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

we would definitely be given that as a Section 18 yet we’d end up
charging them with common assault or ABH.
Uniform will go to a job and think ‘what do we have to do to get CID
to take it? Someone’s broken into a caravan to have a kip there. We
will put it in as a burglary. CID should take that'.
When uniformed inspectors and above insist an incident is ‘a CID matter’ GO CID
have no other option than to take responsibility for it. Commenting on the examples
they provided in the groups, they invariably lamented the loss of the protection once
afforded them when they had their own CID hierarchy. Their direct accountability to
uniformed senior officers has made a difference to their workload.
Discussion
A uniformed chief inspector says to me 'There was a robbery in [a
neighbouring town on the BCU] last night, who’ve you got to deal
with it?' So I tell him I haven’t got anyone to deal with it. He tells
me I am going to have to find someone. It turns out to be an
absolute Mickey Mouse incident where a drunk has gone into an
off-licence and has had an argument with the guy because he
hasn’t got enough money to pay for a bottle of White Lightning.
He’s given him a mouthful and legged it shouting “I’ll come back
and shoot you”. So now we’ve got a ‘firearms incident’ [sarcasm]
because he’s mentioned coming back to shoot someone. Yet this
happens all the time you know. We’re dealing with, and there’s
probably no easy way of saying it, the less fortunate in society,
people who have got drug and alcohol problems who commit
absolutely low-level crime but because of the words that they use it
has got to be robbery or it has to be a firearms incident. People are
afraid of the accountability that they’ve got, so everything is ‘bulked
up’ and we spend hours and hours dealing with absolute garbage.
The group discussions confirmed the hypothesised knock-on effect on GO CID of the
under-resourcing of the 24/7 Response reliefs. It will be recalled the anticipation that
this would have occurred was one of the reasons why the Joint Central Committee of
the Police Federation of England and Wales commissioned specific research into
GO CID.
Bearing in mind the recruiting problems mentioned earlier it is interesting to note the
under-resourcing vicious circle that has developed:
•&the inexperience of the 24/7 response officers and other
characteristics of their work described in our earlier report,
particularly the lack of first-line supervision, contributes to the
workload pressures on GO CID;
• in turn these workload pressures deter response officers from
applying to the CID and consequently when they are
promoted they have not had the benefit of working as a
detective. If they had, and provided they had the time to
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