Movin’ on up now…

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Good old Walsall Police Station. We’ve been working out of the station on Green Lane ever since we left our former address on Goodall Street back in 1966.

You can probably tell from the funky design of the roof that our building on Green Lane dates back to the swinging sixties, although I can assure you that inside the building is (for the most part) fairly modern.

Sure, we do have a few ball chairs and a vinyl record player blasting out the Rolling Stones but then, who doesn’t?

As good as the Stones were (are?) though, music has moved on a great deal since the sixties and so have building designs.

Just like the members of the Stones themselves, our base on Green Lane is now looking a little ‘weathered’ and as such the search for a suitable replacement is underway.

Subject to complicated negotiations between lots of different parties, progress was always going to follow a similar pace to that at which Charlie Watts now climbs the stairs to his drum kit, however recently details have emerged on how we’re looking to find new accommodation in Walsall.

Summing up the announcement from our News Beat website, the outline of the proposal is to as follows:

• Moving some of the neighbourhood and partnership teams in with Walsall Council at the Civic Centre on Darwall Street
• Having the response shifts, the head honchos from the command team and other departments work from Bloxwich Police Station
• Bloxwich would become our Local Policing Unit HQ
• The old station on Green Lane would be ‘disposed of’, probably by huge wrecking balls, explosives and diggers with fierce claw attachments.

There’s incentive to leave Green Lane as looking after the station in its old age is becoming increasingly expensive, a maintenance bill of half a million a year at last count, and not only this, listening to loose bits of cladding crashing into the roof on windy nights was always a bit disconcerting for officers too.

Working from the Civic Centre would offer several advantages including enabling officers to work more closely with council partners, being more accessible for the public and as mentioned, freeing up money that could be better spent elsewhere.

As for a time frame, should the proposals successfully make the transition to solid plans then officers could be working from the Civic Centre as early as this September with the bulk of the rest of the move taking around a year and a half.

As Police and Crime Commissioner Bob Jones has said, “The proposals really do embody the spirit of joint partnership working and will allow police and the council to work even more closely together which can only be of huge benefit to the people of Walsall.”

I’ll keep you posted on the latest news as when I hear it, your feedback on the proposals is welcome too and you can contact us via a variety of different options on the Walsall LPU website to let us know what you think.

Meat is murder…

Bacon! The official meat of the interweb and increasingly popular with thieves. What gives?

Working as a cop, I’m never too far away from associations with meat due to our (probably affectionate) nickname as ‘the pigs’.

As someone who eats more than their fair share of mixed grills, I’m quite comfortable with this.

On the investigation team too, our links with meat seem to be even stronger as we deal with many shoplifters and as a result, seem to end up investigating many reports of thefts involving meat and cheese.

Meat and cheese you say? Who would want to steal that?

Well, at the moment meat and dairy products seem to be very popular with thieves who have developed a sophisticated, Ocean’s 11-style, system for stealing packs of bacon.

It involves cutting holes in shop roofs using miniature lasers, abseiling out of helicopters and then escaping to Brazil with their bounty in a custom-built submarine before jetting off to a moon base where they all remove their latex face masks and sit around stroking cats.

Rather, they simply walk into a shop, do a quick ‘check for CCTV glance’ (this usually involves staring straight into the camera) and then stuffing blocks of cheese down their tracksuit tops before running out the door.

I would say that anecdotally, we seem to be seeing a rise in the popularity of meat and cheese with thieves looking for a quick profit which they can put towards a wrap or two of heroin.

Looking at the health of most of the shoplifters that end up in our cells, they don’t appear to be subsiding on Philly cheesesteaks suggesting that the produce is actually ending up in the bellies of people who decided to take up an offer of a cheap block of cheese having been offered it in a pub.

Judging from the cost of my own weekly shop, I’m well aware that food isn’t cheap so there’s an added incentive to cut corners and save a penny or two when opportunity presents itself.

It’s worth baring in mind though that rather than being refrigerated to Food Standards Agency guidelines, the produce on offer has more likely than not been pressed against a warm, unwashed armpit or crotch for the past three or four hours.

Still fancy eating it?

I’ve searched the FSA website and can’t find any recommendations that meat or dairy products be stored at body temperature or bathed in sweat/other ‘juices’ and so I’m going to conclude that doing so probably isn’t in the best interests of someone’s health.

If you’re offered some bacon on the bus, some beef in a bar or some cheddar in the coffee shop, firstly you really don’t want to accept it.

The pence you’ll save won’t be enough to justify the forty eight hour vomiting spree you risk, nor the offence of handling stolen goods that you may open yourself to.

Secondly, it’s always a good idea to give us a call straight away and let us know that there’s a dodgy pedlar about.

Catching someone with the goods on their person is good evidence and it doesn’t take long to trace the source of the meat either, especially when it’s got ‘Tesco’ stamped all over it.

All thing going to plan, we’ll be able to arrest the culprit and take him or her to the nearest station where they’ll be searched, documented and thoroughly grilled in interview!

You should have known by now you were on my list…

Want to increase the chances of your stolen property finding its way back to you if recovered? Get it registered on the Nation Mobile Property Register for free!

The other day I was sat in the Investigation Team office with a serious look on my face as I was busy with some very serious police work. I would have continued with said serious work were it not for two response officers wondering in with a PlayStation 3 under their arms.

What was happening? Why weren’t they out fighting crimes?

Well, I think several on my team were hopeful there was about to be an impromptu FIFA tournament – teams were picked and the location of the nearest TV was discussed.

Luckily for me this was not to be the case (my FIFA skills extend no further than repeatedly pressing the ‘hoof the ball into the stands’ button), rather the console they thought might be stolen and they wanted someone to check it to confirm it as being ‘hot’ property.

Breaking my concentration from a particularly engaging prosecution file, I volunteered to help out as I am one of the many officers with access to the National Mobile Property Register (NMPR).

The National what you ask?

Well, as I’ve referenced previously, the NMPR is a big old archive of property that we bobbies can browse when we recover items to see if they’ve been nicked.

By using the totally free Immobilise website, you can build up a ‘vault’ of all your valuables with their serial numbers and even photographs which is then added to the NMPR. We then use this incredibly useful system to help reunite stolen goods with their rightful owners.

Having logged on, we took down the console’s serial number and I tapped it into the NMPR to see what results we got.

Internet cogs turned, the computer made a few grinding noises and half a second later we got a bright red notification linked to the serial number confirming that the PlayStation was indeed stolen property.

This wasn’t all we got though, we also got crime details relating to the original theft meaning we were able to contact the police force that had dealt and arrange for the item to be returned to its rightful owner.

To work as it did in this example, property needs to be registered in the first place so without hesitation I’d encourage you to go and do the following:

1. Make a note of the serial numbers on all your various gadgets and gizmos
2. Take photos of jewellery and other keepsakes that might lack serial numbers
3. Get yourself over to www.immobilse.com and register everything on the National Mobile Property Register for free

So there we have it, three simple steps that you can take here and now to drastically increase the chances of getting your wares back if they fall into the wrong hands.

There was no FIFA tournament for either us or the criminals as arrangements were made to get the console returned to its rightful owner, all because that owner had taken the very sensible step of registering it in advance.

As ugly as I seem…

What sort of injuries might the police classify under the term ‘serious violence’? You may be surprised but the above scratch would likely be recorded as grievous bodily harm. (Image from AlishaV)

One of my main aims behind writing this here blog is to help explain the law and police customs on behalf of those who may hear stories about the justice system in the news and think ‘that can never be right’.

Today there’s one such story in the papers concerning how community resolutions have apparently been used inappropriately to deal with reports of ‘serious violence’.

The implication of the headline is that offenders responsible for some of the most serious crimes we deal with are being let off with a slap on the wrist and victims are losing out as a result.

From the face of it, ‘that can never be right’ would be a very sensible reaction.

Serious violence demands a little more than an apology, surely suspects should be put before the wig-wearers at Crown Court and sent for a lengthy prison sentence?

It’s at this point it’s important to consider exactly how ‘serious violence’ is being defined so we can understand what offences within the category often actually look like.

Offences that have been considered ‘serious’ in reference to this story include causing actual bodily harm (ABH) and wounding or inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent.

When it comes to the police decision as to which level of assault we’re going to record (or ‘crime’ in police speak), suffering pain is the benchmark for ‘actual bodily harm’.

This means were you to playfully punch a colleague on the arm and your colleague felt some pain, even in passing, we’d be obliged to record an offence of ABH were your colleague to make a complaint to ourselves.

Why? According to our ‘criming’ standards (by which I mean the exciting Home Office Counting Rules), feeling pain makes the difference between a common assault and ABH.

Now consider the benchmark for recording an offence of wounding. This is a category in which the severity of injury can vary hugely.

We define a ‘wound’ as a breaking of the continuity of the whole skin.

This could be a huge Holby City extra style gash running the length of someone’s body and this sort of wound is likely the sort you’d imagine as ‘grievous’.

Equally so though, it could be no bigger than a paper cut.

Because it’s the breaking of the skin that qualifies a wounding as such, many of the injuries that we record as woundings – I’d go as far to say the majority – are relatively minor, sometimes so small that they can’t even be photographed.

With the definition of ‘wound’ so encompassing, statistics for what is recorded as ‘serious violence’ can be somewhat skewed.

The 10,160 incidents of serious violence certainly doesn’t mean 10,160 people with stab wounds, broken bones and worse.

When it comes to agreeing community resolutions in relation to these sort of offence categories, it’s essential to keep in mind that we are victim led and that without the consent and agreement of the victims themselves, community resolutions aren’t even an option.

When we attend incidents, we have to consider the circumstances and will ask the person reporting what course of action they would see as appropriate. We do our best to explain the options and come up with a course of action that the victim is happy with.

Take a hypothetical example of two friends who after a few too many sherbets fall out and one ends up pushing the other against a door latch causing a very, very small cut to the forearm.

A complaint is made and as we’ve got a break in the skin, we have no choice but to record a crime of inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent. A serious crime has been registered, time for court!

Speaking to the now-sober victim though, he doesn’t want his friend to go to court. He’d rather an apology be made and they look at putting the matter behind them.

As we’ve checked his friend out and found he hasn’t been in trouble for violence in the past, we pull out the local resolution form and resolve the matter there and then.

It’s a proportionate, appropriate and very sensible way to sort out what at first appears a very serious offence but in reality is actually not quite as it seems.

So looking beyond the raw figures and into the detail of how wider a definition ‘serious violence’ can be, the story isn’t quite as shocking as it first appears.

Local resolutions are all about common sense, by properly understanding how we define the different levels of assault hopefully you can be reassured that our own understanding of common sense has not been lost.

P.S. If you’d like to know more about the different levels of assault, have a look at my blog on the subject from last September.

For more on community resolutions and restorative justice, have a look at the Restorative Justice Council website and also see what our ACPO lead, ACC Garry Shewan, had to say on the story here.

Hungry for more info on local resolutions? See our own website for a little more on how they’re used and why they’re useful.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, some of the people can be all right part of the time, but all of the people can’t be all right all of the time…

Both the FBI and CIA had prior knowledge of one of the Boston bombing suspects, does this mean they should have acted though?

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, there’s been a lot of comment from the media about the failings of the security services that despite Tamerlan Tsarnaev having been interviewed by the FBI in 2011 about possible links to Islamic extremism, the leads weren’t followed up and opportunities to prevent the attack were missed.

Comment has followed a similar line in reporting on Jimmy Savile, the Philpotts and other stories where police, social services, security services and others apparently ‘knew’ of issues and yet failed to act.

To use my own force as an example, it’s important to understand how intelligence comes to us and how it can be used so that decisions to act, or not to act, can be appreciated in their proper context.

We gather intelligence from a variety of different sources including officers on the streets, external agencies and Crimestoppers to name but a few.

Hundreds of intelligence ‘logs’ will be received by the force on a daily basis concerning everything from serious criminal activity to licensing issues, ASB to fly-tipping.

As people let us know things for a variety of different reasons, reliability is always a big consideration when we decide what steps to take when a new log comes in.

Some of the information will be second or third hand, it may be rumour, could have been misinterpreted by the source or even deliberately false.

With the quality of intelligence varying so much, it’s not uncommon that the intelligence paints a contradictory picture.

We may ‘know’ all sorts of things but without verification, there may not be grounds to act there and then.

With something like Tsarnaev having been previously interviewed by the FBI, it may seem tempting to take the view ‘they suspected he had extremist connections and did nothing – wasn’t it obvious he was the sort of person who might plan an attack?’.

This view though doesn’t take into account the reliability of the information and misunderstands the context.

The FBI will likely have similar information of thousands of others, this isn’t to say that they should be ‘acting’ on said information though as often it will not be appropriate to do so.

Viewing the FBI’s 2011 interview of Tsarnaev and his subsequent link to the bombings as a failure is very difficult, principally because it raises the question of what steps could realistically have been taken in the circumstances.

Assuming the information was unverified and isolated, there’d likely be insufficient grounds to justify actions such as arrests, searches and surveillance.

There will be plenty of people in the UK as well as the States about whom similar intelligence will be held suggesting links to extremism. Any one of those people could potentially be planning a similar attack to that seen in Boston.

As was seen this week in the case of three men jailed for plotting terror attacks on Wootton Bassett, strong intelligence can lead to a strong case and police intervention.

Simply having some suggestion of a link to extremism though, especially through unconfirmed sources, is never going to give grounds to take immediate action and nor should it.

With hindsight, security services’ ‘knowledge’ of a threat may seem concerning but what would be far more concerning would be steps taken to act on every piece of information they hold, no matter how doubtful.

Seeking to do so may lead down a very dark path indeed with a large toll inflicted on civil liberties.

If anything, the example stresses how important it is that information is shared so that we have the quality of intelligence we need to act effectively.

A call you could make may represent the missing piece of the jigsaw that we’ve been looking for, so if you know something you think may be of use, please call us on 101 or speak to the Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321.

Apparently absent in the Tsarnaev case, the consequences of such missing pieces are all too apparent.

One of us cannot be wrong…

Online conjecture following the Boston Marathon bombing was generally unhelpful, is there potential to harness public interest for more useful ends?

Out of all of the steps that the police in the States would have taken in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, appealing to the online community for help solving the case was not likely to be one of them.

Like many others, I first became aware of the bombings when graphic images of the aftermath began to find their way into my Twitter timeline.

This was ahead of any of the news channels picking up on the story, it was too soon to say what had happened but even at this early stage some users were making unwarranted assumptions about what had happened.

As it does, the true picture began to emerge slowly with the mainstream news needing to verify their sources before reporting. Even with this professional journalistic approach some stories found their way into the headlines that turned out to be misleading.

With images and videos uploaded directly from the scene onto social media, rumour about the significance of certain ‘clues’ encouraged some using message boards and forums to take it on themselves to try and piece together what might have happened.

The sum of the efforts was well represented by the since removed ‘Find Boston Bombers’ forum created on Reddit.

Footage was assembled and with the available ‘clues’, uninformed theories gathered pace to the extent that names of ‘suspects’ were mentioned despite their being nothing to support a suggestion of their involvement.

As The Onion well summed up in its ‘Internet Comes Up With 8.5 Million Leads On Potential Boston Bombing Suspect‘ article, the large amount of time spent online by amateur detectives had been distinctly unhelpful and counter-productive.

In the professional investigation, many different sources of evidence will have contributed to the formulation of theories including forensics, intelligence, human testimony and perhaps most importantly of all, the expertise of the investigators when it comes to managing major incidents.

Not only lacking any real knowledge of investigation, without any supporting context from other sources of evidence as outlined above a few blurry frames from a camera phone could never have been sufficient information on which to base credible theories.

As such though well meaning, most of the theories generated online were ill-informed and in no way helped further the official investigation.

The problem I think was that the public’s interest to help had not been guided, instead it had been discharged unsupervised and at random.

Imagine instead if there was a mechanism through which this eagerness could be harnessed to help rather than hinder the actual investigation, to employ the resources of the many eyes and ears available for a useful end.

Take witness identification as an example and the ‘trace, identify, eliminate’ strategy that we sometimes use to help further investigations. Could people be asked to tag themselves in scene photos so the police are able to contact them as potential witnesses?

As another example, a portal through which witnesses could upload photos and videos from the scene would be hugely beneficial in terms of the evidence gathering process.

With some thought and structure, public ‘crowd-sourcing’ could be a powerful investigative tool and one which in the wake of serious incidents such as the Boston bombings could be very valuable indeed.

There’s potential in the pitfalls of the Boston example, potential that is worth serious consideration.

There’s so much you have to know…

What am I going on about when I talk about getting some ‘CPS advice’?

As I mentioned on me Twitter feed earlier today, this shift I had to give the Crown Prosecution Service a call to get some advice in relation to a prisoner I’d been dealing with.

This is something we have to do fairly frequently on the Investigation Team, what does ‘going to CPS’ involve though and why do we have to do it? For that matter, who are the CPS anyway?

First things first, the Crown Prosecution Service is the department responsible for prosecuting the criminal cases that we police officers present to them as a result of our investigations.

They give advice on the cases that we’re putting together, make sure cases are in a suitable condition to be put to the courts and it’s the CPS lawyers who present said cases to the court itself.

As a condition of their employment, all Crown Prosecution Service employees have to wear crowns whenever on duty as a sign of their legal authority.*

The CPS has been operating ever since 1986, prior to this date police forces would prosecute their own cases.

When it comes to ‘going to CPS’, whether we have to do so or not depends on the type of cases that we’re working on.

For simpler jobs, such as a minor assault or low value criminal damage, we police can make the decision about whether there’s enough evidence to take a matter to court and so don’t need to consult with CPS beforehand.

More serious offences, or anything involving a domestic or hate crime element, usually require us to ask CPS to have a look at the circumstances of the report and the available evidence as only CPS can authorise us to charge someone with said offence.

So, we police are allowed to decide to charge people with low level offences whilst CPS have to check serious crime cases before they’re able to go to court, what does the process itself involve?

Like with many other areas, each force will have different procedures but in the West Midlands, we have a program called Electronic File Build (Battlefield 4, eat your heart out!) which links in with our own custody computers.

When we need advice, or in any case if we’re charging someone to go to court, we can upload much of our evidence electronically to the File Build program and then zap it straight across to CPS.

This means CPS get an outline of the case along with copies of statements, exhibits and the like within minutes of us sending them and then can reply to us in the same fashion.

Prior to using this electronic system, we used to fax paper documents (children of the 1990s, see here) or if the fax machine wasn’t working, even read out whole statements over the phone which you can appreciate took a lot of our time so the electronic system is much more efficient.

Once the documents are sent, we’ll then pick up the phone and speak to a CPS lawyer at one of their call centres who may ask a few questions about the case and then will give us a decision.

If you hear in the news that police have ‘submitted a file to CPS’, this is usually what is meant, although the exact mechanism varies and for complicated cases officers will meet with CPS representatives in person to discuss the evidence.

Having CPS oversight is useful as particularly in serious cases, the law can be very complicated hence why it is necessary for a legal professional to review the case to ensure that we have the best chance of getting a conviction in court.

So there’s the process of how and why we have to get CPS advice in as simpler terms as I think I can manage.

If you fancy some bedtime reading, you can take a look at the Director’s Guidance on Charging but if not, simply take away that CPS are the legal experts who work with us to help ensure the cases we investigate arrive at the best possible result.

* Okay, this bit may not be true although what the CPS lawyers wear whilst working in their call centres is a matter for themselves!