Fuddland
About two-and-a-half hours to make a statement about an incident that took less than five minutes is impressive. But that’s in no way an indictment of police work in general nor of the officer who came round yesterday evening. The process just takes a long time. We started out [after the tea had been made, of course] by talking quite casually about what happened, whilst she made notes. Then, referring to her notes, she began to write the statement properly, pausing every few sentences to get specifics or clarify exactly what occurred.
What took so long was that everything was done by hand: all with pen & paper. An interesting aside that we talked about for a few minutes—especially interesting bearing in mind there’s some kind of election coming up soon—was the argument that we don’t really need to recruit more police officers; it’d be more effective, not to mention cheaper, to cut down on the amount of paperwork they have to do. If my PC had had a basic laptop on which to make notes, which could then be expanded into the statement, instead of being re-written on fresh pages, and instantly copied to every other department or person who needed to see them, we would have been done a great deal sooner.
Of course, us being done a great deal sooner would also have been a bit of a downside: she really was very nice, not to mention rather pretty, and some might say I kept distracting her with small-talk and cups of tea because I was enjoying her company.
In a couple of days I’ll be looking at hundreds of photos of offenders to see if I recognise any of them. Not sure how I feel about that; it’ll be disappointing to not find my muggers amongst the faces, but at the same time, I’ll be nervous about being sure enough to point the finger at anyone in particular. In the meantime, I’ve been worrying about silly things to do with the statement, such as realising I actually had three bottles of Corona at the club, not two, as I’ve put in my statement, and wanting to go back [again] to where the incident took place with a measuring wheel to verify that we were indeed about fifteen metres from the edge of the bridge. Actually, asking for those things to be changed could be a good way of getting my lovely PC to come round again…
Comments
clair | 2005 / 04 / 21 – 08:52
Hehehe…trust you to find something good out of something bad :)
Kav | 2005 / 04 / 22 – 09:42
oooh, did she have handcuffs? Was she in uniform? Oooh!
David | 2005 / 04 / 22 – 11:26
Re #2: Sheesh, took you lot long enough, I’ve been waiting for someone to make the uniform/handcuffs joke. :P
No, she was CID so in plain-clothes, and she arrived in a normal car, thus depriving the local curtain-twitchers with some juicy gossip had she arrived in a squad car.
Interestingly enough, a google for cid uk police threw up my local constabulary in the first few hits, which is currently displaying this message:
Due to an unprecedented response to our recent recruiting campaigns, we are currently not sending out application forms or accepting new applications for police officer vacancies.
See? They don’t even need any more applicants! Buy them a laptop each!
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