Three recent incidents involving friends or family make me wonder about the value of calling Police Scotland on its “non emergency” 101 number, other than satisfying some bureaucratic whim.
Given the ho-hum responses it is difficult not to conclude that the 101 service – now in its third year – exists to record events rather than do anything about them.
The incidents included the smashing of a car window, prolonged suspicious activity at a cash machine, and the theft of a bag from a private hire taxi. Such incidents will never inspire a Hollywood heist movie, but they can be important to the victims or witnesses who report them.
Why should we care, if the police do not appear to do so? Police Scotland reportedly plans to invest less in media communications and more on social media. How soon might car theft, “minor” road accidents or suspected drug dealing – all three of them listed by police as “101” offences – be posted on Facebook instead?
And where has the trust in social media led some forces already? Last April police in Lanarkshire published Twitter and Facebook alerts warning of dwellings being marked with an “X”, supposedly denoting premises that were easy to burgle. The story attracted nationwide publicity, helped by its inclusion of a helpful graphic depicting what various symbols meant. As a supposedly criminal code depicting targets worth robbing, it was scary stuff.
This week, however, West Mercia Police found that such supposed symbols – inevitably dubbed the “Da Pinchi Code” – are in fact left by utility companies to depict water pipes and telecoms wires. A nation sighed, relieved its homes had not really been identified by criminals performing some weird service for their peers, a dubious concept indeed; after all if a burglar finds a suitably soft target, why would he tip off a rival?
West Mercia’s revelation – and presumably Lanarkshire’s discomfort – was avoidable. “Da Pinchi Code” nonsense pops up repeatedly via social media. From Texas to Bellshill, Surrey to Salford, police officers and often the media have fallen for the same old urban myth. Search the Web and you will find numerous examples, going years back.
We should not doubt police intentions to do good. But this new reliance on social media and the attempt to “grade” crime returns us to the issue of dialling 101. The truth is such calls rarely seem to lead to a police officer visiting the scene, and certainly not in time to do anything about it.
It transfers to the citizen the responsibility for deciding what is or is not an emergency. If we report a broken window, or someone harassing women at a cash machine, we cannot know whether or not these might be part of a series of incidents. An experienced police officer, armed with more facts, might know differently.
When a passer-by dutifully reported a car lying off the M9 using 101 last year, he could not have known that the dead driver and seriously injured passenger still remained inside. The 101 system left him to make that decision, not a qualified police officer. Suddenly the risks of two-tier reporting were laid bare, in tragic circumstances.
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