding to your 999 call. Unfortunately we encountered a litterer, an illegal number plate and a pavement cyclist without pedal reflectors on the way here"

I'd want police to prioritise more urgent cases over more minor ones

Isn't that the basis of the crime pyramid though? By allowing small transgressions you make the ones just above more likely. (A bit like the risk pyramid, where fixing the low level stuff is what brings down the KSI's).
It's essentially the 'broken windows' theory of crime management as practised by Giuliani in NYC.

Of course it does assume you have enough police to go around...
Bicycler
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Bicycler »

Prioritising response to more serious crime isn't the same as not dealing with less serious crime. As you say, if there were enough police you would be able to deal with all crime. In terms of an individual officer tasked with attending a major incident, it would be perverse if they were to postpone their getting to the scene of that major incident in order to deal with a minor one
thirdcrank
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by thirdcrank »

One point I repeatedly make is that the full-blown all-the-king's-horses-and-all-the-king's-men approach isn't appropriate to a lot of relatively minor offences. It's taking a hydraulic press to crack a nut. For all sorts of reasons the CPS decided from the creation of the organisation that it wasn't in the public interest and, unless successive DPP's have been lobbying behind the scenes, they didn't offer an alternative. Some stuff has been taken outside the CJ system altogether, but not much eg yellow line parking. Fixed penalties have been introduced but a recipient can still insist on a trial if they like. All manner of court diversion schemes have been introduced, but whatever the declared intention in terms of reform, the net result has been avoiding the cost of prosecutions. Every so often, some party politician gets self-righteous over the numbers of cases being cautioned, but this is with the connivance of the authorities. Ironically, as public confidence in the system falls and fewer people bother to report what's happening, so it can be dressed up as a reduction in offending.

It's government by spin.
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bigjim
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by bigjim »

Wouldn't it be nice if we could count the crimes that have not been comitted or the amount of perpertators deterred from comitting a crime.
This IMO would require a more visible police prescence and an appropiate level of punishment.
I was once responsible for instigating a regular mounted police patrol on a small town shopping centre that was subject to a lot of daytime crime. Once the patrols started the crime disappeared. You can be seen and see a lot more from atop a large Police horse. Guess what? They are cutting the mounted police as well.
Criminals seem to view prison as a necessary risk of the job and come out more educated in criminal ways than when they went in.
Though, I have spoken to two people who had been 'guests' in Strangeways and they both said "never again".
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mjr
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by mjr »

thirdcrank wrote:One point I repeatedly make is that the full-blown all-the-king's-horses-and-all-the-king's-men approach isn't appropriate to a lot of relatively minor offences.

One point I make repeatedly is that the dividing line at the moment doesn't seem to be the severity of the offence or the danger it poses to other people, but it looks like some prejudice about the social standing of any parties involved.

Cyclist assaulted: can't be bothered to attend; but if your motor vehicle gets slightly damaged: double-crewed visit.

Block a busy A-road cycle lane: one PCSO arrives on foot long after the offender has left after blocking the lane for an hour; but if an all-traffic lane nearby on the same road is blocked: full-on blue light run to advise the driver, even though there's no rule against stopping there to unload.

And so on...
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thirdcrank
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by thirdcrank »

It's true that the system has always tended to assume that the criminal classes and the lower classes were synonymous and has, in consequence, struggled to come to terms with modern society where the baddies and the goodies are lee easy to separate. It's also true that once brake horsepower had replaced the horse as the daily transport of the well-to-do, a lot of people came into contact with the police who would never otherwise have done so. When I was a lad, there was a split between senior detectives and senior traffic officers over the consequences of upsetting the traditional police-supporting middle classes but that didn't get in the way of enforcement. Some of the older forum members have posted about a time when they would not wheel a pedal cycle on a pavement and spent ages on quiet Sunday mornings, jumping up and down on the rubber strips which activated traffic light. Mutatis mutandis the behaviour of most drivers was similar. Visible police patrolling combined with enforcement produced civilised standards from most road users. I'm not naïve and I know that there used to be some appalling crashes, excess alcohol being one obvious contributor. Indeed, the breathalyser is an example of what I'm saying: the police got stuck and levels of drink driving fell. By no means eliminated but the incidence of people who were otherwise a good D&I had they not been driving fell dramatically.

I'd reiterate that IMO traffic policing has collapsed. The numbers of specialist traffic patrols has fallen and the amount of time spent by non-specialist uniform patrol officers on dealing with traffic offences is now a tiny fraction of what was once the case. One area where the effort has increased is in the investigation of serious crashes ie detective rather than preventative policing.

I've pointed to various reasons for these trends. It seems to me, however, that one of the biggest threats to vulnerable road users, including cyclists, in all this is the emphasis on "casualty reduction." The threat is insidious. After all, what could be more laudable than reducing casualties? The problem is that it is little more than a form of victim-blaming and those who trumpet the UK's record of casualty reduction are less strident when it comes to levels of walking and cycling. I'm saying that casualties are reduced by vulnerable road users being frightened off the roads.

Ensuring an appropriate level of response to reports of incidents isn't easy, not least because the arrival of a car always seems more significant than the arrival of a police officer, whether they are in the car or on foot. It's also easy after the event to deem that the response should have been different, even though it was determined by what was known at the time and who was available to attend. There are cock-ups and I blush :oops: :oops: :oops: when I remember how many were down to me. I can only plead, as I usually did when Department Y called, that I was doing my best. Everybody has there own anecdote, often recycled, about armed men and helicopters arriving for a cat up a tree or nobody attending for days when something truly serious had happened. IME, cyclists are singled out in this respect.
Last edited by thirdcrank on 22 Jul 2014, 6:46pm, edited 1 time in total.
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bigjim
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by bigjim »

mjr wrote:
thirdcrank wrote:One point I repeatedly make is that the full-blown all-the-king's-horses-and-all-the-king's-men approach isn't appropriate to a lot of relatively minor offences.

One point I make repeatedly is that the dividing line at the moment doesn't seem to be the severity of the offence or the danger it poses to other people, but it looks like some prejudice about the social standing of any parties involved.

Cyclist assaulted: can't be bothered to attend; but if your motor vehicle gets slightly damaged: double-crewed visit.

Block a busy A-road cycle lane: one PCSO arrives on foot long after the offender has left after blocking the lane for an hour; but if an all-traffic lane nearby on the same road is blocked: full-on blue light run to advise the driver, even though there's no rule against stopping there to unload.

And so on...

Double crewed? You'd be lucky.
Some exaggeration there methinks. It's that sort of attitude that contributes to the police leaving in droves. NHS workers suffer the same sort of attention when one of their numbers lets the profession down. Apart from the cycling bit the above reads like a Dail Mail comment.
Flinders
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Flinders »

I don't think traffic offences or incidents are being policed as well as they used to be, though being a layperson I don't know all the ins and outs.

Just to take motorways as one example, round here, if there is an accident on the M6, it is closed for hours. Now I've lost a family member in a traffic accident, I would always want everything possible to be done to help victims, and naturally there needs to be a proper investigation at the scene. But I don't understand why here it seems to take hours longer than the same sort of accident takes elsewhere, nor do I understand why here the whole M6 if often closed in one, or even both directions, when elsewhere some lanes aere let through, or at least the other carriageway is allowed to move, and here, nothing is done to direct the traffic left stranded. I got stuck for nearly six hours, and I was completely stationery for four hours last year here in raging heat, we were given no information on local radio, and nobody whatsoever came to check to see if there were any vulnerable people who could suffer from the heat. Had we even been told we'd be there for a couple of hours, we could have organised some of us to go to the nearby service station for water for people like the lady in the car in front of me, with two children and an infant. But we had no idea what was happening, so dare not leave our cars in case the motorway started to move and our cars were left blocking it. We were just left dumped. The police decided not to let people on at the junction I was very nearly at in the direction going away from the accident (which was in the next section in the opposite direction) which then gridlocked the motorway roundabout so even when the traffic was allowed off the closed section, we struggled to get onto the road network. There was a police car at the roundabout; the policeman had parked it with its back to the chaos and was sitting in it.

I'd just delivered two American friends to the airport, one of them a journalist (thank goodness I wasn't on my way there) and I must say I was glad they didn't experience it, I'd have been ashamed of the standard of policing and total lack of duty of care to the public that this exposed. There could easily have been more deaths in the queue from the heat than there had been in the initial accident.
Vorpal
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Vorpal »

Flinders wrote:Just to take motorways as one example, round here, if there is an accident on the M6, it is closed for hours.


I could write an essay on this one. Most other countries design the central reservations to allow traffic to be turned round when something like that happens. If it's a problem to leave it open, it's gated, and emergency services all have keys. It's one that works both ways because it also allows emergency services better access to an accident. However, the problem that arises in the UK is partly due to infrastructure, and partly due to the coordination between emergency services, and partly due to the police being understaffed, and therefore not having the personnel to do traffic direction.

Any other place I've been, it would totally unacceptable to leave people sitting on a motorway for hours at a time, waiting for the accident to be cleared.
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thirdcrank
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by thirdcrank »

Vorpal

Having been stuck a few times myself on the motorway, including being held up most of the day in the queue at what I believe is still the most serious UK motorway crash in terms of fatalities, I'm interested in the idea of opening a gap in the central barrier to allow the queuing traffic to do a U-turn. How does that work, except when the traffic flow is extremely light? In particular, what's the result of stopping the traffic coming the other way to allow this to happen? How do you avoid a situation where you have as many people queuing - with possible in-queue crashes - as you are releasing from the other queue?

We've recently had a stretch of motorway upgraded with variable speed limits and fancy signs that might have been programmed to facilitate something like this but solid concrete central barriers were installed at the same time so there are obviously no plans for anything like that here in the foreseeable future. Incidentally, all this is the responsibility of the Highways Agency and the police are only consulted as what it's fashionable to call stakeholders, and stakeholders of reducing importance since the motorway control centres are now staffed by the HA's own people and their "Traffic Officers" deal with the great majority of incidents.
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mjr
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by mjr »

bigjim wrote:
mjr wrote:Cyclist assaulted: can't be bothered to attend; but if your motor vehicle gets slightly damaged: double-crewed visit.

Double crewed? You'd be lucky.
Some exaggeration there methinks. It's that sort of attitude that contributes to the police leaving in droves. NHS workers suffer the same sort of attention when one of their numbers lets the profession down. Apart from the cycling bit the above reads like a Dail Mail comment.

Maybe it was luck, but say what I see. Also I know anecdotes aren't data but data on this isn't readily available so anecdotes is all I've got.

To be clear, I don't blame the responding officers for this - I assume that they don't decide how many to send on each call... or not - but the management and policy setters and ultimately the home office. And don't get me started on the NHS management and the current Dilbert-style "battling business units" approach of trusts and groups! :twisted:
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Vorpal
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Re: A-hole in a van.

Post by Vorpal »

thirdcrank wrote:Vorpal

Having been stuck a few times myself on the motorway, including being held up most of the day in the queue at what I believe is still the most serious UK motorway crash in terms of fatalities, I'm interested in the idea of opening a gap in the central barrier to allow the queuing traffic to do a U-turn. How does that work, except when the traffic flow is extremely light? In particular, what's the result of stopping the traffic coming the other way to allow this to happen? How do you avoid a situation where you have as many people queuing - with possible in-queue crashes - as you are releasing from the other queue?

We've recently had a stretch of motorway upgraded with variable speed limits and fancy signs that might have been programmed to facilitate something like this but solid concrete central barriers were installed at the same time so there are obviously no plans for anything like that here in the foreseeable future. Incidentally, all this is the responsibility of the Highways Agency and the police are only consulted as what it's fashionable to call stakeholders, and stakeholders of reducing importance since the motorway control centres are now staffed by the HA's own people and their "Traffic Officers" deal with the great majority of incidents.

I've seen it done similarly in the USA, Germany, and Italy. Large cities may have arrangements that allow the traffic direction to be changed on the outside lanes in either direction. Lacking that sort of arrangement, they just cone off the outside lane, or block it with a police car, and put a couple of generic warning signs up. The turned traffic goes into the outside lane, and other lane(s) continue as before, albeit somewhat more slowly if traffic is heavy.

Where the central barrier is concrete, they still build in periodic gaps, or removeable sections. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.75026 ... B-xfMw!2e0 Where the space between lanes is wide, they may even build in crossings https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.76149 ... WMUx7g!2e0
I'm not sure how the removable concrete sections work. I think they must use the winch from a tow truck or something. I've never seen it done, but I have gone through a gap made by removing a concrete section. I have also seen sections of metal barriers that are removable. In some places, gates are more common. Most states in the US have a law that makes it illegal for any vehicle, other than an emergency vehicle or a highway maintenance vehicle, to make a U-turn by crossing the median of an interstate highway and they put signs up to reinforce this. It is also likely to be enforced by police. But then, they make exceptions for when people are directed by the police. The same crossing points are used during road works as well. In the US, I think they only close or gate them where illegal crossings are a problem, or likely to be.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
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