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.

Comments

  1. Jim Brown3 March 2011 at 15:45

    LOL - welcome to the seriously grumpy club - I find blogging helps. Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3 March 2011 at 16:46

    Funnily 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. phisheep4 March 2011 at 11:14

    Avon & 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.

    Top 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.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Defence Brief11 March 2011 at 14:32

    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.

    It just annoyed me that it was so easy to complain about an officer but almost impossible to report an actual crime!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are items referred to in s.9’s as exhibits bound to be served?

  Background - CPS served a witness statement on me that exhibited two BWV clips that are potentially relevant to the Crown’s case and may have some relevance to the defence case insofar as they are likely to show the lighting and weather at the time events happened. Somebody has listed the clips as unused material rather than putting them in the exhibits folder that accompanies the served evidence. This raised an interesting (to me anyway) question about whether a party who exhibits an item in a statement is bound to serve it on their opponent. At court the judge took the view that the Crown were at liberty to classify items exhibited in s9s as unused material if they chose not to rely upon them in evidence. I took the view that if they are exhibited then they must be served along with the witness statement that exhibits the item and that the solution to a situation where the Crown say they are now unused is to edit the witness statement to remove the reference, by agreement with ...
More gibberish >>

Is there twice as much violent crime in the UK versus the USA?

Image
The tweet from Charlie Kirk I came across a screenshot of a Twitter post while on Facebook this morning. The original post now has 11,000 retweets and 23,000 likes on Twitter. As you can see from the picture somebody called Charlie Kirk, who is a right-wing American commentator, claims that there are 933 violent crimes in the UK per 100,000 people. This is more than double the rate he claims for the USA where he says there are only 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK doesn’t feel that violent to me, so is it true? We’re all gonna die According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 1,248,185 violent crimes committed across the whole of the USA. That is an increase of 4.1% on the 2015 figure but still represented only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people . So, Mr Kirk appears to be slightly overestimating the violent crime in the USA. I should say that I am using the 2016 figures as those are the latest available on the FBI website, so maybe he has slightly differe...
More gibberish >>

Driving without insurance

Image
Insurance is a contract that remains in force until it expires or is cancelled As you may, or may not, know I specialise in motoring law and most of my work involves defending people accused of drink driving . With the drink driving often come other road traffic offences such as driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. It’s driving without insurance I want to talk about today because I think far too many police officers, solicitors, barristers and judges miss a key legal point when looking at these cases. I’ve received prosecution papers today for somebody accused of driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The no insurance element is claim that the suspect did not tell the insurer about the disqualification. In his statement, the police officers says, “ [I] contacted [the insurer] who called me back informing me they would not consider the insurance policy valid as there were no convictions disclosed.” Looks like an open an...
More gibberish >>