Perverting the Course of Justice

I read this book last year after first reading Wasting Police Time by David Copperfield. At first you'd think it was a work of fiction, but sadly it's not.

~The Book~

Written anonymously by Inspector Gadget, the book highlights the day to day trial and tribulations of an inspector of the 'Ruralshire' police force.

Although not actually named Gadget, he is an actual Inspector in the police service.

During the book he talks about not only the stupidity of police procedures, but also the idiocy of things like health and safety; that won't allow stations to have kettles any more in case someone burns themselves, nor allows anyone not qualified to change the time on a wall clock, yet is quite happy for those same people to tackle great hulking thugs, who are high as a kite and ready to kill.

Police reports also come in for huge criticism, the massive amounts of paperwork, most of which is duplicated, takes up so much time, its no wonder we never see officers out on the beat.

However, the main trend that runs throughout the book is the lack of common sense in dealing with incidents.

Within the first few chapters Gadget tells us what happens when someone rings the police. Firstly you don't get through to an officer, you get through to a civilian call centre. His first example is of a man who received a nasty text from his girlfriend. Instead of using common sense and talking to the guy about ignoring the texts, turning his phone off, changing his number etc. The call is logged as harassment, officers will be sent to interview him, the girlfriend will be arrested, her phone seized for a few months. Eventully she'll either get a caution, or the case will most likely be dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. All this takes up between 10-20 hours of police time, taking officers of the beat. All because someone was upset about a text.

Throughout the book, there are many, many examples where a bit of common sense, and allowing the officers to use their own initiative would have meant a five minute chat and on your way. Instead absolutely rigid procedures are in place and that five minutes turns into hours upon hour of paper work and interviews, and results in large districts being un-policed or policed by a lone officer.

~My Thoughts~

As I said earlier this often reads as a work of fiction, 'You couldn't make it up' would have been a perfect tagline for this book.

Unfortunately I know that some of it is most certainly correct. My volunteer work takes me into the courts on many occasions, and one time I was chatting to two officers who mentioned that because they were stuck in the courts, and the horse fair was also on, their was only one police officer out in the town. This one officer had to patrol a town of 60,000 people and its surrounding area!

So I do believe a lot of what Gadget tells us is true. I'm not naive enough to think there is no bias in the book, I'm sure there is. But even if only half of what he says were actually true then it's an absolute disgrace.

I would say that anyone who have ever moaned about the time it takes for the police to turn up, or that the police should be out catching 'real' criminals, should read this book. It is certainly an eye opener into the world of the police, that is not shown on The Bill or A Touch of Frost.

~Extra Details~

The book is available from Amazon, or direct from mondaybooks.com. Gadget can also be found at his very informative blog http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/.