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Brian’s Brief Encounters has now been taken down, and I’ll be removing the link and adding Blue’s and Two’s link when I get round to updating the template, which should be tomorrow.

For those who are wandering why these blogs are going, it is because supervision, Complaints & Discipline/Internal Affairs, or both, are catching wind of these blogs and are somehow identifying those behind it. The “catch all” offence of “bringing the force into disreputre” is usually levelled at those involved, in spite of very few of us actually stating which force we work in! How can you bring a force into disrepute if noone knows what force that is?!?!?

Since these blogs reveal what ACTUALLY goes on behind the glossy, PR-friendly corporate image put across by most forces, and threatens to actually inform the public as to what police officers do, the ties that bind us and why we’re consequently not always able to respond immediately to a report of youths causing annoyance, the ‘unofficial spokespeople’ of frontline rank-and-file officers, and of the trials and tribulations being the lowest on a big food chain entails, are ‘the enemy’ of public relations.

We’re also the enemies of performance management, the Key Performance Indicators we’re under pressure to meet and the various other bureaucratic instruments implemented to monitor how police ‘perform’ (in spite of the fact that efforts are then made to meet such indicators purely for the sake of meeting them, whilst other aspects of police work that aren’t measured, such as actually patrolling, are neglected in the meantime), since these blogs show such things actually exist and that we are under pressure to meet them. Certain authorities would rather this not be common knowledge, although a couple of pertinently-worded Freedom Of Information Requests by the correct press outlets to the correct institutions could settle that.

These blogs also go against the idea of all officers singing from the same hymn sheet and adhering to the collection of corporate buzzwords, nonsenical management speak and phrases that adhere to their own inner logic which form the various vision statements, mission statements and charters for whatever the theme flavour of the month is. Some of the public, and indeed some authorities, may be horrified that some officers would be so bold as to state why we’re not always to do what people think we can do 24/7. I would prefer to think that the public would appreciate knowing the real reasons behind such restrictions.