Digital Futures…

I attended a conference today with some senior police leaders to discuss how we take police use of social media forwards. Following on from the riots, there is a real impetus behind this work, and the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. It was really refreshing to see a room full of senior officers with an understanding of the key issues and a desire to improve the current situation.

There is an emerging consensus of the big business areas where we need to integrate social media into our traditional policing response, they are;

• Engagement
• Intelligence
• Investigation

Engagement seems relatively obvious, police officers should be taking every opportunity, and using every medium to talk to our communities, listen to them, and allow the public to influence how we deploy our resources. In this regard, social media seems to be an open goal. I am followed on twitter by around 7700 people, many of them from Wolverhampton, and as the Superintendent for the City, this gives me an opportunity to talk to people every day, in a way that would not be possible if I didn’t use social media. The opportunities are endless, and in 2012 we ought to be using social media routinely to talk to people, there are no excuses not to.

Intelligence gained from social media presents some new challenges to us in terms of the way we have traditionally worked, but the opportunities outweigh these many times over. In the aftermath of the riots, people were tripping over themselves to tell the police who was responsible, and we had to find ways of getting the information into our systems. We need to protect people who give us information, and we need to able to verify whether or not the information is true. Our traditional model for turning information into intelligence, the National Intelligence Model, simply does not work quickly enough to process information in the age of instant media. This is not insurmountable but, it does mean that that we are having to think about things differently.

Investigation in the digital age is changing rapidly. When you are investigating serious crimes, speed is of the essence. We often refer to the golden hour, and the evidence gathered in the immediate aftermath is often crucial to solving a crime. These days, the golden hour often happens digitally. People take photos and videos on mobile devices, provide commentary on the scene and start to speculate on motives and potential offenders online. Police need to be capturing all of this information, at the same time as containing the physical crime scene. again, there are risks, but we simply have no option than to adapt our processes and educate our investigators.

This is of course not a complete list of all of the opportunities and threats that exist in the digital world for policing, but it is a good start. The ACPO business leads for the areas listed above were all at the meeting today and there is clear commitment from them to make the necessary progress.  

I am really optomistic for UK policing and pleased that the hard work of some of the early adopters of social media is starting to bear fruit. Watch this space…….

Social media, Police and Riots

I decided to wait for a little while before writing a post to discuss the use of social media during the recent riots that took place across England. Over a period of two weeks we have seen a move away from the initial knee jerk calls for social media to be turned off during disorder to a much more sensible position, of the industry working with the authorities to start to understand the social media world better from both sides.

Over this period, I have seen the Police attacked for their lack of knowledge of and use of social media. Those of you who have read my previous blogs will know that I have been a fierce advocate of police use of social media for many years. I have used social media effectively during disturbances before, and posted about it in April 2010. There has been a group of early adopter forces and individual officers who have been trying to enhance the understanding and use of social media amongst UK policing over the past three years.

Those calling for social media to be turned off seem to me to have completely missed the point. I was on the streets of Wolverhampton during the riots that took place here. I saw first hand the use of mobile handsets, where offenders were clearly consulting their screens and then issuing instructions to others. I have no doubt at all that social media played a part in the organisation of riots in parts of the country. This does not however mean that we should be calling for it to be turned off. It does mean that we need to understand how it works, and get better at using it.

The organisation of protests and disorder has evolved significantly in recent years. It was not very long ago that to organise a protest, you needed a group of like minded people in a room together, agreeing on a theme for the protest, making placards and flyers, and spreading the message via posters and word of mouth. These days, protests can be arranged without any of the protesters even having to be in the same country as each other. Locations can be announced at the very last second. Police forces have not kept up with this change, and we have sometimes given the impression that we are being outwitted and out-manoeuvred at every turn, thwarted by technology.

When protests were being organised in student union bars, our answer was not to try and close down every bar and pub where the meetings might happen. Instead we chose to overtly approach these meetings and speak to the organisers to help us plan. Where co-operation was not forthcoming, we used covert tactics to gain a better understanding. In my view we should be taking exactly the same approach to social media. Rather than risk alienating millions of social media users by trying to turn it off (which I’m not sure is even possible) surely the way to address social media is to better understand it, and look at ways to use it to our benefit.

During the disorder in Wolverhampton, I used Twitter throughout, to update communities in Wolverhampton with developments, and crucially to prevent the spread of misinformation and rumour. One thing that we have seen over and over again during emergency situations is that where there is no information coming from the authorities, the gap will be plugged by speculation. InWolverhamptonwe have worked hard to build a network of local social media users, so that there was a network in place to get our messages out. (For those who want more information on this, this blog sets out the story of how we used social media during the riots.)

I cannot overstate the positive feedback I have had following my use of social media during the riots. I have had hundreds of messages of support and thanks from people who followed me to get an accurate picture of what went on. The very clear message is that people were reassured by following my feed, and believed it rather than all of the rumours that were flying about on the day.Wolverhampton local authority have told me that they were following my feed and then broadcasting updates from it. Almost every tweet I put out updating the situation was retweeted by 100+ people (Twitter seems to stop counting at 100!) National TV channels were running banner headlines which were straight lifts from my tweets. I gained 5000 extra followers in the 24 hours after the riots started which gives you some idea of the amount of people who wanted to be kept up to date.

I don’t think that there is now any question about whether or not police should use social media. Forces cannot just bury their head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist.  UK policing must become better, and integrate modern communications into their day to day operations.

As somebody who has been using social media since the early days, the most important things that I have learnt are;

1)      Use Social Media – this might sound blindingly obvious, but we must adopt much wider use of social media in UK policing, if we are to become adept at using it. It appears to me that some areas have started to think about social media the day before they start using it at an event. This doesn’t work, firstly because as a result they don’t know what they are doing, and secondly, they have no follower base, and so they are talking to themselves. If you use social media on a day to day basis, people start to trust your voice, and they are much more likely to turn to you for information in a crisis.

2)      Be brave – you will make mistakes when you use social media, and once they are out there you can’t retract them easily. I think police forces need to be relaxed about this, the benefits of using social media to talk to people far outweigh the potential pitfalls. When I have made mistakes, people have commented that it just makes the police appear human, nobody expects us to be perfect all the time, but they do like to be able to talk to us.

3)      Reach out to current users – one of the benefits of social media is that there are already lots of networks out there just waiting to talk to us. I have spent some time since I arrived inWolverhamptonspeaking to the influential social media groups here. On the day of the riots, WV11, which is a fantastic hyperlocal site were carrying all of my messages, allowing people to access my information from a local site they like and trust.

4)  Be an individual – There are some great examples of corporate use of social media in policing. West Midlands Police and Greater Manchester Police have both got huge follower numbers, and are excellent tools for broadcasting messages. Both forces during the riots monitored their twitter feeds and answered questions they were asked, taking a step away from the one way traffic that has been the hallmark of Police twitter use. My view is that this is very important, but that alongside the corporate presence, forces ought to encourage individual officers to engage through social media. This allows local people to follow a local cop, asking them questions and talking to them about issues on their doorstep. In effect this adds another dimension to the concept of a local officer.

I am encouraged by the early signs. There is now a platform for the industry to work with the police to help us understand each others needs better. There is interest from the Home Office about how police use social media, we may be seeing a new dawn in police use of social media. Fingers crossed!

Post Riot Thoughts…

It is now two weeks since the riots. On the day that significant disorder broke out in Wolverhampton, I was out on the ground, witnessing at first hand the damage being caused, the violence being used towards officers and the looting of the shops that were deliberately targeted for the goods that were on display. We were able to bring the situation under control due to some heroic actions from our officers, relatively quickly, and with thankfully little injury to the public or police. As is always the way in such events, there were moments of extreme frustration, that we couldn’t protect everything as we had to move officers to protect and contain locations. There were also moments of extreme satisfaction, as we started to lock the offenders up and force the rioters out of the city.

Throughout the course of the day I witnessed some acts of real bravery from officers. As always I was very proud to be part of the Police force that stood in front on the offenders, took the missiles off them,  stopped them inflicting the type of damage that they clearly had in mind, and then set about locking them up.

At one stage I was with a group of Special Constables and PCSOs, they were stood in a line in front of the new glass bus station in Wolverhampton, with the rioters coming towards them. They are not public order trained, but they wanted to be out, protecting the community they work in. We replaced them with trained officers in protective kit as soon as we could, but they stood, without question, in the line of fire whilst we did it.

Throughout the day I was using social media and twitter in particular to update the people of Wolverhampton about what was going on. That was in fact what this blog was going to be about but I will cover that in a later post. Suffice to say that twitter and the social media users of Wolverhampton were invaluable throughout. Rumours were quashed, facts were distributed, and people slept better once they were reassured that it was under control.

The day after the riots, the people of Wolverhampton turned out to clean their own city centre up. They were brilliant and the pride they showed in the area put the rioters to shame. I went out and spoke to the staff in the shops that had been damaged and members of the public. The overwhelming message was that they were determined to press on and not be beaten by the criminals involved in the disorder. Wolverhampton is full of great people, and we saw the best of them the day after we had seen the worst.

In the time since the disorder, it is fair to say that we have been overwhelmed by the messages of support we have had from the public. We have had cards, cakes and chocolate delivered to the police station. I have had countless officers relaying stories to me of being stopped while they are on patrol and thanked by people. We are very grateful for the support we have received from ordinary people; genuine thanks for that.

The investigation has been in full flow since the disorder, and we have seen large numbers arrested and prosecuted. I am pleased that we have been able to do this quickly, as it sends a clear message to those involved; if you are involved in this type of offence, we will come for you, and won’t stop until we have you.

Making progress….

In November 2009 I posted about Police using Social media, or rather not using social media.  At the time I wrote it you were more likely to see Gordon Brown performing a stand up comedy routine than you were to see a police officer on twitter.

Since that time, we have made some good progress. There are many more forces now engaged and actively participating, and lights seem to be coming on all over the place. I am regularly e-mailed by officers asking for advice on Social Media use, and encourage as many as I can to come on board. Since taking up my new job at Wolverhampton I am encouraging my officers to get involved and take the social media plunge.

I wrote the post to encourage officers to use social media to talk to and engage with the public in a different way.  We will of course always make most of our contact face to face, but we cannot afford to ignore the booming social media landscape. Engaging with the public remains an excellent reason to use social media, but it is clear now that we need to be engaging for other reasons.

At protests recently, social media has been used to orchestrate and co-ordinate activity to good effect. Police have been caught on the back foot and are a long way behind the protesters. It is my view that until more police officers and senior leaders start to use the medium, we will not even begin to close the gap. You can’t expect to just turn up on the day and start successfully tweeting. Firstly nobody will be following you,  so you will be merrily tweeting to yourself.  Second, although it is not a difficult to use the sites, it is good to practice before you start.

Before I tweeted from the EDL protest last year, I set about speaking to people in Dudley in the weeks leading up to the event. When I tweeted on the day, I had a ready made group of local people who forwarded on my tweets, and who were able to help me reach more people.

I still encounter some limited abuse and negativity on Twitter, but the vast majority are really welcoming. On a number of occasions, people have spoken to me about real crimes I have been able to help them with, people regularly ask me for advice, which I happily give.  I have been able to diffuse malicious community rumours, and offer clarity where there is confusion.

The one thing I regularly find myself having to deal with is the assertation that because I use twitter regularly, I am somehow neglecting my job, and spending all day looking at a computer screen. To any doubters out there let me offer some clarity;

I am a Superintendent in the Police. The budget for my area is around 40 million pounds. There are around 800 Police officers and staff working with me at Wolverhampton, looking to me for decisions and leadership. Last year I led and solved four murders….I am therefore actually capable of doing more than one thing at a time!

I am really encouraged by the progress we are making. I commend to anybody about to start tweeting PCSO Lee Haynes and PC Richard Stanley as excellent examples. 

If you are a police officer or PCSO reading this, delay no longer. People want to talk to you, so make a start. If you are a member of the public frustrated at not being able to tweet your local officer, send an e-mail to your local Inspector asking them to get an officer tweeting. Refer them to me if they need any advice.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think…

The Invisible Police

You do not have to look very far at present to find a small group of people having a regular knock at the Police. At the top of the list of issues that they frequently repeat is the lack of visibility from Police officers. The issue is then picked up and repeated by the media, in places like Twitter and quickly becomes accepted as fact. Next year we will have the election campaigns running for the new Police and Crime Commissioners. I predict that all of the candidates will be telling the public that they will get tough with Police leaders, and force officers out of their stations into their communities.

I will not go into the way that police visibility is measured here, but I do want to illustrate the competing demands on police resources and why some officers are not visible to the public.

Firstly let me say that there is nobody prouder than me to wear a police uniform. I recognise and value the fantastic work carried out by neighbourhood teams and response officers up and down the country. I have carried out both of these roles fairly recently, and can testify to the way officers work tirelessly, out of the station, getting in the faces of criminals, and keeping people safe. Nontheless, we ignore the work of the invisible police at our peril.

Four years ago I was a Detective Inspector working in Wolverhampton. I received notice that a sex offender was about to be released onto my area from prison on license. The man was a predatory paedophile, who had offended against children in the past. The prison assessment was that he was highly likely to do so again.

As you would perhaps expect we put a comprehensive plan in place to deal with him. He was visited by uniform officers and probation officers and spoken to. He assured all parties that he was a reformed character and that was would abide by the terms of his license. There were very strict conditions in terms of where he could or could not go. We also used a lot of covert  officers and techniques so that we could gain a better understanding of what he was doing.

Four weeks in, the man had been good to his word, only going where he was supposed to, and complying with his license. At this stage we were having to take difficult decisions. This operation was very expensive, the resources we were using were precious, and there were a whole host of competing demands. We take these types of difficult decisions on a regular basis, but it doesn’t make them any easier. We decided to run the operation for another week.

The man was arrested in week five of the operation. He was arrested in Coventry, miles away from where he was supposed to be. When my officers grabbed hold of him, he was accompanied by two little girls, and had just come out of  a sweet shop with them. When officers spoke to the girls they told us that they were en-route with the man to a local park.

Although these types of incidents are rare, I would place a hefty bet that this type of scenario is playing out somewhere in the country as we speak. During the operation I have just described, there was no public reassurance, because we obviously didn’t tell anybody. The operation didn’t count towards any kind of performance figures, and it was very expensive. Nobody saw the officers involved in this investigation, and they would clearly not have featured in any count of police visibility. No votes would have been won by any Police & Crime Commissioner candidate because they wouldn’t have known about the job.

Given the very real financial situation that Policing finds itself in, we will have to continue to make real decisions, based on real threat and risk, influenced by whole range of factors, one of which is visibility. Should we continue to invest our precious resources in the type of invisible policing that I have described above?

Perhaps the first people we should ask are the parents of those two little girls.

Money, money, money

We are currently in an era where money or lack of it is having a huge impact upon the policing landscape.

Last week saw the publication of two reports which will have a very significant effect on police officers terms and conditions for years to come. On Tuesday, Tom Winsor, the former rail regulator published his report into Police pay and conditions. This was followed by the Hutton report into public sector pensions.

In the space of a week, many officers have seen a future which is looking significantly worse than it was the week before. All of the public sector have been told to deal with a two year pay freeze and an increase in pension contributions, but seemingly uniquely, police officers also have to absorb a report into pay and conditions which will leave almost every officer worse off. This is I think much worse than most officers had expected, and has left many feeling a bit bewildered.

At the same time there has been an unprecedented campaign being carried out in the media, with many credible journalists repeating some tired claims, many of which are totally untrue. I will deal with some of them now;

• Police officers can claim five hours overtime for answering a phone call on a rest day; absolute nonsense, it is expressly stated in our terms and conditions that you cannot claim for this. I have been called morning noon and night, (including being woken up this weekend in the middle of the night because my name was on the wrong rota!) on my rest days, spent hours on the phone and never been paid a penny for it.
• Police officers get double time on a Sunday; again totally untrue Sunday is just a normal working day for the police
• Police get free gold plated pensions; Police officers pay 11% of their salary into their pensions, the highest in the public sector
• Only 11% of officers are visible at any one time; Police officers work shifts, 25% will be on a rest day at any one time, the rest split between earlies lates and nights. In addition we have officers posted to investigating rapes, murders, dealing with counter terrorism, child abuse, and a whole host of other things which are not visible. Which one of this list should we stop doing to fulfill a visibility target?
• Police officers spend all their time in stations filling out paperwork; Most officers hate paperwork and will do anything to get out of being in the station. The majority of paperwork we fill out is to service the needs of the criminal justice system, where we see the same criminals again and again, being taken through the system by the same defence lawyers, demanding to see every scrap of paper in an investigation to see if they can find a flaw in the paper trail and get their client off. Every agency in the criminal justice system is moving towards a paperless system, but it is frustratingly slow, and over the years, every agency has built up their own systems, none of which are compatible with each other!
• We can massively reduce back office numbers and save money; we will have to do this, but who is going to carry out all of these functions? In some cases we will be able to remove the function, or work with other forces and agencies, but in others we are going to have to ask officers to carry them out until technology catches up.

I do not seek to say that there is not waste in the public sector, nor in policing, and the state of the finances is forcing us to look at things again.  We should have been more aggressive in previous years, tackling waste where possible, and I suspect this is true of all public services.

My Dad is a builder who has to make a profit to survive and pay his bills, there is no room for sentiment in his world. Many practices in the public sector would not survive contact with the private sector, but this is not the whole story. Policing is a service, not a business, and it cannot be run like one. We need to be able to assess things based on risks to and needs of the public, not on a cost only basis. I once ran a hugely expensive operation targetting one man for months on end. He was a repeat stranger rapist who used terrible violence on his victims. All the prison psychologists told us he would offend again upon his release. We eventually got him locked up for the rest of his life. Was this value for money based on a private sector costs analysis? Probably not. Was it the right thing to do? Definitely.

Police officers do not join for the pay. They join because they like locking up the bad people and helping the good. Police officers will I am sure continue to serve the public to the very best of their ability, irrespective of their terms and conditions. We do not have the right to strike, but even if we did, I do not think for a second that most officers would ever want to.

When I joined the police service I never expected to find myself having to lead officers in this environment. We will step up to the challenge, but it is a funny old world at present.

From Hard times to Hyperlocal

It will not have escaped your attention that the country is experiencing some financial turmoil at present. The news in the last 24 hours has been dominated by a claim that 10,000 police officers will be lost over the coming year. I have no idea if these numbers are true (I’m not sure anybody knows yet), but it is safe to say that in years to come there will be less police officers, less fire officers, less local authority employees , in fact less of lots of people employed to look after us.

I claim no insider knowledge here, I have a good idea what is going on within policing, but a combination of common sense, and watching the news leads me to anticipate a reduction in these posts. Essentially for any organisation, people are the most expensive resource, and therefore any significant reduction in funds is likley to see less people on the ground. We are all trying to make sure that we preserve as many frontline staff as possible, but we will need to explore new ways of delivering our service in these hard times.

One of the difficulties facing policing is that we are often seen as the service of last resort. You will have heard the 999 tapes where people ring us up because they have lost their house keys or can’t find their cat. All services are going to have to take a long, hard look at what they have the capacity to deal with.

I can remember as a young Sergeant volunteering to go to a job where a group of kids had reported seeing a snake. Overcome by a feeling of gallantry, I decided to go and save the kids from what I was sure would be a small grass snake. On my arrival, the snake was about 7 feet long, bright yellow, and not at all intimidated by me and my extendable metal baton. I ended up having to phone Dudley Zoo, and a man (who I later found out was Mark O’Shea, a famous reptile wrestler from TV) turned up, muttering something about it not being dangerous. He duly dispatched the snake into a bag and the world was safe again.

This illustrates my point, whose job is it to deal with escaped snakes? Who says that police have to deal with lost property or take in stray dogs? I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but we are going to have to find ways of helping people to help themselves in some areas where they would previously have rung us.

This is where we come on to hyperlocal sites. My view is simple, all public services ought to be reading, and engaging with hyperlocal sites in areas that they serve. They are an incredibly important method of talking to our communities and finding out what their priorites are, what they are worried about, what they want us to do, and what they are happy for us not to do on their behalf. They already exist, and they are just waiting for us to engage with them.

I would go a step further and say that public bodies ought to be actively encouraging communities to set up hyperlocal sites. There are some fantastic examples of  communities making a real difference to their local environment through this medium. Will Perrin from talk about local is well known for his work in this area. He talks about a community who were fed up of dog mess being left on the pavements outside their houses. They came up with the ingenious idea of making little flags branded with the name of their local authority. They then planted these flags in every dog ‘deposit’ they could find, took a picture, and posted it online! Needless to say, it did not take long for the local authority to get it’s act together and clean the streets on a much more regular basis.

When a child loses her cat, they would have a much better chance of finding it if a picture of Tiddles was posted on a hyperlocal site covering their postcode than they would have from asking a police officer to find it. The same is true of a whole host of other issues that communities can actually resolve for themselves, without going to their local public bodies. The local bodies responsible for that area have a new way of engaging with, and having conversations their communities.

Once these sites are in existence, we can then talk to them, help them, and of course take flak from them when we aren’t getting it right. If you click here it will take you through to a simple tool which enables you to search for a hyperlocal site in your area. Any neighbourhood police team, housing association, parent/teachers association or any one of the other public bodies working in an area with a hyperlocal site should be talking to them. If there isn’t one on your area, try and work with the community to set one up, there are loads of people out there happy to help and advise.

I do not pretent that these sites are the solution to all of our problems, or that there will not be really difficult decisions to make moving forwards. Nontheless when we make decisions about local services, we ought to do so from a position where we have listened to local people and allowed them to influence us.

As  a Superintendent in Wolverhampton, I will be regularly reading the excellent WV11 and hopefully making the odd contribution. I would urge all of my police colleagues to find their local sites, read them, and engage with them.

As ever, I value your thoughts…

It’s a great life really……

On my second ever day in the police, I was called to a ‘sudden death.’ As the probationer on the team I was taken by my Sergeant to the scene to make sure there were no suspicious circumstances. Once in the house I was told I would have to search the body, to make sure there were no knives sticking out of their back or anything else that might have prompted my inexperienced 23 year old mind to suspect foul play. Nothing in my life to date had prepared me for this experience, but I was determined to look professional, so I pulled on my plastic gloves and bravely knelt down alongside the deceased. It was at this point that a horse walked out of the kitchen into the lounge where we were all gathered. Nobody but me batted an eyelid, this was apparently quite normal in the area. At this point I realised that the life of a police officer is anything but normal.

I am often asked by people I meet what my job is like. If I am honest I absolutely love it, and would never consider doing anything else. I frequently have days that if they were WH Smith gift experiences people would pay to do them. There is nothing like the thrill of locking up a good criminal, deploying a firearms team to take armed criminals off the streets, or a surveillance team telling you that they have just secured a crucial bit of evidence.

There are of course bad days too. I have had to deliver numerous death messages. There is nothing that can prepare you for having to tell somebody their loved one is dead. I have had reactions ranging from people physically hitting me, to calmly offering to make me a cup of tea and offering me a comfy seat. They are all truly awful experiences and I remember each one.

I have been really lucky to have spent almost all of my sixteen years to date on the frontline, in uniform and CID. I love the complexity of CID work, and have worked at all ranks as a Detective. I have blogged before about murders, but I have been involved in some fantastic jobs targetting career criminals and been able to deploy some great gadgets against them. Most of the stuff you see on telly has some semblance of truth in it, although I do tend to sit through cop shows saying “thats not how it happens”, driving my Wife mad.

I get frustrated by paperwork and bureaucracy. I don’t think it is quite as bad as people make out, and to be honest if I cant see the point of filling out a form, I generally tell my officers not to, and wait to see if anybody notices. You would be amazed how many times they don’t.

I can’t think of another job where you could see so much strange human behaviour, or where you see so many funny and tragic incidents. I once got called to a man who told us he had taken an overdose. On closer inspection, he had swallowed a whole bottle of Tixylix. Needless to say, he survived, although I understand he didn’t have a cough for months afterwards.

I still struggle with people who are aggressive towards officers just because of the uniform. I have been on the receiving end occasionally, and have been attacked with fists, feet and knives. Luckily I am reasonably handy, having spent  most of my formative (and later) years studying Karate, but the people attacking me don’t know that, and I often wonder as I am picking them up and dusting them down what they would have done if I couldn’t defend myself. I have avoided any serious injuries, but have seen some colleagues get badly assaulted.

 I am shortly to be promoted to Superintendent, and although I will still take every opportunity to get out of my office (I have the attention span of a goldfish) I am moving away from the frontline. I may suffer the odd paper cut, and paper clips can be nasty if you get one under your nail, but I assume my days may contain a few less adrenalin bursts.

Although I can’t wait to move to my new role (watch out Wolverhampton) I will really miss frontline policing and day to day investigation. The vast majority of police officers are like me. They joined to keep people safe and lock up bad people, they are on the your side, and want to help. We don’t always get it right, and sometimes get it quite badly wrong, but the majority of the time, I think we do a good job. Don’t take too much notice of the occasional report about officers spending all day doing paperwork, and withdrawing into offices. They are out there day and night, working hard and targeting villains.

As ever, let me have your thoughts…

Policing:Further adventures on Twitter

Over the past 24 hours, the Local Policing Unit from Birmingham South have been tweeting live incidents and their officers’ responses to them. Armed only with a hashtag (#bsp24) and a new twitter account, they have ventured out into the world of social media. Judging by the excellent feedback they have received, I am sure they will be  extremely pleased with the results.

Two weeks ago, I spoke to the Commander from Birmingham South, Phil Kay, and discussed the idea with him. He is really forward thinking and had already set the ball rolling with his communications team. At that point they had around 70 people following them on Twitter. By the end of the 24 hour output they had well over 1000.

I have blogged before about the need for police forces to engage more pro-actively in the area of social media, and the example above really does illustrate the point.  The communities of South Birmingham clearly want to engage with and talk to the Police. The Commander and his staff now have the ability to communicate with 1000 more people than they had at this point two weeks ago, and perhaps more importantly (and this is the key strength of social media), the community has a way to talk back.

Throughout my years in the Police, we have always struggled to get some communities to engage with us. We labelled those communities as ‘hard to reach.’ It turns out that they were not that hard to reach, we were just reaching in the wrong places. Social media platforms provide us with an absolutely fantastic opportunity to have conversations with people, to recognise their problems and to tell them what we are doing about them.

In the 18 months or so since I first blogged about this issue, the situation in UK policing has improved significantly, there are now some fantastic examples of officers using social media in new and innovative ways. However there are still large areas where there is no social media presence, where officers are actively prevented from engaging by force policies which have simply not caught up with the technological advances of the last decade.

There are now hundreds of officers up and down the country using social media. To my knowledge no riots have been triggered, no officers have been sacked, we have not had to spend huge amounts of money and there have been no breaches of the official secrets act. What we have had is lots of conversations with the people we police and forged some really positive relationships.

To those police areas not currently engaged, I ask the same question as I did in my first blog; Why are you waiting?

Drugs; dealing with the dealers

This week my officers swooped on a large scale drug supplier, we recovered about 4 kilos of class A & class B drugs, together with several thousand pounds cash. The dealer and his accomplice have both been charged and remanded. The week before that the courts granted an order taking £56,000 off another dealer and a further order setting out a repayment order of over £800,000 against him.

I tweeted the result and got a great response, people seem to enjoy seeing drug dealers locked up. I also got another familiar response, ‘Great result but what about the drug dealers where I live?’  Communities see people dealing drugs outside their houses every day, and understandably get frustrated when they don’t see the police taking action. As somebody who has run a drugs job or two, I thought I might set out some of the issues that we have to address when we are dealing with the dealers.

Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, we have to prove that they have actually dealt some drugs, or intend to deal them. This is not as easy as you might assume. People caught with relatively large quantities of drugs will often claim they are for personal use, but as they are regular users they have ‘bought in bulk.’ Although this might seem ridiculous to normal people, you need to bear in mind that we have to prove everything to a court ‘beyond all reasonable doubt.’ All the prospective dealer has to do is establish that doubt and they know they will get away with a simple possession of drugs charge which carries much lighter punishment. Therefore any dealer worth their salt will only carry small amounts at any one time, going back to their stash to stock up on a regular basis.

So if just finding somebody with quantities of drugs is not enough, we have to use different techniques to prove they are dealing. We will often watch several deals take place, arresting the buyer out of the sight of the dealer, to prove to a court that there is a course of action taking place. As you can imagine this carries quite a large risk of compromise. Dealers will tend to sell drugs in areas they know and where they are comfortable. Police activity in these areas will quickly get reported back to the dealers and they will shut up shop.

When we are told about a dealer, we often execute warrants at their houses. Again this does not always bring success. They do not leave their drugs lying about for us to stumble across, they hide them, and they actually put quite a lot of thought into it. The dealer who we took the £56,ooo at the start of this blog was burying his drugs in an old lady’s back garden which was insecure.

Taking out a good drug dealer often required many hours of painstaking surveillance and gathering of evidence. This is expensive and difficult. It requires the completion of reams of forms to get the authorities and the painstaking compilation of the evidence gathered. Drugs are exchanged in very small packages, and it is not always obvious when a deal has taken place, again the ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ argument is applied, we have to prove that our potential dealer is not a raging socialite who often meets up with 200 people a day for around thirty seconds at a time.

There are few things more satisfying than unearthing a dealers stash, knowing that you have the evidence to link them to it. Police officers continue to arrest dealers and enforce the law, but it is not as straightforward as you might think. I hope this blog has given you an insight into the day to day battle that we have with dealers, and the reasons why it might appear that we aren’t taking action.

It is really important that people work with us. If you suspect somebody is dealing drugs, tell us. You might not see immediate action, but it starts the ball rolling, and is sometimes the little piece of knowledge that we need. We know communities want to help us, they don’t want dealers on their street corners or outside their kids school. The best weapon we have at our disposal is information from the public.

Thanks for reading, let me have your thoughts…