In modern police parlance “cuffing off” a job means to look for a way to avoid dealing with a complaint about a crime made by a member of the public. Shonking means the same thing. South Yorkshire Police is very much focused on internal award ceremonies for its staff and members of the public calling to report criminal offences gets in the way of this. Most inconvenient.
So here’s the story. I had an offence to report on the basis of information that came my way. Having researched the offence and charging guidelines for the same as well as collated sufficient documents to show who was responsible and how I completed the South Yorkshire Police online form. This is their preferred way of contacting you. And so I waited for contact back. And waited. And waited.
Eventually a series of phone calls were made on one afternoon to South Yorkshire Police via 101. The poor handling of the initial report from the webform data and subsequent poor handling of all subsequent contacts are described below.
Basically the webform was ignored. Phone calls to check on the progress of the report of a crime were also consistently mishandled.
The basic issues are as follows:
1. A complaint of a crime was made. This was done via the online form for such. That the response from the online form took longer than the 72 hours the website states for any action to be taken in respect of the referral of a crime.
2. That the online form had still not been processed some 7 days later.
This amount to the first effort to “shonk” the job.
3. That from comments made by Professional Standards Dept. at SYP in a later email to me it would appear that this online referral has been “lost”.
4. Following the lack of response to the webform a series of phone calls were made by me on the Tuesday and Wednesday to SYP to establish what was happening in relation to the online referral.
5. That these calls were either cut off when transferred to the appropriate department or else rang out for an exceptionally long period. The time it took to get through to someone was the time of my journey that day from West Yorkshire to Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast. Some one hour and fifteen minutes.
6. That on eventually speaking to an officer he stated that he had no copy of the online form in front of him but proceeded to dismiss the referral of a crime being committed on the basis that this incident was not a crime and therefore not something that police would deal with.
This is incorrect. I quoted CPS guidance and sentencing guidelines that clearly show the activity reported was a criminal offence.
Most police officers have a very poor working knowledge of the law and are often the worst people to decide if an offence falls into their jurisdiction or not. Or if an offence has been committed in law. Without sight of evidence etc. the officer was additionally on very shaky ground.
7. That the same officer rang me back several minutes later. He had performed a search on my name after our initial conversation and my refuting his comments that the matter complained of was not an offence in law.
8. That his call back to me amounted to harassment and intimidation. His manner during this second call was offensive, uncivil and harassing. Having tried to “cuff / shonk the job off” only to be confronted by a member of the public who knew the law put his fragile and delicate nose out of joint.
Most police officers have exceptionally fragile egos and cannot bear not to have the last word on something. As sites such as the exceptional. ://crimebodge.com show (especially I would recommend their YouTube channel) this can often lead to violence and assault from the officer if a member of the public stands their ground.
9. That the officer concerned did this solely for the purpose of causing harassment, vexation and distress. On the second call he refused to give his name or service number when asked which is usually indicative of an officer misconducting himself. South Yorkshire Police have plenty of form for this. Ask the miners who were at The Battle of Orgreave: SYP removed their epaulets displaying service numbers so they couldn’t be subject of individual complaints.
That overall the standard of conduct in relation to this matter was sufficient to cause loss of professional reputation, such as it is, for the force. Overall the behaviour described above gave the impression of South Yorkshire Police as being inept, incompetent and evasive.
Later that day is I rang again. This time to make a formal complaint. The College of Policing Code of Ethics has a series of guidelines which had each been breached in the police’s handling of this matter. Not least of these are those related to courtesy and respect. https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/Ethics/Documents/Code_of_Ethics.pdf
I was told I would be called back in a few days. However again there was no response.
This matter relates to the following issues in the College of Policing Code of Ethics:
1. Authority, respect and courtesy.
2. Duties and responsibilities.
3. Conduct.
I emailed Professional Standards Department at South Yorkshire Police a few weeks later. The response was initially in terms of my complaint call of a few weeks earlier and stated:
Unfortunately, we are unsure as to who the officer was who spoke with you…
This suggests that the admin systems at South Yorkshire Police are not robust enough or else that they’ve already tried to evade examination of the complaint in the same way as they avoided examination of the original report of a crime. The comment is also vague: do they mean the misconducting officer I spoke to at around around lunchtime or the one spoken to to enter the complaint at 18:30 on the same day?
But it gets worse:
In relation to the online complaint form this does not a appear to have been received by us.
So an additional copy was attached to the response. Neither the original web form reporting a criminal offence nor the complaint form sent by email were received by the force. How many others have been similarly missed by them?
By this point some three weeks had elapsed since this complaint form was sent in to Professional Standards Department and their sobriquet was looking further and further misapplied. The South Yorkshire Police webform auto-generates a copy of the complaint for the public so it is unlikely that a copy was not sent to PSD. The comments they made about not receiving a copy are likely bunkum.
They stated:
If you would like to reply to this email with your initial complaint, we will pass it for assessment and ask our assessors to look into it asap.
So this created a further issue to the complaint: that failure to record the initial complaint call made around 18.30hrs in the evening to SYP via 101 amounts to a further breach of duty. A copy of this call will have been recorded on the Airwave system, which records all incoming and outgoing calls from police stations.
The failure to properly action the issues raised by phone in the evening call amounts to an effort to evade dealing with the complaint from an early stage. The “loss” of the follow up complaint form to PSD is a further effort in this direction.
Matters have now been before Professional Standards Department at South Yorkshire Police for two months without visible progress.
The whole fiasco makes SYP look doubly incompetent in their behaviour in failing to action the original webform, then “cuffing off” the job on the phone.
Then they fail to record and action the complaint made from 18:30hrs on the same day and further claim a follow up communication on the complaint was “lost”.
Heaven help people who actually live in South Yorkshire when it comes to reporting crime or making a complaint to SYP. Because the force’s systems are clearly set up to avoid having to deal with either.
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