You hit a point when you realise this isn’t going the way it was all meant to be at the start. Looking back – two relaunches and still no consistent udates ……. and then the realisation that I have three drafts started but none finished – all in all it’s telling me something, something very clear! I have been struggling time wise to keep the blog regularily updated, no shortage of stories and issues, just a shortage of time. I don’t want to close it down completely as I intend to come back to it in the near future and build on some of the ideas but for now as the winter really begins to bite it’s time to go into a partial hibernation. There will be occasional updates as circumstances allow and these will be ’advertised’ through our Twitter posts so keep in touch with us there and as always if there is anything particularly that you do want me to include in future blogs then let us know.

A re-launch of a re-launch ….. I’m saying nothing more about it but back up and running properly again now!

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for us policing the Dudley Borough. While policing is never routine there is a certain pattern to it; as the week goes by things tend to get busier as we approach the weekend, no great surprises there I guess. Every so often though a week comes along that changes that and that’s what happened this last week.

As an emergency service we deal with a wide range of incidents.  At the start of the day you just don’t know whats going to come your way but so that we can manage our response effectively we need to grade our calls according to the risk and danger involved. To help us manage these calls we colour code them, it’s not rocket science, an Immediate Emergency (the sort of thing that you will see or hear a police car responding to with blue lights and sirens) is shown on our screens as red, next grade down as yellow, so you get the idea. It’s...

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Ok then, the evidence is fairly heavily stacked against me, so I guess its hands up time, I admit it, I have failed miserably haven’t I? No updates for eight weeks! A bit like a New Year resolution, going great guns for a while but then other things start to take over and suddenly those great intentions seem so lost and….. At this point I should be able to give you a whole host of reasons why I neglected the Blog, I could talk about the technical issues, the other time consuming commitments, the great summer weather … ok, now you know it, there isn’t an excuse, it’s just one week slipped, then another and before you know it you’re thinking ’what happened to that Blog thing I used to do!’ So, time to move on and get some writing done,

For one reason or another our last few weeks seem to have been dominated by incidents where we are concerned for the welfare and safety of some of our local residents. I’ve talked about some of the issues around this before, actualy its one of the recurring themes. Just...

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Ok then, the evidence is fairly heavily stacked against me, so I guess its hands up time, I admit it, I have failed miserably haven’t I? No updates for eight weeks! A bit like a New Year resolution, going great guns for a while but then other things start to take over and suddenly those great intentions seem so lost and….. At this point I should be able to give you a whole host of reasons why I neglected the Blog, I could talk about the technical issues, the other time consuming commitments, the great summer weather … ok, now you know it, there isn’t an excuse, it’s just one week slipped, then another and before you know it you’re thinking ’what happened to that Blog thing I used to do!’ So, time to move on and get some writing done,

For one reason or another our last few weeks seem to have been dominated by incidents where we are concerned for the welfare and safety of some of our local residents. I’ve talked about some of the issues around this before, actualy its one of the recurring themes. Just...

Continues, Read More...

We have had a few very busy days over the last week or so, some incidents with happy endings, some not so happy but overall I think it has been quite a positive couple of weeks. The warm humid evenings last week certainly had an effect with calls and incidents coming in almost by the minute at one stage. A real case of juggling staff and establishing priorities – is that missing person more at risk than that victim of car crime? Can that matter wait a bit longer? Arrests for everything from Drink Driving in Stourbridge and Theft in Halesowen to Domestic Abuse in Dudley and Fraud in Brierley Hill. Anyway, yes, it has been a busy couple of weeks for everyone!

The other day I posted a message on our PolicingDudley Twitter account that as I wrote it I thought that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense; after I posted it I thought, that really doesn’t make much sense and on reflection it made no sense at all! So I thought I would try to put it into some sort of context here and explain the background to...

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I’ve been very remiss and not published anything for the last few weeks. In my defence but I think I’ve used this one before, I have been very busy recently at work and at home. The vast bulk of these posts are done away from work and the last few weeks has seen my ‘spare’ time taken up with a hundred and one other priorities, it’s always priorities, how come everything is a priority? Besides this has been one of my more traumatic and frustrating posts as I have lost the content three times already!

Most of what I have being doing was influenced by the great weather we had recently (we did) and that weather is the common theme running through everything this week. The sun and warmth bring all sorts of issues for us in policing, very few of them anything positive I’m afraid. Open windows cause real problems for one reason and another and the migration of many local residents from the sofa to the garden often brings misery for their neighbours.

So I suppose the starting point this week is that relationship with our neighbours,...

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We have had a particularly busy few days this week. If you have been following the Blog or our Twitter posts you will have picked up on how I like to say “nothing happened” … “Its been a quite week …. ” and so on! Our aim, I guess, is to be boring, to have nothing happening – Ok, so the reality of life is nothing like that but we are striving to make sure as little as possible actually happens. This week though, a lot happened, from gun reports in Halesowen, to chases over back fences in Pensnett, shopping trolley dash in Amblecote and Domestic Violence reports across the area. But the good news is that these are uncommon (except perhaps the Domestic Abuse) and all had very positive results with arrests and safety.

Every one of the incidents above came in to us as a phone call and we organised our responses, gathering information, getting officers to scenes and ensuring everyone’s safety by radio. Communications are key to everything we do.

Whats in a call?

Everything really, it could be anything...

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I finished off last weeks Blog with the comment that there is no such thing as ‘normal’, that every policing day is different. Generally everyday is different, bringing new challenges but we returned to duty this week to find that everything appeared to be normal, almost a case of Déja vu! We literally started our week off where we had finished the previous one, on some railway tracks in Stourbridge, looking for a vulnerable Mental Health patient who had run off threatening to go on to the railway line.

trespassers on the Line

Railways and railway stations are policed by British Transport Police (BTP) but as with everything in policing (and indeed right across the emergency services) there are no boundaries to helping out in emergencies.  We quickly set up searches, including using the Police Helicopter, of the tracks and open areas around Stourbridge and fortunately found this person before they came to any harm and got them back into treatment.

So rewind to our last Night on duty, when we got a call in the early hours...

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Its been a busy week for us here in the Dudley Control Room with all the ‘normal’ things coming in along with a few more notable events. Whats ‘normal’ though? Was it the Burglary arrests, the Robbery arrests, the shoplifting arrests? Or was it the Hoax calls, the disputes with neighbours, the “I’m lost and drunk, will you get me home?” Or was it the hour of peace and quite? Perhaps it was the Mental Health patient helped into treatment, the missing persons found or the Domestic Abuse offenders arrested and put before the courts? Or was it just the peace and quite that is Dudley?

Raiders in the Night

Continuing on from last weeks garden theme, we took a call the other day from a local resident reporting the theft of some fish from his pond. While we always remain open-minded about incidents we were a little bit sceptical whether this was a criminal offence, not the theft (theft of fish is an offence) but more a case of ‘who dunit?’

This man had raised the fish from young over a number of years and was clearly devastated about...

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Its been a busy week for us here in the Dudley Control Room with all the ‘normal’ things coming in along with a few more notable events. Whats ‘normal’ though? Was it the Burglary arrests, the Robbery arrests, the shoplifting arrests? Or was it the Hoax calls, the disputes with neighbours, the “I’m lost and drunk, will you get me home?” Or was it the hour of peace and quite? Perhaps it was the Mental Health patient helped into treatment, the missing persons found or the Domestic Abuse offenders arrested and put before the courts? Or was it just the peace and quite that is Dudley?

Raiders in the Night

Continuing on from last weeks garden theme, we took a call the other day from a local resident reporting the theft of some fish from his pond. While we always remain open-minded about incidents we were a little bit sceptical whether this was a criminal offence, not the theft (theft of fish is an offence) but more a case of ‘who dunit?’

This man had raised the fish from young over a number of years and was clearly devastated about...

Continues, Read More...