Complaining is easy
For reasons that do not matter I have had to make a crime report to Northamptonshire Police. Now, my office is nowhere Northants so I thought I'd visit the website for help. I know on other police sites reporting crime is easy.
With Northants, I can easily make a complaint about a police officer - that's on the front page. I can easily access their pages on various social networks - there's a huge ad for those on the front page. I can also find out all sorts of interesting things like what the police helicopter has been up to, where the mobile speed cameras are going to be through the month (which seems to defeat the point of them) and I can find out what the police do; I had assumed I knew, but apparently I need to watch the "Force video", read the "Mission Statement" and research the "Command Structure" to fully understand what the police do.
Nowhere on the front page can I see how I might report a sodding crime!!! I checked "Contacts" still nothing there about how I can make a written crime report. There is a number for enquiries but that's about it.
I have eventually found that if I click on a link marked "Forms" then I magically find a way to report crime.
It's almost as if they don't want to mention the word crime. Crime only merits a single mention in the "What we do" section and I've counted a total of 8 mentions on the whole website (three of those being references to Acts of Parliament where you can have your say about them and other Government schemes).
In the end the crime reporting I did find was quite poor and we'll see if I ever hear back about it.
Maybe I'm old fashioned or out of touch or both, but all I really want from the police is for them to do things that prevent crime and arrest those who commit crime. I'm not interested in finding out what their helicopter is up to. I don't really want to go to the Facetube site and am concerned that they are paying people to sit around managing all this rubbish.
With Northants, I can easily make a complaint about a police officer - that's on the front page. I can easily access their pages on various social networks - there's a huge ad for those on the front page. I can also find out all sorts of interesting things like what the police helicopter has been up to, where the mobile speed cameras are going to be through the month (which seems to defeat the point of them) and I can find out what the police do; I had assumed I knew, but apparently I need to watch the "Force video", read the "Mission Statement" and research the "Command Structure" to fully understand what the police do.
Nowhere on the front page can I see how I might report a sodding crime!!! I checked "Contacts" still nothing there about how I can make a written crime report. There is a number for enquiries but that's about it.
I have eventually found that if I click on a link marked "Forms" then I magically find a way to report crime.
It's almost as if they don't want to mention the word crime. Crime only merits a single mention in the "What we do" section and I've counted a total of 8 mentions on the whole website (three of those being references to Acts of Parliament where you can have your say about them and other Government schemes).
In the end the crime reporting I did find was quite poor and we'll see if I ever hear back about it.
Maybe I'm old fashioned or out of touch or both, but all I really want from the police is for them to do things that prevent crime and arrest those who commit crime. I'm not interested in finding out what their helicopter is up to. I don't really want to go to the Facetube site and am concerned that they are paying people to sit around managing all this rubbish.
LOL - welcome to the seriously grumpy club - I find blogging helps. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, what you want from the police is what the vast majority of police officers below the rank of Chief Inspector want to do. Sadly we seem to have someone somewhere in the middle ruining it for all of us.
ReplyDeleteAvon & Somerset Constabulary seem to be OK on this - to an extent. It was very easy to report a crime (Contactus/Report a crime), a perfectly ordinary theft-from-a-vehicle, and while the form was a bit confusing and I ended up saying evrything twice, reported it successfully within half-an-hour of discovery. Then I ended up with three emails, two phone calls and a SOCO vist (when I was out) which seems a bit like overkill when they could have justy rung me once. Besides, there seemed to be no way of updating the report (when the lady two doors along found the credit cards in her hedge) and I had a heck of a job retrieving my wife's purse from the police station.
ReplyDeleteTop marks to them for making the reporting easier. Needs some sharpening up on the follow-up - it was all very well-meaning but not very effective and probably a bit wasteful as well.
Just an update - about an hour after I put this post up, I received a call from a civilian member of police staff who informed me that as there hadn't yet been a loss on this fairly obvious fraud it wasn't a police matter.
ReplyDeleteIt just annoyed me that it was so easy to complain about an officer but almost impossible to report an actual crime!