Inspector Paul Franks

Blog: Working 24/7 on a response team based at Telford has its challenges but also offers rewards to those officers who work day and night to keep the residents of Telford & Wrekin safe and secure.

I hope to provide the readers of this blog an insight of what a typical week of shifts means for the police officers and support staff who work alongside me, writes Response Inspector Paul Franks.

My officers range from student officers – with less than two years service – through to officers who have over 20 years experience of policing the streets of Telford. All of them strive to make a difference to the people they meet during the working week.

Having over twenty years service myself I have seen significant changes in what is expected from ‘frontline’ officers, and these expectations are made more challenging due to the ongoing drive for cuts across the whole of the public sector.

The demands on my officers will only increase due to these cuts and in order to meet this demand changes are being made to the way my officers are being asked to work. I want to take this opportunity to reassure readers that my officers do not sit in the five stations across the division waiting for calls.

They are out on patrol in your estates and streets and, if they are not in attending an incident, they are providing reassurance to the communities we serve by dealing with neighbourhood issues that often blight an individual’s life, such as road traffic offences, as well as conducting bail checks on active criminals in your area.

I have to acknowledge that a percentage of my officers’ time is spent in stations completing paperwork for the incidents they have attended and the prisoners they have arrested during their patrols. There are drives to reduce this burden – something I would welcome – but offenders would not be brought to justice without some paperwork, meaning criminal cases would not get to court.

A particular area that has increased the work of my officers and me is the sphere of social networks and mobile communications. Obviously these are both now an integral part of the modern world in which we live and police.

This technology will continue to be of use in criminal investigations and searches for missing persons. However, it is almost a daily occurrence where officers have to be deployed to a threat to kill incident which has been made via a social network site or via a mobile phone.

Due to the nature of the alleged threat, as the police we have to take them very seriously as we have a duty of care to protect life. This means an officer has to attend, debrief the caller, and complete the required paperwork so that I, as duty inspector, can make an assessment of the risk to the caller and other individuals – putting in place control measures to reduce the risk factors involved.

All of this takes time, as I am sure you appreciate, thus preventing my officers from completing some of the patrols mentioned earlier.

I am able to inform you that the great majority of these incidents turn out to be nothing more than friends or ex-partners who have fallen out and, due to the anonymity of the technology, decided to vent their anger via a screen, either a computer or a mobile phone.

These comments made in cyberspace are not anonymous and we then get contacted by the person threatened or by a friend/relative of those threatened, resulting in the actions covered earlier. Dealing with the victims or witnesses to these threats can take up to several hours for the most complex cases.

I hope to write some more blogs in the coming weeks and I would therefore welcome some feedback on what issues you would like me to cover, remembering my role within the police.

One blog will be in the form of ‘A Day in the Life of a Response/Shift Inspector’ that will, hopefully, provide you with an insight of the day to day issues a shift officer has to deal with.