Whistleblowing

Two very good posts currently up on PC Bloggs' and Inspector Gadget's blogs.
Bloggs gives an insight into what it's like in her custody unit, where 'some days... 100% of the prisoners arrested in Blandmore require a police doctor, of Forensic Medical Examiner (FME). If they aren't alcoholics, they are drug addicts. 'Drug addicts are OK,' the FME told me. 'Drug addicts might withdraw but alcoholics can just die on you.'

In the comments below the post, 'Mac' writes:
Spot on post Ellie.
I'm going home now (I'm posting this in my own time - I was off duty at 0200). Down in the cells there's: one 15 yr old female chronic alcoholic who's blind drunk again. (She'll be dead before she's 20 either through the drink or what might happen to her when she's drunk). She came in too drunk to be processed. A drink driver banging his head off the walls, Another regular with depression, history of self harm, drug abuse etc. and who claims (and looks like) not to have eaten for 4 days but is refusing food when offered. Our cell block holds 27 and at any one time when more than half full there will usually be 2 open door cell watches, taking 2 officers per shift off the streets to babysit. There are another 20 prisoners in at the moment and just about all of them have had to see the FME for some ailment or other. I have just done PACE reviews on them all and just like after every PACE duty I go home now praying none of them die before I'm back tonight.
The irony is that as a commenter says above, most of them're safer here than if they were at home alone in their own beds with no one monitoring them!

I don't read about this kind of stuff in the national papers. Why? It can't be because it's not interesting, or important - two police officers employed to sit and watch a prisoner who is claiming he is suicidal, replicated nationwide, is a colossal waste of manpower and cash. And 'chronically alcoholic' 15-year-old girls? Terrible stuff.

Talking of cash, Gadget's latest post reveals that Kent Police have just taken on three new assistant chief constables while claiming not to have the cash for a force helicopter or to pay officers properly. Do the people of Kent know? I can't find anything about it on the Kent Messenger website.

One reason the media don't cover this sort of thing is because officers like Gadget and Bloggs daren't blow the whistle publicly. I mentioned earlier in the week that PM had contacted us asking Gadget to go on to talk about the G20: he wouldn't, because he'd have been identified, and, if identified, sacked. He's risking a lot - his job, his mortgage - running a blog and writing a book: national radio and telly is just a risk too far.
I'm not saying that it would be a good thing for rank and file coppers to spend all day talking to newspapers, but the fact is we are not being told the truth.
If you ask a police force whether it's true that its front line numbers have fallen, it will say that all shifts are being staffed at the appropriate levels. Ask (pretty much) any front line officer, and they'll tell you this is nonsense. Who is right?

If you dare to reveal material of genuine public interest, that the government is wrongly trying to keep secret, you run the risk of arrest, as Damian Green MP and Chris Galley found out. They're not being charged, but what an ordeal the last few months must have been. Galley talks to the Daily Mail today and says that he was threatened, absurdly, with life in jail during interviews in which the police also tried to get him to cough to passing 20 documents to Green instead of the four he had released. I know these officers have a job to do, but if I were them I'd reflect on what I was doing and where this is all leading.

Meanwhile, in one of the most scandalous decisions made by a public body that I can recall, a nurse has been struck off for whistleblowing about the appalling care elderly, dying patients received in her hospital.
Working for the BBC's Panorama, Margaret Haywood secretly filmed people at the Royal Sussex hospital in Brighton where she worked. One old lady, who had terminal cancer, was seen squirming and crying in pain after not being given her morphine.
For this Haywood loses her job - while the Healthcare Commission decides not to bother with an investigation of the way the hospital is run.
A spokesman for the hospital trust involved told the BBC: 'We welcome the Commission's decision. That does not detract from... ensuring a good standard of care for our patients.'
Between them, the authorities seem to believe that leaving patients in indescribable agony is not as bad as revealing that they are left in this way.
Were he alive today, Orwell could not invent doublethink: it would not be fiction.

Posted by Dan