I did this today because it’s Christmas. Unlike you, I bet.

Right this minute, I KNOW you are procrastinating. I know this because it is the 6th of December. From pretty much this first Monday of the month through until the first Monday of the New Year, you will be using the expression “Let’s leave it until after Christmas” to justify not doing something, today, that would be better done, today. Even the two minute joblets.

Let me tell you what that means.

It means that all those joblets will mass, like a cancerous tumour, to give you nasty headaches from the 2nd of January, that’s what. That is because while your heart is telling you it will be alright, and your mind is justifying it, the world, the people in it and fate are all conspiring to have accidents, commit crimes, engage in arguments, overdo the alcohol (leading to the previous three problems) and generally create more problems to add to the ones whose solutions you are deferring for ‘later’ when you have some time.

You do it, the CPS does it, the Courts do it.

And then they all blame each other for their own procrastination strategies, all of which are based on the ‘good intent’ of managing their current workload better by slowing down the rate at which they deal with it. (Breathe.)

Every decision you put off, and every bogus action you add to someone else’s task list, doesn’t mean less work. It just means the same work gets done later.

And Christmas, like no other time of year, seems to cause more of this activity. And for the life of me I can’t think why.

You can’t shop for presents while you put the work off. You can’t put the decorations up at home, you can’t go to the pub any earlier. Your work day stays the same length right up until, and occasionally including Christmas Eve (where the occasional early finish may happen. Yet there you are, on the telephone, making an ‘appointment’ for January the umpteenth. And if you’re like the worst offenders, you cater for the deferred by making those appointments later in January than you otherwise might have (unethically) done.

Which means if you have a busy Christmas they’ll get done in February, and if you have a slack, uneventful one, you find you have nothing productive planned, anyway. Which is a paradox but you can’t rely on people behaving during the festive month-that-used-to-be-two-days.

You know, as do I (because I did it), that doing the work as soon as reasonably practicable after it arises is Best Practice. Always was, and always will be.

So keep your action lists up to date, do the small jobs the instant they come about, and plan blocks of time for the bigger stuff. Get them done as soon as you can because the next great big huge and humungous challenge/project/Major Crime is approaching, and your eyes will be ripped off the ball.

This is best practice because you know that those little tasks will still need doing, will become urgent because another department has decreed that their figures are more important than your service. And then instead of doing something you enjoy doing, you’ll be tied up involved in executing what you could have done before Christmas.

You know it makes sense.

Happy Christmas, folks!

Utilising ‘Nothing To Do’ Time

Yes, I know. “What’s he on about, when do we have nothing to do?”

More than you think. For example, front office duties at night (assuming yours hasn’t been shut) or on early weekend mornings; scene guard ‘after hours’; that moment when you’ve arrived early for an appointment; waiting around in Court to give evidence just before you’re sent home again; that sort of time. Time when you can’t really commit to something that will take massive amounts of attention and input because the interruptions are inevitable or you simply don’t have the resources (although I again acknowledge that smartphones and individual-issue laptops do make some work possible).

You do have moments when you have gaps. Maybe not many, but you do.

How to fill them?

Use your imagination, first. On the basis that such times exist, you need a strategy that you can apply at a moment’s notice, because if you have to think about the gap too long, it’s over and the time’s been wasted. Decide, in advance, what you can do in those moments.

Here are some suggestions, but you need to use YOUR imagination, not mine.

  1. Make telephone calls that need making but aren’t necessarily planned for; for example, update the witnesses you didn’t have time to update in your original plan for the day, or make appointments that need to be made.
  2. Study. If you don’t have a study manual handy you can still go to the Web and read articles on your chosen area of study.
  3. Solve other problems. Again, Google and YouTube are amazing sources of education and personal development. I stress, here, that better use of your time does not include watching Strictly on iPlayer. LEARN. (It’s easier to explain surfing Legislation.go.uk, than it is using the iPlayer, too.)
  4. Meditate. Listen – I’m not the greatest advocate of ye Mindfulness obsession but having quiet time can recharge your batteries if you’re not quite the Type A productivity obsessive.
  5. Carry a book in your ‘stuff’. A thin one, maybe, one that educates or informs.
  6. Practice public speaking. Might make you look a bit weird of you’re talking to yourself at the scene of a murder but keep your voice down and imagine making a properly constructed presentation on an interesting case you’ve dealt with.

There is ALWAYS something you can be doing that isn’t just idly thinking about life in general.

That said, perhaps you’re really over-worked (or just think you are – which is psychologically the same thing with the same effect) and you need a chill. In which case, see (4) above as your first port of call. Or you could use affirmations – just repeat a mantra to yourself that serves you: for example, some staid old tenets, “This, too, shall pass”, “I am capable of this,” “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”. They may seem cheesy, I know, but these sayings invite your brain to think about HOW to make yourself more capable, better and more content. Which is the idea.

You never have nothing to do IF you have a sense of purpose, a personal vision or sense of where you want to be that you aren’t, already. You serve that vision by making sure that what you are doing in the moment pulls you towards it, rather than away.

Carpe Diem, as they say. Every Diem.

Policing – it’s just like Baseball.

For those who don’t know, and until I read about it myself neither did I, baseball is a game where no-one scores a point until a runner passes the baseline, having completed a full circuit of the diamond. I was always under the impression that some credit was given for those runners who stole the intermediate bases. The fuss the crowd makes when someone just beats the fielder to the punch through one of those spectacular slides suggested some benefit for the effort expanded, but no. Until s/he gets all the way back, nothing.

Do you sometimes feel as though policing has it back to front? All the measures we dutifully record seem to be more about the smaller tasks than the bigger picture. How quickly the 999 phone was answered, how quickly the other call was completed, whether or not you submitted a crime report/NICHE entry on time, if the misper form was completed correctly. And we seldom seem to get credit for – taking the right action after the 999 call was received, taking time with a caller, submitting timely paperwork and finding the missing person quickly. Although to some degree that’s a jaded view, I suspect that you often feel that way – you’re badgered about minutiae but only ever complimented on a good job at relief/team level. And the plaudits always seem to go to the lucky ones who landed what I used to call a ‘spectacular’, both in terms of what happened and what they did about it.

The real test should be the final score – did you win? Was the result the one that you wanted?

There is a film starring Brad Pitt called Moneyball. It’s based on a  true story of a baseball manager/coach who recruited a statistician. The manager (Billy Beane) suffered from a lack of capital to back up his desire for wins. But he worked with a statistician named Alderson who identified that the big, expensive ‘hitters’ weren’t the ones winning the games. They did the spectaculars – home runs – but Alderson showed Beane how other measures predicted wins not by home runs from big hitters, but by inexorable, careful play in terms of bases stolen (from the batting perspective) and catches, interceptions and strikes from the bowling side.

They won lots.

This demonstrates how some measures predict success, even though they may not seem to be successes in their own right. Another way to look at this idea is, say, an effort to diet or get fitter. The end result may be spectacular, but it’s the daily measures that caused them – eating better and less, or building weights or distance by daily, incremental improvement. It was once suggested that a Grecian athlete from millennia ago used this method by lifting the same calf every day from its birth to its full maturity. The spectacular resulted from the smaller measures being planned and met.

In Beane’s case, home runs weren’t key. Getting batsmen onto bases was. And stopping the opposition doing the same was important. So he focused as much on short-length sprint speed, catching ability and brute strength of his fielders as much as he ever did his big hitters’ ability to smash the ball out of the ground. And those less spectacular players were cheaper, too.

So don’t knock all of the incessant measures with which you have to comply. Some certainly are unnecessary, serve managers and the Home Office rather than the public, and look pretty but don’t catch no bad guys.

But the odd submission of intel, the right question at the right time, the properly completed report or application – all can have a massive impact on whether your players get back to Home or just sit out there waiting for someone to do their bit so they can progress.

Your form might turn out to be the submission that solves a murder. I know that – because I saw it happen.

For more on police time management, go to http://policetimemanagement.com and get the book by the same name.

Put Purpose before Process. For a Change.

Last week I suggested that you look at designing routines that serve your professional and personal lives. This week, I am going to suggest you shouldn’t be over-reliant on routines. What a hypocrite I am.

Well, not really. Routines are wonderful things, but there are two caveats to the use of routines that you should bear in mind.

First of all, they can be boring. If your time is spent only in routine activity, it won’t be long before your standards drop, and your interest wanes. And that will happen in either order. You’ll get bored and stop trying, or you’ll feel the effort isn’t worth it and you’ll get bored. Ithink that experience is a given.

Next, they can frustrate initiative and growth. I know from my own experience (matched, I suspect, by your own) that the over-emphasis on routine eventually results in the ‘we’ve always done it that way’ attitude to change, which helps no-one, causes inefficient and ineffective thinking, and stifles true innovation. Over-emphasis on routine doesn’t take into account that not every circumstances follows a previously set pattern.

I have always hated blind compliance. Routines are important, but only to the degree that they serve the purpose, and not to the point where the process is served – but the purpose not met.

You should absolutely, unquestionably know the routines. And in many circumstances they are important – like checking your brakes when you start driving, at a low speed where discovery of a fault won’t have a nasty effect. And doing your other daily vehicle checks.*

But you should also know and understand the rationale behind them. Doing this underpins your execution, but also enables you, when appropriate, to save time and effort by not doing those elements of the routine that serve no purpose in the precise circumstances you are faced with. Or by delegating them to a more appropriate level.

Oddly enough, I read a Twitter tweet about just that, this weekend. A barrister was reading or transcribing a PACE suspect interview and stated that the first 17 pages were the ‘rapport building’ stage, the content of which was irrelevant, and unnecessary in the circumstances. I know I’ve omitted that bit with suspects who just want to confess – leave them to it, I say. And I am also aware of Judges who criticised cops for including, in JICA witness interview transcripts, all the pre-evidential guff about who kids support and who their favourite pop stars are.

Like routines, checklists are effective ways of learning routines, and of checking whether things have been done. But they are routines, and just like routines should be seen as guidelines and not The Holy Bible. You wouldn’t ask the mother of a missing child if she happened to know his driving licence number, after all. You know that would be stupid. Apply the same thinking to some of the other lists you follow. And apply your experience accordingly.

To be frank, this advice might not apply so much to your private life. Checklists and routines tend to be professional-life activities, but if you gave it some thought you might come up with some homelife routines that just get in your way. Like ‘I always walk the dog at X pm’ will cause frustration when you have something else you could be doing and you prioritise ineffectively. Or cause you to feel guilty because you’re not walking the dog at ‘her time’.

Use routines, don’t let them use you. Remember – it’s not process at the expense of purpose. It’s better to be the other way around.

*I know.

For more, get Police Time Managent at AMAZON, by clicking THIS LINK.

Routines Work. So Develop Your Own.

In my book, Police Time Management,  provide a template approach to planning your policing time – albeit one that you can apply to both your working AND personal lives – so it would be a little imprudent of me to reproduce it in this article. But I CAN promote the idea of having a routine that works for you. I already hear you saying that you already have a routine. Fairy snuff, but I still have one question.

Who designed it?

In an organisational environment like the police service, the Armed Forces and the other emergency services, routines are established that serve those august bodies. Some best practices cross the organisational borders, as it were, and as a result the operational approaches change, now and then.

But those are system-imposed, and generic routines. They work for those organisations. Compliance with them is expected. But the very fact that they are occasionally altered automatically suggests that they are not perfect, and they will very likely never be perfect. Objectives change, lessons are learned, mistakes are made and, to be frank, the ethical rules change every time Cressida Dick has to apologise for one person’s failings in a way that results in us all suffering the upheaval of ‘new protocols’.

I am not, however, going to bemoan those operational routines – I use them only to illustrate that change is possible. And if it’s possible for the organisation, it is possible for you, too – for the individual office or employee.

Most of the routines that you endure (sometimes) and accept, you do so without question. For some, like me, you do question the routines, but you don’t do that much about them ‘cause ‘you can’t beat City Hall’. But now and then, also like me, you raise your helmet badge above the parapet and, to paraphrase Harry Enfield, you shout “Oy! Organisation! NO!!” and you submit a report, suggest an initiative, perhaps experiment and see how that particular flag flies. Good for you, and good for any organisation that encourages such practices.

And then there are YOUR routines. Not those imposed upon you by the Chief and her staff. Your own. The ones only you know about. They tend to have been introduced to you by your parents, friends, prior team members and for officers, your Tutor Constable. They aren’t so much the institutional routines, just the ones that other people used, and you adopted because at some stage they seemed to work for you.

In m’book, I invite you to rethink what you do as a routine. You’ve learned from others, people that you no doubt respect. But what they taught you is what they learned and adapted to suit their situations, and now it is incumbent upon you to do the same – adapt your routines to your situation.

And by ’situation’ I don’t mean location. I do include your role, the nature, make up and overarching mission of your team, and how all that fits into the Greater Good. But mainly your perspective on all that. I invite you to consider what you’re for, and what you’re going to do about it. And I invite you to develop personal routines in that regard.

But I also, admittedly, provide a template planning routine that you can use so that once you know your place in the previous paragraph, you can utilise your time and other resources to making sure that what you produce is the best you can produce.

None of what you do is done in a vacuum. But your bit is down to you, and you alone.

Design a routine that works for you, On and off the job. and use my template to plan it all.

For more, and that secret template, get the book at AMAZON, here.

Overcome Your Nastiest Habit

Edwin Bliss, author of respected time management literature, wrote, “Misuse of time seldom involves an isolated incident; it is usually part of a well-established pattern of behaviour, and to change for the better we often must grapple with a habit that has been developed over many years.” Those habits, I would suggest, come under a singular title. Procrastination.

And procrastination is another term for fear.

“Watchoo talkin’ about, Willis?” (If you’re under 30, look it up.)

Yes, fear. Not a phobic fear. Yes, that would be a silly thesis to promote. In procrastination terms, it is a fear that exists on a continuum, but it is not a ‘frightening’ fear.

Procrastination can arise from a fear that you aren’t enough. Your self-esteem is at a low ebb and what you’ve been asked to do is, in your mind, beyond your capability at that moment, if not ‘forever’. Or it’s a technical challenge and you ‘haven’t been trained’. Took me years to attempt a tap washer change. Oh, the testosterone rush when I did it!

Connected to your own sense of inadequacy, there is also fear of being seen to be silly. I used to feel that way – until I discovered public speaking. Then I also discovered Karaoke (sorry, birthday party attendees). Then I started trying (nearly) anything. Except cold-calling. Still can’t do that!

It can result from a fear of loss – if I do what is asked of me I may lose something I value. For example, money. Have you ever wanted something but keep putting it off because you feel you can’t afford it? I have. When I retired, I still felt I was ‘poor’ despite my lump sum being 100 times the amount of handy cash I’d ever had in my life.

It can arise from a fear of missing out (MOFO) on some other event or opportunity, when that other opportunity still has to arise. “I can’t commit to A because B might yet happen.”

And the funniest one is, “I fear that don’t have the time.”

Let’s cure them all in turn.

You have joined the Police. You have overcome the challenge of interviews, education, training. You are enough, you always were. And in turn you’re going to be even better. It takes time, and an enthusiasm to ride the learning curve.

Accept the silliness. Own it. When you make a mistake, you do the jokes first. People c*** up occasionally. Sometimes it will your turn in the box, right up until the next fool makes a mistake. Do karaoke and speak in public. Boost your own confidence.

Ask if you can afford the loss – can you make it good, IF it actually happens (it tends not to)? If not, then it’s not procrastination, it’s prudence. But make sure the assessment isn’t just that fear.

MOFO is harder. But knowing your own values can help you make a better decision – yes, you’ll miss out on something, but if you’ve decided in advance what the ‘right thing’ to do for you is – do that. You will feel good about it IF you know what the right thing to do actually was.

And you have as much time as you need, as much time as there is, and all the time in the world to MAKE A PLAN TO DEAL WITH IT IN A TIMELY WAY. Sorry, I shouted.

If you take the time to consider your priorities, and the priorities of those you serve, you can apply time management philosophy and methodology to ensure that you get all you want, learn what you need, and face your fears in favour of something that is more important.

Pity that you can’t get a Procrastination Patch. You’re going to have to go cold turkey.

For more, read Police Time Management, available HERE on Amazon.

Think before you App.

This one is more about personal time management than work, because the arguments I am about to make have already been ignored by your organisation, anyway. 😊

Seeking inspiration for this week’s article, I googled ‘time management’ and was immediately presented with an article on time management apps. And my heart sank. There was good reason for this.

There are too many apps on the market, and people interested in the subject have a tendency to seek the best one by researching all of them, trying them all out, rating one against another and eventually….

Wasting time.

I recently considered moving from paper to pure digital, and looked at Microsoft’s To Do app. I now use it solely for shopping lists, but while I was looking at that also noticed that Microsoft had a number of ‘time saving’ apps in their suite. I did look at them and I realised – they were pretty much all doing the same thing. Making lists. There were tweaks that arguably made each slightly different from the others, but they were ultimately list managers. Then I elected to give OneNote a good try, and even then I realised that apart from its very handy document retrieval, it’s basically a list manager, too. I now use it as an on-hand repository for ideas that come to me when I’m out and about and have no access to my planner, and as a handy place to keep documents I might need on the hoof – but the truth is that DropBox would be just as useful for that.

What I have noticed, therefore, is that there are a lot of useful tools out there that are truly useful for self-management.

Moving on, I listen to podcasts about the popular Getting Things Done methodology espoused by its creator, David Allen. There was a debate about Evernote vs OneNote, and mentions were made of ToDoist and OmniFocus* and blah blah. What I observed as I listened was while each has merits, the users were explaining their preferences and I heard many say ‘I can send an email and it goes straight to the right note in the app.’ And I thought, “Why are you sending an email when you could just open the app and write it straight in?’

And that’s when I realised that people are sometimes using technology purely for the sake of using technology, and not necessarily for the purpose that the technology was created to serve. Like collecting books to have a great library of books you never read, using technology when it isn’t necessary, or using it in a fashion that doesn’t save any time (and in fact increases the time needed in using it) is a waste of time and effort. It looks or sounds good when you tell people you’ve mastered an app, but when mastering the app took months, and that mastery means you can make notes in only twice the time it took when you used paper or a simple To Do app, you really aren’t underlining your intelligence. Okay, maybe you ARE intelligent – but you are evidencing a severe lack of common sense.

I recall a short-lived ‘case management’ programme used by my force. It was sold as a marvellous way of recording investigations but – it was basically an email system. Boss sent an email, you did the thing and emailed back. Magic!

It lasted half of one investigation, but it cost thousands.

Surprisingly, I am not promoting a wholesale return to paper planning, although I encourage it. 😊 What I am suggesting is that instead of blindly using tech, think about what you want it for, choose one app, and then stick with that.

And to be utterly frank, if you use Outlook at work I’d recommend you select ONE other MS prog that will synch easily with it.

And don’t forget to keep a pen handy for the note you have to take which you then put into the digital world….

*And I baulked when they said how much it costs!!!!

Brief Backwards, Reduce Stress

Every day, two or three times a day, people meet to be told what happened between tours, and to identify what needs to happen that day. Routine, yes? The agenda of every briefing is what’s happened since we last met and what are we going to do about it while also preparing to deal with whatever comes before we go home. ‘Twas ever thus.

Meanwhile, the entire room is still focussed on what happened yesterday/last week/last month that they are still dealing with, with (usually administrative) deadlines pressurising them. With threats of disciplinary action peppered around failure to deliver on those (often artificial) deadlines. Yes, we do that.

Stress. And as outlined in paragraph one, stress that is created because we give no thought to an alternative, slightly less stressful, and arguably more professionally respectful approach.

Which is to discuss what the shift’s current workloads, appointments and commitments are well before addressing, even identifying any new problems.

Now, before you start, I acknowledge that stuff happens and I, too, have experienced the day when you’re just settling in when it hits the fan and that’s your day gone. (Great fun!) But they are always genuine emergencies, not system-imposed activity.

But imagine you have a list of things to do and the briefing sergeant asks what they are before allocating ‘new’? How would you feel? As a supervisor, how do you think your team would feel? Let me tell you.

The team would feel cared about, validated, and calm. The supervisor would be seen as someone who understands and remembers what it was like when they were the doers and not the tellers.

And oddly, even if work is then allocated as demand requires, the mere knowledge that their needs have been considered creates a greater sense of calm.

Now, to be frank, this can only work in an atmosphere of trust. Trust that the team members will ‘confess’ when they aren’t over-committed so that they can take the slack for those who are. Day by day. If you can’t trust a team member to support the others you, as a supervisor, have to adapt. But that’s why you are a supervisor, innit?

Remember how you felt when you had a plan and – emergencies (fun) aside – you were granted the opportunity* to do something else that was not fun, and which caused a straw-level increase on a workload that was already spine-threatening?

Utterly deflated. Sergeants – watch the shoulders droop when you give a stressed officer/colleague a new opportunity.

Stress is caused by a number of factors, but trauma aside is caused by the feeling that you are out of control. Notwithstanding the severe and debilitating lack of training in task- and self-management provided by the service, each new task dilutes the ability to deal with everything, including that task. And conflicting priorities that are routinely created by new impositions, create more stress. It’s inevitable.

Want the cure? Try the reverse briefing process and see if there is an improvement in the response, the productivity, and the attendance of your team.

*The phrase used by politically astute senior officers when granted a political powder keg job like DV, or a non-starter like dog thefts during a pandemic.

For more on this idea, read Police Time Management, available inexpensively from Amazon.

Are YOU a Mobile Phone? On Priorities and Closed Doors.

If this post just popped up in some kind of inbox and you were alerted to it, let me suggest that you open the tab and then go back to what you were doing. Read it later, when you have a clear, spare two minutes.

Can you imagine if other people did that? Allowed YOU to decide when to be interrupted?

I have noticed that people are now imitating mobile phones. (Eh?*) When a phone rings, we answer it without thought. We have adapted to the urgency implied by the self-selected, jolly amusing ringtone and, even if we are engaged with someone else, will usually interrupt ourselves and answer it.

Unconsciously, people have now adopted the belief that they are smartphones, and I bet you have experienced the situation where you are chatting to a colleague and someone interrupts – and the conversation sways that way instead of where it was. Absolutely unbelievable and incredibly RUDE.

A wise man speaking as I did a spin session said, “An interruption is something that happens when someone thinks you care.” I like that. It’s a little blunt and it doesn’t apply to all interruptions, of course – but it is funny.

Interruptions – unwelcome interruptions – are those events that interfere in an untimely way with what we are doing that is more important. If an event intercedes with what we’re already engaged in, but the new event is more important, it is NOT an interruption – it is a new priority until it is effectively dealt with, even if that only means arranging the response for a later, better time.

That’s why a firefighter isn’t ‘interrupted’ by a fire alarm – that is their job and their greater priority. And given the aforementioned definition, they care.

But a lot of ‘interruptions’ are lesser priorities, and we need to (a) manage ourselves to have the discipline to negate their impact and (b) teach other smartphone-people that their urgency is not necessarily ours. (In fact, we often need to teach people that their urgency is their fault, but each occurrence has its own characteristics and we can’t generalise. Some such interruptions need our input.)

The proper response to a needless interruption is – “I’m sorry, I can’t deal with that now*, come back at/email me about it.”

I was once asked by a manager how he could prevent unnecessary interruptions. I asked him if he, like many managers in the organisation, routinely left his office door open. He replied that he did.

“Close it when you’re busy,” I suggested. He later provided feedback to the effect that shutting his door when busy was the most effective time-saver he’d ever used.

The key to managing interruptions is to know what your priorities are, plan your time to maximise the impact you have on those priorities, and manage everything else around that plan.

And ensure you communicate that system to those around you. If they know how you manage, they can adapt their needs (priorities, plan, execution) around yours, too. And little fleas have smaller fleas, as they say – the systematic approach to work, properly communicated, cascades downhill until only those interruptions that matter come to your attention.

Which in itself frees up enough of your time to make reading this article the best use of your time – and the best thing you have learned – today.

You’re welcome.

Numbers Aren’t ALL Important – a Plea to Number Crunchers.

A wise man (named Roger Merrill) once wrote: “The degree to which urgency drives an organisation’s activities is the degree to which importance does not.” This is a foundational explanation as to why you, front line officers, are permanently busy. But not for the reason you might think.

“Urgency R Us”. We’m the police, as they say – an emergency service, therefore a service that deals with emergencies which are, by their very nature, urgent. Of course the truth is that (a) emergencies are not the only things we deal with, and (b) events that aren’t emergencies create just as many administrative and management problems as any emergency – possibly more.

Now, hear me out. I suspect this Urgency v Importance problem became particularly prevalent with the digital revolution, and with the immediacy of telephone access (and social media access) of Joe Q Public. Suddenly, things could be obtained with levels of immediacy that typists, telexes and faxes could never manage. But instead of thinking ‘Hey, we CAN do things a bit quicker than we used to’, the environment was created instead that shouted, ‘WE MUST DO EVERYTHING FASTER THAN WE USED TO.’

Suddenly, getting paperwork in with due haste became ‘by the end of the tour of duty’ for the front line officer (yet was only produced by the end of the month for the people who demanded it be submitted by the end of the officer’s day. Hm.). This automatically created a sense of urgency for bits of paper, which meant – bear with me – that everything else had to be done commensurately quickly in order to get the results in as quickly as possible.

Digitisation also meant that results could be fed into computers so that statistics could be created, adapted and monitored. And since (someone decided) they had to be constantly monitored AND programmes created that could measure everything, the data became more important than the work. And since knowing all this stuff was important, and obtainable immediately, it HAD to be.  

Unfortunately, all this data-immediacy failed, and still fails, to take into account that the work – conversations, crime scenes, arrest, interviews, statement taking etc – still takes as long as it ever did. As for the sheer stupidity of transcribing digital interview records – the interviews are quicker than pre-recording, but the courts, allied to the CPS, developed a system that then increased the time officers spend writing about them! (BTW, ever get the feeling that we have to work on a ‘by the end of the day’ cycle, while the Courts work on a three-week cycle. Not just me, then.)

Digitisation increased the demands – urgency – but no-one thought about how those demands would impact upon the importance of what we actually do. Yes, a lot of the data informs our response to events, but a lot of it is just numbers, does not represent in any shape or form the actual work that is done, and that is needed to be done, in order to create those numbers.

So I make a plea:

“Dear administrators and statisticians. The numbers aren’t all important, and they are rarely urgent. They serve our service: they are not the service. Our clients don’t give a monkeys about most of them – in fact, they are rarely even aware of them.

Making ‘submission by the end of play’ demands upon an officer who’s spent all day dealing with a paedophile predator helps no-one, least of all the victim. Having officers’ attention on delayed paperwork when they are dealing with crime scenes, RTCs, murders, rapes and missing children really isn’t helpful. Lower your timing expectations and cut them some slack so that they don’t have 6 months off for stress, because the number-crunching really didn’t help.

Love, David”