Police shut non-urgent crime reporting portal

schocked

public money spent on trendy technology project that is infact no better then pissing into the oncoming wind?

Shocking, really really shocking.

@ I smell a rat

<< I somewhat suspect that it was closed not because it wasn't good enough, but because it made it too EASY to report crime. The police don't like it being easy to report crimes unless they can solve them easily, because it makes them too accountable. >>

Load of twaddle. I know police-bashers usually aren't too bothered about whether their assertions make any sense, but the simple fact is that it's still considerably easier to ring the police up and say "I want to report a crime" than it ever was to fire up the computer, find the URL, log on, click here, click there, fill in a form and mail it in. Which, of course, is why most people continued to ring in even despite the existence of non-urgent recording portals.

Plus, the optimistic but misguided imposition of the National Crime Recording Standard and the National Standard of Incident Recording means that police discretion as to whether something warrants a response and investigation has been entirely removed. The upshot of which is that your burglary/mugging/rape will just have to wait while the force in question wades through the morass of neighbour disputes, driving complaints and schoolyard scraps that they're no longer allowed to reject. And the situation isn't helped by the increasing number of armchair experts, fully trained through the 'The Bill' school of telly policing: for them, every angry word or badly-parked car is a crime and demands police attention.

Police waste time dealing with petty nonsense not because they *want* to, but because the public and the government have said they must.

Rustius, twaddle back at ya!

Twiddle Twaddle yourself!

You can't put the blame of league tables and accountability on the

'public'. It lies fair and square with the politicians and the police.

My experience of the police in the last few years has been pretty

poor, break ins, car torched, etc. The best I got was a crime number.

The worst was verbal abuse, stating that they would arrest me for

not reporting a motoring offense in the first 24 hrs. Each time they

would try their best to not accept any crime or to give out a crime

number. In short I agree with the tough on the reporting of crime.

I now throw out a challenge, to see if anyone can come up with a

situation where league tables have improved the activity which was

being league tablized. Schools dont teach, they just want kids to

pass exams. Nurses dont cure patients, just patch them and get

an empty bed. Police dont police, they just avoid difficult crime

and focus on motoring offenses. Universities with degrees not

worth paper written on.... It's an amazingly depressing list.

Problem is league tables are only measure one or two dimensions

of an activity, and when you focus on them, it's at the expense of

the other dimensions. Sad Sad Sad.

@Andy

Perhaps you'd like to tell us exactly how you checked on the efficiency of schools, police, hospitals etc etc etc prior to these league tables existing.

The league tables might well not be ideal, but they're far better than the non existent crap we had previously where no one was responsible for anything and any school, hospital etc could simply trudge along spending a fortune and achieving absolutely nothing.

@ Andy

<< You can't put the blame of league tables and accountability on the 'public'. >>

I didn't. I blamed on the public the public's increasing inability to judge what's a serious problem and what's trivial, and *some* people's utter conviction that their tiny problem must by definition outweigh everyone else's huge problems.

League tables, targets and the self-defeating obsession with statistics I blame firmly on politicians, whether they wear police uniforms or not.

<< My experience of the police in the last few years has been pretty poor, break ins, car torched, etc. The best I got was a crime number. >>

No doubt. Sorry to hear you've had a bad time - but that, unfortunately, is the result of the aforementioned policies, not any desire by the police to focus on tiny crimes because they're 'easier'. I'm pretty convinced that the majority of police would prefer to be dealing with serious problems rather than the drivel these 'standards' oblige them to give time to.

The trouble is that before the standards there was widespread public dissatisfaction when the police said "sorry, that's not really a police matter". Now there's similar dissatisfaction because they can't say that.

So how DO you please all the people all the time?

<< a situation where league tables have improved the activity which was being league tablized. >>

There aren't any. The entire statistics culture is based on the myth of game theory: that people, their needs, desires and aspirations can all be reduced to simple numerical formulae. And policing is fundamentally unquantifiable: you can't measure a crime that a police officer prevents by his or her mere presence, for example. To quote Robert Peel again:

"The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it."

So I wouldn't dream of suggesting that there isn't a problem: my only point here is that assuming the police - or members of any other public service - are all lazy slobs who don't want to bother doing the job is not only simplistic but also pretty much the opposite of the truth. It's not that they don't want to: it's that they're not being allowed to.

Its not the sytem its the operators

I think those who say that the system was overloading the police,and not that the public were overloading the system have a very valid point. As a former police officer, it hurts to do so, but I have to admit that complaints of close friends and family members indicate a drdop in the service we get from the police service in general. A former colleague,recently retired, conformed low morale,always a good indicator of the level of service one can expect. He said that officers with as little time to serve as 5 years for retirement were talking of quitting beacuse of the conditions today. The abysmal response times are another indicator. Try getting a response when there is a pop concert or football or rugby event in your city centre. As far as getting it in Welsh as well, what that has to do with the price of chips I fail to see. I quote a Conserrvative member of the National Assembly for Wales. "If if the honourable member were drowning,would he cry for help in English or Welsh?" And yes, I do live in Wales, and No I don't speak welsh nor will I or my family ever do so, neither will thousands of others.