Police community support officers solve less than one crime every four years and only hand out a fine every eight months, figures reveal. Several forces have admitted that their squads of 'plastic police' failed to clear up a single crime or give out even one fixed-penalty notice during the past year.
"they are there to provide a "visual presence of the police force" and to reassure the public."'The public are starting to realise that while they look official, they are very limited in what they can do.' Some 30 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales provided official figures, of which ten gave data for crimes solved.
Of those forces, only 433 crimes were solved by 1,748 PCSOs in the year ending March 2008. By contrast, a sworn police officer solves an average of 11 crimes a year. In Leicestershire, the force's team of 212 managed seven notices and zero detections. Bedfordshire's 120-strong band handed out 18 penalty notices and did not catch a criminal. New Labour's PCSOs little more than glorified dog wardens, hell scratch that they would not be able to catch a stray dog based on these figures!
Next time some Labour politico bleats on about resolving crime or waste remind them of the dire PCSO's.
New Labour a huge "gold standard cock-up", amoral, corrupt and evil to the core.
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4 people have spoken:
"Next time some Labour politico bleats on about resolving crime or waste remind them...."
You know there no point in that, they ain't listening folks. When you hear them bleating, just ignore them and vote for someone else. That's the best remedy.
They have nothing but contempt for you folks and it's time you returned the sentiment.
New Labour's PCSOs little more than glorified dog wardens, hell scratch that they would not be able to catch a stray dog based on these figures!
Even the regular police, certainly the Metropolitan Police in London, including those supposedly assigned to "local community policing", do not want to have anything to do with stray dogs either.
Try leaving a stray dog at a local police station, and you will be told that you can't do that any more.
They will call the Local Council, but you will have to take charge of the stray at your inconvenience and expense in the meantime.
Of course they don’t SOLVE crime, that’s not their bloody job! It is one of public reassurance and regenerating their designated communities. Also, and this is a fundamental fact here, PCSOs cannot be named as the officer in the case, meaning they cannot be named as running a crime investigation, under no circumstances have any of the PCSOs at my station EVER been named on a crime report, because it is not allowed. This means that, statistically, not one single PCSO here has ever solved a crime. Of course you guessed that that doesn’t mean they have not actually solved a crime - come across crimes, figured things out, been given info from MOPs that solved crimes, or that their enquiries (house to house, CCTV viewing and local knowledge) has solved crimes. In fact, many of our PCSOs have solved, or detected a crime on numerous occasions. Many of them are listed in our monthly force newspaper and are constantly given shiny polished awards for doing just that. I know as a PCSO I played a major part in solving a number of crimes every year. I may not have spent the three hours building the file and putting my name to it for that statistic, but I did spend countless hours doing house to house enquiries, gathering evidence, viewing and copying CCTV and exhibiting that footage, doing my own statements and giving evidence in court for that case. I also played a major part in reassuring that victim on a daily basis. The sort of thing that cannot be monitored with figures and stats.
There is also a suggestion that PCSOs are issuing less fines then they did previously. Perhaps because they are dealing with things appropriately and giving words of advice/educating, rather than smacking a ticket on someone’s forehead every chance they get. There are no quotas to fill and no bonus payments for issuing fines (and rightly so). The press would only be complaining if it were the other way around and PCSOs were issuing too many, 'little Hitler’s' they’d be calling them. You can’t win.
So plastic - run the cost against the results and it would be better to sack the pcso's and replace them with real police.
Mind you we would need to build lots more homes for special needs folk who are suddenly out of work....
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