Another Option

You’ve got to ask yourself one question:

“Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya punk?

You see, you really should know what you’re up against. It may not be quite as deadly as a .44 magnum but, it’s just as scary.

There’s bound to be a ‘passing motorist’ who will glimpse part of your transgression and give us a ring to tell us all about it. No point in them hanging around to tell us more; not when there’s an important journey to complete. Of course, we could get the call from the actual victim. The chances of this are greatly increased if they’ve called everyone else in their phonebook first and someone has mentioned the words ‘insurance’ or ‘compensation’.

So, now we get to the first contact with the crime fighting machine; the control room operator. Hopefully, all we’ll get is the facts. If we’re really lucky we may get the correct road name, post code and borough. A good description and direction of travel would be just a bit too much to wish for. At least we have plenty of people on duty to investigate what we do get; and generate the all-important crime number.

One of those ‘lazy’ wooden-topped patrol officers will be first on scene while the trail is still fresh. Well, they will be if it’s an important enough call and they aren’t sitting in front of a computer wading through important messages and demands for action from an office officer. They’ll have to weigh up the importance of the call versus the missing sentence from a crime report first though.

They’ll get to make the decisions on what help will be needed to ‘solve’ the crime. Or indeed, work out if there is a crime in the first place. With any luck they’ll hear phrases like “I don’t know why I bothered calling you”, “What took you so long?” or “I just need a crime number” as soon as they arrive in their high powered diesel vehicle that smells of torched brake pads.

If they see fit they could call on:-

A supervisor; to pass the buck to in the case of something that looks like it has a buck that needs passing.

A scene examiner; to cover every stationary object in silver dust and shake their heads.

A helicopter; to get their Air Miles up and to tell them to call out a dog unit when they can’t find anything.

A Land Shark; to bark, drool, pee against anything stationary that isn’t yet covered in silver dust and then to lead the handler on a four mile hike before losing the scent on a housing estate.

A detective; to take charge of really important stuff. They usually come in threes or fours depending on how many trainees still have workbook gaps to fill in.

A firearms unit; in case there are any potential photo opportunities and to talk in code on their secret radios.

The Spice Girls; to grunt a lot and to help with any large scale problems or searches. Providing there is a strong possibility of overtime that is.

A probationer; to do all the writing, generate the crime number and to stand on the crime scene when everyone else has left.

Now, the more observant may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned those cruelly confined to the nine to five office treadmill. There’s a very good reason for that: We don’t need them to help out at calls. They can stick to what they’re best at; which is sending out messages over the next few days to the reporting officer to tell them that they’ve missed something off the report. Or, to draw up a policy over the course of a couple of months making the original offence disappear from the crime statistics.

Ms Blears will be pleased to hear that everyone else on the list works during the busy times making up the ‘less than ten percent’. Maybe she won’t try and meddle with policing decisions then? After all, ministers don’t have the best recent track record when it comes to this activity.

No need for Chas and Dave to make a comeback either.

Sorry guys.