GMG. Lots of new professionals have joined my work world recently - bringing “fresh ideas” and “new perspectives”. Unfortunately, the “fresh” and “new” are exactly the same as things that have already been tried, tested and failed over the last 15-20 years - and I’ve got a stack of evidence on the failure of said programmes.
Apparently, I’m being “too negative” and should remember “it’s a different time now - things have moved on”. Yes - they have moved on. Services have been hugely eroded, we are in a financially worse position, we have less resources and significantly less capacity to make this stuff happen.
Thankfully, my manager (who has similar thoughts and feelings on these programmes!) has given me a pass to swerve on lots of it - but there are still a number of people internally and externally who are pressing ahead regardless for very marginal gains.
Share with them why it didn’t work in the specific circumstances previously. Allow them to be fully informed, and then let them choose whether to continue that path or not.
It’s a difficult balancing act to be realistic with the newbies without taking the shine away from their enthusiasm. Fresh eyes can, sometimes, find a solution that more experienced eyes miss.
You can but try - & perhaps fortunate that there is the chance for feedback before they make stoopid decisions.
It’s when the management does thing without telling you……
VVIP corporate aviation - memo to crew - we are removing all stocks of Evian water from the aircraft / stock locations (USA management might have got snotty about French inputs into GW2); they will be replaced by Fuji water.
Whilst the irony of carbon offsets wasn’t lost on crews, Fuji water has a rather long transport footprint. Lots of the posh pax complained.
However, the main reason to return to (round) Evian bottles less than a week later? The (square shaped) Fuji bottles didn’t fit in the round glass / bottle holders!
Same happened when I was in the NHS, new manager, we’ll try this brilliant new idea I have, rest of us, we did that twenty, years ago, then ten years ago, with far more resources then than now, it won’t work. Cries of you load of dinosaurs and son negative. No, just realists and have the experience. We’ll do it again, and it fails again.
Yeap - already done! And they’re still pressing ahead.
Spoke to a colleague in a neighbouring LA this morning. She’s noticed the same thing happening there too - only she doesn’t have the evidence to support it - as it was done whilst she was a subcontractor to the LA.
I’m still surprised no one has decided to redo the Neighbourhood Watch logo.
That looks like an easy way to spaff some money up the wall. (Although, I do think it needs it)
BTP’s focus has always been in 3 areas, it doesn’t have the resources for much more:
Counter Terrorism
Events (moving tens of thousands of football fans every weekend)
Disruption (people under trains, trespassers etc).
Everything else comes a very distant second, especially since the wonderful mayor of London insisted he needs 120 cops on foot for night tube (which is one of his greatest and least mentioned failings)
I don’t agree with this decision, but I do get where it’s come from, how many bike thefts a day, how many hours of CCTV to trawl? They are really just coming into line with everyone else.
Ok, let them drop it, but in return make the organisational financially liable for the replacement cost of the bike on any case where they choose not to investigate.
Anything else is a deliberate injustice to the victim.
Precisely, they triage them - they don’t just discard them over a stupid arbitrary time limit, essentially saying it’s the owner’s fault for the bike being in the outdoors for more than 2 hours. Would you apply the same logic for stolen cars?
Frankly, I’ve witnessed first-hand the bias that police have against cyclists and this absolutely reeks of a continuation of that.
12 years ago I was hit by a driver in London who failed to stop, leading to an injury that required medical treatment for several months. The Met had clear CCTV, an exact timeframe of when to check it, the vehicle’s SCRIM info and everything else they needed to take a dangerous driver off the road. Their response? “Oh well we knocked at his door and he didn’t answer so we gave up.” - I wish I was exaggerating.
Not long after that, I was hit in a road rage incident in the City. Luckily nothing serious, but clear and deliberate aggression by a driver in front of their young child. The City of London Police’s response was that they weren’t going to bother trying to track down the driver, even for a quiet word, but they were very keen to have a go at me for remonstrating with the driver after he chose to endanger me.
The police in this country are institutionally anti-cycling, despite their best efforts to whitewash it with “awareness” campaigns that almost always victim blame. This latest action by BTP is a symptom of that institutional bias.
You think the Police are trawling CCTV for stolen cars?
If your car gets nicked the numberplate is going on ANPR and that’s it, unless you’ve got a tracker.
Why do you think shoplifting was ignored for so long? Because there was an arbitrary limit, if it was below a certain value it was closed straight away.
It ultimately comes down to best use of resources and for BTP if it comes down to a choice between trawling CCTV for an insured bike or having a decent sized escort for Millwall going to play away on the league the choice is the second one.
I was listening to an interesting chat on LBC about shoplifting, and there were loads of shop staff explaining that big stores used to be hotter on shoplifting until the cost of preventative measures became higher than the loss risk. They basically stopped paying for better CCTV and security, and more staff because it was cheaper to take the hit on stock.
From the big chain there are several elements of shoplifting that make the willing to take the hit.
They won’t take basic crime prevention measures because they want expensive stock out where customers can get to it, they also want it by the door to entice customers in.
They don’t want to spend the money on kit and staff when the markup on the goods is so good. They can afford to lose loads of stock out the DofE.
They don’t want staff abstracted to go to court in working hours, so they discourage staff from reporting.
That’s the wrong way around. The police are catching fewer shoplifters partly BECAUSE of these decisions:
There’s less preventative measures, so more shoplifting.
There’s less evidence gathering equipment and people, so fewer identified defendants.
If you call the police as a shop and report a shoplifting after the event, if the CCTV isn’t clear, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.
Where attention becomes focussed, or has done recently, is because shoplifters have started pulling knives on staff, which turns a simple summary- only shoplifting into a knifepoint robbery, (Max 6 months becomes minimum 4 years!)
