At last! Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report, released in draft this week points up the waste of police time that is being spent chasing paper around the place. Some of this is our own fault, being too risk averse, seeking to cover every possible eventuality, but a lot of it services “the system”. Sir Ronnie’s report, when finalised and adopted, will set out the need to treat Police officer time like the expensive valuable resource it is.
If we were paying a consultant hundreds of pounds an hour, we wouldn’t have them sitting filling in details over and over again, we would have them delivering core business. To train, equip and deploy a front line police officer, then back them up with communications, forensic and other support costs us all this kind of money, they are a precious resource and need to be treated accordingly. We want our Police doing proper policing tasks, making a difference to our communities.
We can’t always blame others, some of our IT was state of the art 10 years ago, but is no woefully out of date. We are now preparing to upgrade our main systems to get away from “double keying” data into different systems, and bringing us fully up to date.
In
This is a very important report; Sir Ronnie is a pragmatic police officer, whose views are listened to in government. I have put some links in below:
The BBC has done some good analysis on the document:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7232226.stm
The Herald covered the
Other Police blogs are discussing this in detail:
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/
