Where did my parking space go?
January 17, 2007
It’s half past one on a weekday afternoon and I’m just trundling in to work for a late shift. Frustratingly there are no spaces in the car park, but about 70 cars parked in and around the station grounds. I’m working on a different team for the week this week but I pop my head in to see only 6 of my team on duty and ready to go out and fight crime in the town.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people are in the station to work alongside and support these few officers. Agreed, there’s CID and other specialist units that have their own workload but for the crimes that come in here and now, we have 6 bobbies covering a town of about 100,000 people.
Anyway, this isn’t today’s gripe, it’s an everyday one. Today I’m working in one of these other specialist roles, and arguably the most pointless. This team of about 6 people filter through the jobs that the call handlers haven’t managed to get rid of and the 6 bobbies on the team haven’t managed to get to. This is the appointments unit, 6 bobbies all paid regular police salaries to sit in an office and send other people – that’d be me then – to go and deal with the jobs they haven’t managed to get rid of. As you can imagine this is the bottom of the dross barrel – the stuff the specialist teams don’t want and even the beat bobbies who aren’t allowed to turn anything down can’t find the time to get to.
For instance, I’ve attended a job for some stock that was delivered and then stolen, only to find it was never delivered in the first place; nuisance telephone calls received by an unknown person who turns out the were just playing a practical joke and other jobs of this quality.
6 bobbies to send me to junk that nobody cares about, not even those who called the job in, 6 bobbies left on the team supporting 16,000 people each and lots of other departments sat taking up space in the car park outside.
The disproportionality of staff in the job infuriates me. But at half past one on a weekday afternoon, I just want a parking space close to the station so my car doesn’t get broken into.
