LOSING THE DETECTIVES: VIEWS FROM THE ... - Police Federation

dies they come straight over mob handed – lots of experienced
detectives - and run with it as a murder enquiry. Until he dies, or if
he doesn’t, it is me with a substantive DC and two PCs on
attachment.
A good example was the beginning of February we had a possible
murder which the Major Incident Team wouldn’t take even though
the doctor said the girl was going to die within 24 hours. Fortunately
for her she pulled through, unfortunately for my team for two and a
half weeks all our work got neglected. We were dealing with a
possible murder, certainly an attempted murder, which should have
been taken on by the Major Incident Team. My whole team was
deployed on it. So none of our crimes got dealt with. We were still
expected to deal with prisoners and the rest. No help at all from the
senior management. They just said,’ well, just get on with it, just see
what you can do’. Which is normal.
If you are stabbed in a pub on a Friday night and you die you will
get experience, resources and everything thrown at you. If that knife
just nicks that little heart sac and you survive but you’re actually on
a life support machine, you'll get the bicycle response. If you’re a
vegetable for the rest of your life you’ll get one DC.
We’ve got one at the moment who’s had her brain splattered all
over the place. She can hear and she can respond by squeezing
her hand. So by going through the alphabet they’ve got the name of
the suspect and that's a [GO CID] job. You've got a DS and his
team who are on it but that's on top of all of their other work.
We’re getting at the manpower aspect of it insomuch as the
evidence that is required to get a person convicted for GBH with
intent is exactly the same thread of evidence that you need to
convict for a murder. Yeah? If he dies you’ll get a Senior
Investigating Officer a DCI, a DI, three DSs, 21 troops, an analyst, a
HOLMES machine, etc, etc, etc to process that particular body. If
the surgeon comes in and says we haven’t lost him and he lives,
yeah? It comes back to you, and three men [sic]. You still convict
that guy, you still get him life but it’s done on a shoe string.
Under-resourced BCU and force teams call upon GO CID for assistance
Many examples were provided of how the specialist burglary and robbery squads
and priority crime units become overloaded or are not available at the times they are
needed. In these circumstances GO CID are directed to help them out.
[on loss of staff to the burglary unit] That's a regular abstraction so
we should see that perhaps as a benefit in that the officers then left
on [the GO CID] don’t have to worry about burglaries, but the
problem you get is that when you get a successful burglary team it
doesn’t take long for them to get saturated with idents so they then
cannot visit all the burglaries anymore. So then the burglaries end
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