By silicon.com, 29 September 2005 16:25
If ever there was evidence, if indeed it was needed, that some parts of government really don't 'get' technology, it's in the Home Office's latest hair-brained scheme for 'e-bobbies'.
Apparently the Home Secretary Charles Clarke believes police will be able to respond faster to anti-social behaviour and crimes in local trouble spots by giving every household in the country (by 2008) the phone number and email address of their local bobby on the beat.
This latest tough-on-crime initiative to come out of the Home Office is being spun as "responsive local policing" to tackle "a lack of respect in our communities".
So what happened to just being able to call up your local police station to report a crime? It may have been low-tech but it worked. Of course your local bobby didn't use to be stuck behind a desk filling out piles of paperwork.
There also used to be the concept of a local police station before both this and the previous government's funding cuts forced many to either close down or run for limited hours only.
With Clarke's latest brilliant bit of thinking it means the local bobby will now have to spend precious time answering emails from every Tom, Dick and Harry in the community.
Technology has some great uses in helping the police tackle crime - this just isn't one of them.
Instead of wasting £19bn of taxpayers' money on a flawed national ID card system in the vague and forlorn hope it might prove a deterrent to terrorists and fraudsters, wouldn't it surely be better to put some of that money into frontline policing and getting more police on the streets?
Then at least we could forget mad headline-grabbing initiatives such as the e-bobby.
Comments
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1. anonymous
As a retired Police Oficer who now is employed as an Anti Social Behaviour Co Ordinator in the West Midlands Area, I agree, it would be madness to give out email addresses and telephone numbers to the community. It would take Police Officers off the street to answer their emails. In certain circumstances when officers are involved in dealing with the more serious cases of ASB and crime. It may be reasonable for the public to have accesss to email or mobile telephone numbers.
What we do need is Police Officers to take ownership of incidents ASB in their communities. We need additional Police on our streets, we need dedicated teams to deal with anti social behaviour in our communities and not modern technology that will have the effect of taking Police off the streets.
2. Mike
Have you ever tried to phone your local police station?:
1) You wait ages for them to answer
2)You get a regional centre, who ask for all the details, then put you through to the local station.
3) You wait ages for them to answer
4) They ask for all the details
Total time in excess of 20 minutes, if you don't give up.
At present you can't email details of a crime or anything you think would be useful to them.
One factor of police work is intelligence (No we aren't talking about how easy their entrance exam is or how bright they seem!). By making it hard to contact them, they lose out on useful information.
No we don't want the bobby on the beat's email, we do want an email address for the local station, so we can contact them about non-urgent matters.
An automated acknowledgement is ok, not long responses.
3. anonymous
I've called the police. I bet they do not want this system, because then there will be an even bigger record of incidents that result in nothing being done. I dialled 999 in rural Suffolk when someone was being beaten up in the street 200 yards from a large police station that was open 9am-5pm. The assualt was inconveniently outside those times so I got an argument from the police officer over why they were not going to do anything about it. They "might be able" to send a car at some point in the next hour. They didn't though.
This isn't really the point. The PM who proudly claimed he didn't really do email will be able to say he is foremost in the e-initiative against Terra and that's really all that matters. As Blair said earlier this week, obediance is your duty.