MarshaMelrose
Paperwork - This is one of those things that appears to work in principle, but not in practice.
For me to write up the details and hand it over will still be time consuming - i may as well just complete the file as the admin staff will just copy and paste what i have rote over. The statements can't be done via dicta-phone - witness & victim statements have to be read and singed by the people at the scene.
If the admin staff have not been to the scene or met any of the victims or witnesses - how can they identify people & scenes on CCTV?
And its not bad time management - it's something that has to be done. Places send CCTV in which is multiplexed and not in any order and usually and hour either side of the offence. So i have to go through it to pick out what we need to prove the offence. Once we have that, we need to edit it so a plays in a format that is 'legible' - so it shows the offence clearly. And then you need to go through it again to take out all the sensitive info - but only i will know what that information is as the OIC.
We do have a prisoner handling team - so for example if i arrest a person for a shop theft, they will take over the case & interview the suspect. I will still need to get the statements from the store, my statement, crime it and obtain the CCTV. If its a straightforward guilty plea - they would put the rest of the case file together - but if its not guilty, it comes back to us to complete the case file for CPS. And the reason is because there is too much stuff to go on the case file that only the officer in the case can answer - especially if it bounces back from CPS.
And this is only case files
Admin staff won't be able to help with risk assessments taken at the scenes or missing from homes, sudden deaths, mental health cases etc etc. All of which have paperwork.
We have two officers currently pregnant on our shift, so they are taken off front line duties - they often deal with crimes being made at the front desk or interviews etc. They can help with all the paperwork associated with phone down loads and some back ground checks for missing from homes etc - but even they are limited to what they can do to help us with paperwork - and they are experienced officers who know their way around case files.
SongAtTwiighlight
We do go to the urgent crime jobs. Things like rapes and murders are a priority, domestic incidents are high up as well.
Everything has to be graded with respect to threat, harm & risk. For example - a domestic disturbance where the suspect is still on scene will overtake one where the suspect is no longer on scene. A violent domestic will trump a detained shoplifter - where the shoplifter is complainant and sat in the managers office not causing any issues.
Anything that's below that will go onto an event queue, where you will get the next available officer. Might take a few days, as often incoming jobs jostle the queue around. So the incident where your garden shed has been broken into sometime in the last two weeks but nothing was taken - might drop further down the queue.
We would like to go to all of them straight away, but we don't have the resources.
The 'stickering' incident you refereed to - I don't know the details of it - but is it part of a bigger incident? What was the original crime that was reported & recorded for an arrest to be made? Was this a priority job or was this a job that had dropped onto the event queue and was dealt with after there were no immediate threat, harm or risk type jobs?
if you look at my post above - a female has phoned the police as her ex-partner has wished her 'all the best' on social media, that's the way the job had come in to us. But once you investigate further, its a much more sinister detail. Now, I went around and arrested him straight away and got him sent to court - but he could easily come on here and moan that the police have arrested him for simply passing on a nice message to his ex.