Those who know me *really* well will know I have several problems with the British police.<\/p>\n
All of them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Whoo-pee-fucking-doo.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
I mean, why have the mentally-challenged blue-jobs only just arrived at this course of action?<\/p>\n
Here’s why.<\/p>\n
The government has cut all of their budgets.<\/p>\n
And instead of reducing their *operational* establishment count (the number of uniformed personnel on their payroll), the twats<\/span> people in charge have decided that they shall reduce the size and scope of their administrative fiefdoms.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The areas of operation that the Welsh police forces have offered up for collaboration are:<\/p>\n Specialist Crime<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n Criminal Justice<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n Scientific Support<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n Firearms<\/strong>: Gwent, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys Police Forces will develop options for the establishment of a joint firearms range.<\/p>\n ICT<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n Procurement<\/strong>: A Joint Procurement Unit will be established between Gwent, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys Police, merging existing departments into one, “maximising buying power”.<\/p>\n Interoperability<\/strong>: The final project will focus on reviewing interoperability between forces, identifying further opportunities for collaboration.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n And, just for good measure, let’s add in Payroll.<\/p>\n And Pensions.<\/p>\n And HR\/Personnel.<\/p>\n The police forces of the UK – not just Wales – do not collaborate enough. They have been built into individual republics because Budget Is King.<\/p>\n And the bigger budget that a police force can command, the better that police force is.<\/p>\n Except that’s not true.<\/p>\n Size of budget is actually an indicator of inefficiency, not *quality of service*.<\/p>\n With the possible exception of London and Manchester, but their budgets and compartmentalisation need to be heavily scrutinised too.<\/p>\n To this end central government needs to stop running scared of the police in general and ACPO in particular.<\/p>\n We need to have a scheme that doesn’t allow the perpetuation of bloated police force expenditures.<\/p>\n We need to have a system that penalises police forces with large budgets, and rewards those that collaborate and share efficiencies.<\/p>\n Every single police force in the UK should be an *operational* unit. They shouldn’t have their own mountains of support industries.<\/p>\n That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}