The Policeman's Blog

I've always thought that the Inspector is the highest sane rank in the police. Beyond Inspector, you enter a parallel universe where the normal concerns of the police: criminals, witesses, victims and the mad are replaced by a series of figures in a spreadsheet, a line on a graph or a new policy. The Inspector is often able to both see the madness caused by trying to get the figures right and powerless to prevent it. While more senior ranks direct non-existent officers to perform pointless tasks, the Inspector actually has to look at the roster, find the troops and implement the impossible.

Inspector Gadget is just such a man: caught between unrealistic bosses, too few officers and an insatiable administration department, he does his best. But it's never enough. Gadget's book, Perverting The Course Of Justice, explains how and why the criminal justice system is the way it is. Why don't the public have more faith in the police when the detection rate is always increasing? And if the detection rate is increasing why are the criminals that the police caught still on the streets?

The Inspector is the rank above Sergeant, so while the Sergeant might look after a team of around ten to twenty officers, an Inspector might be in charge of three or four teams. He also attends meetings, and if you ever wondered why you never see a police officer or when you call for one, they never turn up, you should read this book.

I had an Inspector once who came from an obscure department to work with us for a short while to improve his chances of promotion. The problem was he was hitching his wagon to the one department (the uniformed reactive bobbies) that got blamed for everything: not filling in the correct domestic violence forms? Come on Inspector, these are important you know. Not attending enough incidents? What are your troops doing Inspector? Your officers seem to be getting too many arrests for Section 5 Inspector are they not aware of the policy? To his credit, our Inspector did his absolute level best in a thankless task, with one eye on the bosses and one eye on the sergeant. I often thought that I wouldn't like his job, but he must have been comforted by the thought that one day he'd be in an office with a notice like "Intelligence Inspector", "File coordination" or "Domestic Violence Compliance" on the door. For all I know he's there now, he certainly earned it.

When Inspectors actually find the time to get out of the office, they spend most of their time at serious incidents: murders, suicides, fatal road accidents and the like. So if you've never been to a serious assualt or a good old scrap in the High Street, Gadget will take you there, talk you through what ought to happen, and tell you what will happen. He'll rush back to custody, do some prisoner reviews, sign some other forms vital to the continuance of the modern police service and then argue with a defence solicitor.

The policing pendulum might be swinging , but I it will be some time before Britain gets the police force it deserves and the criminals get the sentences they deserve. Buy Gadget's book and see what remains to be done.