Transcript

JOHN NELMS:

I’m what’s called the Force Duty Officer, in a police control room. So I’m responsible for the operations of any policing operation running across the whole county. So, anything that requires a police response, it is my responsibility to make sure that we deploy the right resources to it in the right time and we get the right result out of that.

So my role as the operations manager, if you like in, the police control room is to monitor all the jobs that are coming in, make sure that my team have applied the correct priorities to it – so they’ve assessed the threat, the harm, and the risk of every job – and, based on that, make sure we prioritise the jobs and we’re sending the right people to do the right job at the right time. So we’re sending people to do the high-risk jobs first, and anything that’s low-risk is put to the back of the queue. It’s still kept an eye on, but it’s not dealt with in the same priority as something as a high risk. So my job, really, is to check on the prioritisation of the jobs and make sure that we minimise the risk to people by sending the right resources for the right jobs.

We have to make sure we assess the risk of the job properly, to make sure the job is done right. If we get the assessment of the risk wrong, the whole job goes wrong. The resources within the operations centre, again, vary greatly on the amount of demand we’re expecting to get. So, at our peak times, when we’re expecting a lot of phone calls, usually again Friday and Saturday late turns, we can have up to 20, 25 people taking calls in here, a similar amount of people dispatching the resources and controlling the jobs, plus supervisors. At our low-demand periods in here, we can run down to probably four or five call handlers taking the phone calls and anything around 10 people actually dispatching and controlling the resources.

The range of resources we control are very extensive. So, right from a foot patrol officer walking the streets of one of the towns, any patrol cars, anything on the motorway, some motorway patrol cars, right up through dog units, firearms, up to helicopters, anything that the police can deploy to an instant is deployable to myself, through the operations centre.

The amount of resources we control on a daily basis depends greatly on how many calls we’re expecting to come in and what is happening. So that can vary from Friday late turn, when we’ve got a lot of nighttime economy issues with pubs and clubs. And we can have anything up to 200 officers available to be deployed outside, whether it be on foot, in cars, dogs, firearms, helicopter, whatever we need. That can then vary greatly to 2 o’clock on a Sunday night, when there are very few calls coming into the operations centre, when we can have maybe as low as 20, 25 officers available across the county to deploy.

The reason for being, for any police force, is protection of the public, reassurance of the public, and preventing and detecting crime. So the output is that we do those things, that we protect the public, the public feel reassured by what their police force is doing, and that we prevent and detect crime. So, everything we do is designed to do one of those things.

They expect us to respond to their phone call. So, when they ring us, we should be answering the phone call as quickly as possible. We should understand what they want from us and ask them the right questions, so that we can get the full details, so that we can assess what’s going on and what the risk is. And then, the reassurance to the public is making sure that they know what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, and they feel we are taking it seriously and acting on their behalf to deal with whatever problem they might have.

There is no typical day in what we do in policing. It is purely based on what happens when that phone call comes in. It can be a very, very quiet day, with no crimes being reported, no antisocial behaviour being reported, no traffic accidents coming in, or all things can happen at the same time.

So we have had days when we’ve had serious crimes come in at the same time as we’re dealing with a motorway accident. We’ve had high-risk missing people at the same time as we’re dealing with a petrol tank had broken down on the motorway. It depends greatly on what happens at any one time. You cannot predict what is going to happen at any one time, in this job.

So, if I run you through a job, from start to finish. So we may have a call from a supermarket, saying that someone’s stolen some food from the supermarket and they’ve run off down the street, being chased by the store detective. Fairly common. Happens in most town centres, three or four times a day, every day.

We would send foot officers and officers in cars, to try and find the person. We’d also send an officer to the supermarket, to check the crime scene. A theft in a supermarket is a fairly low-level crime.

But if the crime’s just happened and the offender is running away, there’s a good chance of catching them and detecting their crime straight away. So we treat it quite important. So we send the officers to it. They would try and find the person and hopefully find them and arrest them.

They then have got to take that person to a police station, to the custody unit. And, as well as doing that, we’ve also got to get people to go to the shop and take statements, look at CCTV, find other witnesses to the crime, to make sure we can prove the case later on.