Those who know me *really* well will know I have several problems with the British police.
All of them.
I have voiced many disparaging comments of the Metropolitan Police Service here, based on my experiences in and out of uniform and my professional observations compiled of frequent business meetings in New Scotland Yard and *cough* other places.
The source of today’s police-themed unhappiness is the news that the police forces of Wales have decided to collaborate with each other to reduce their overheads and, thus, cut their overall operating costs.
Whoo-pee-fucking-doo.
Why?
I mean, why have the mentally-challenged blue-jobs only just arrived at this course of action?
Here’s why.
The government has cut all of their budgets.
And instead of reducing their *operational* establishment count (the number of uniformed personnel on their payroll), the twats people in charge have decided that they shall reduce the size and scope of their administrative fiefdoms.
The compartmentalised way that the police forces of Wales have been allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged is a symptom of a broken system that extends far beyond the forces of Dyfed-Powys, Gwent, North Wales and South Wales.
The areas of operation that the Welsh police forces have offered up for collaboration are:
Specialist Crime: A Specialist Crime Directorate will initially be established between Gwent and South Wales Police to “improve strategic and tactical intelligence opportunities”, rationalising resources and training.
Criminal Justice: The creation of an All-Wales Criminal Justice Board will create “uniform criminal justice processes”, and increase capacity for the police and Crown Prosecution Service.
Scientific Support: Scientific support covers areas such as forensics, fingerprinting and scenes of crime investigators. A Joint Scientific Support Unit will be established, and “offer economies” by pooling current services.
Firearms: Gwent, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys Police Forces will develop options for the establishment of a joint firearms range.
ICT: An agreement has been reached to develop a common ICT infrastructure across Wales. Officials say there will be a reduction in duplication with increased capacity.
Procurement: A Joint Procurement Unit will be established between Gwent, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys Police, merging existing departments into one, “maximising buying power”.
Interoperability: The final project will focus on reviewing interoperability between forces, identifying further opportunities for collaboration.
All of these – every single fucking one – is an absolute no-brainer. How is it possible that neighbouring police forces were allowed *not* to collaborate on these business areas?
And, just for good measure, let’s add in Payroll.
And Pensions.
And HR/Personnel.
The police forces of the UK – not just Wales – do not collaborate enough. They have been built into individual republics because Budget Is King.
And the bigger budget that a police force can command, the better that police force is.
Except that’s not true.
Size of budget is actually an indicator of inefficiency, not *quality of service*.
With the possible exception of London and Manchester, but their budgets and compartmentalisation need to be heavily scrutinised too.
To this end central government needs to stop running scared of the police in general and ACPO in particular.
We need to have a scheme that doesn’t allow the perpetuation of bloated police force expenditures.
We need to have a system that penalises police forces with large budgets, and rewards those that collaborate and share efficiencies.
Every single police force in the UK should be an *operational* unit. They shouldn’t have their own mountains of support industries.
That is all.
No brained indeed. Especially shocked that ICT and HR aren’t shared even within Wales. Madness.
There are so many obvious ways of reducing the spend. But our totally screwed-up ‘budget-driven’ method of funding public services are actually inhibitors to common sense, not enablers. The central government powers that be calculate the support costs for a police force and that’s that. If a police force underspends on their support, their next budget is trimmed. So the incentive is not to save money. The whole funding/spending model needs to be thrown away; clearly not fit for purpose.
I think our roading budgets used to be like this, though perhaps not any more. We certainly used to see a flurry of pointless resealing in the most annoying places all at one time of year.
The travesty with running a police force like this is what all that wasted money could be spent on in the front line. Better equipment, more training, better communications with the public. And so on…
It seems to be a mandate that government in general is required to have more REMFs than operators. And, the lack of resource sharing and cooperation was a prime contributor to the felling of our twin towers on 9/11.