Real Policing

On Wednesday night we were out on Hallowe’en patrols.  For some reason beyond my understanding, some teenagers find this a reasonable excuse to go around lobbing eggs, flour, racial abuse and fireworks at people and their houses and cars.  They also think nothing of putting in a few windows for good measure.  Like I say, quite why they feel the need to do this escapes me.  It’s hardly ‘trick’ in the fun sense as originally intended in this adopted Americanism.  While carrying out this duty, it occurred to me that we were taking the time to do such an activity as a result of the lack of social respect and discipline around in an ever growing proportion of the youth culture today.   

Anyway, the task at hand presented a logistical policing problem in regards to certain procedures, bearing in mind we work in pairs and were stopping ”suspected” youths often in numbers of 10+.  It soon became apparent that going through the whole officially sanctioned stop & search routine of GO WISELY (an acronym for the verbal notification a constable must give to a person detained for the purposes of a search) and accompanying paperwork just wasn’t going to work.  On a very busy night where our attention was constantly required elsewhere this wasn’t practical.  So, faced with this problem there was a swift return to some old fashioned “common sense policing” in the form of a one off warning to the youths to remove anything from their pockets followed by a quick pat-down and a look in any bags.  Any eggs hidden in the pockets were going to get squished - CRACK - yuk, oops.  Shame!  (Anyway, I can’t think of any legitimate reason a 14 year-old out past 8pm and in company with a group of pals would have for carrying a loose egg in their pocket).  Strong words of advice were issued and they were told “if you want a search form then come to the police station tomorrow with a parent and ask for one.”  By adopting this working practice between us we were able to get through a marauding group of potential troublemakers in about 2 minutes.  

Following the formal method would have meant, well, I’d probably still be filling out the paperwork now, the day after, for the 50 or so I had stopped and dealt with.  In fact, let’s look at that and do some quick maths.  Working on an average time of ten minutes per person per stop & search, including running a computer check and filling in the required paperwork: 50 people x 10 minutes = 5 hours.  Also, the new stop & search forms now contain a section to monitor how the detainee felt about the whole encounter - a kind of customer satisfaction questionnaire, just in case we’ve hurt their feelings.  WHAT?  I’m not here selling consumer goods!  You’ve been stopped for a damn good reason and if you don’t like it, tough.  If by some chance I have made a mistake and got the wrong person then I will apologise without reservation and explain my reasoning again so that hopefully you’ll understand why.  If you’re not happy with that then by all means take my number and make a complaint, which you’re perfectly at liberty to do.