Open Letters to Those in Power

“Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

A brave serving officer has opened his heart, risked the vilification, wrath and bullying of Avon & Somerset’s chief officers, and told the truth about what it is to be a PC in the constabulary. The same constabulary that targets its retired officers on IODs in the same manner it abuses its serving ones.
https://www.facebook.com/bullshirepolicefederation/posts/859634284118913:0

A FORCE FOR GOOD_ A serving police officer..

The twitter response from DCC Gareth Morgan  suggested he doesn’t recognise the picture ‘PC B Standard’ paints (hardly surprising as the DCC types his twitter feed whilst sitting in his ivory tower) and to cheerfully put forward a gleeful invite to meet up ‘in a place of PC Standard’s choosing’

Notwithstanding if PC ‘Standard’ ever takes the DCC up on his invite that his career will be over (an interesting statistic would be how many serving officers in A&S are off on long term sick due to management bullying induced stress), it is the lack of prescient of the DCC that he himself can not see that he and his chief officer colleagues are the problem cause.

It seems this force preys on serving officers just the same as it sucks the life force from those that it has retired.

DCC Morgan – you say you don’t recognise the description, but the 490 people retired on an IOD recognise it all too well.

Here is an accompanying polemic  to PC B Standard’s brave stand.

A FORCE FOR EVIL?

When I was told that I  would  be retired on an injury pension I thought the force had my best interests in heart.  I  didn’t understand the regulations – I’d never read or even heard of them.  I just thought this was what a happened when you could no longer work as an operational police officer.  I tried to get on with my life, and the constabulary seemingly stepped away and gave me space as I never heard from them for years.

Then I came across the Mountsteven’s letter that compared the expense of fulfilling the force’s duty to pay injury pensions to replacing the fleet of police vehicles.  I then found other IODs similarly shocked and then the reviews of others started.  Reviews motivated by greed  Reviews not individual to the circumstances of the retired officer.  Reviews initiated with the tacit approval of the force’s chief officers.

It became clear that we had not been reviewed because the force was allowing us to rebuild our lives – we were never reviewed as it suited them not to review.  They hadn’t left us alone by any notion of displaying kindness and concern, they had left us alone because they had forgotten, and it had suited them to forget.

The force cannot proclaim they have a duty to review when they themselves have never reviewed.  A suitable interval isn’t ‘their‘ suitable ‘we have no money‘ interval.  It is an interval suitable to the individual.

But it is the falsity, the subterfuge and treacherous guile that the force engages against those who dare speak out against it .  PC Standard shows the true colours of those in charge at A&S.  If current officers are being told mistruths to lure them into a false way of thinking as PC Standard put it ‘they are to sell the lies that all is well to the officers on the ground’, it is nothing compared to when the force sees you as an enemy to be crushed.  The freedom of information team have been told by the chief officers to breach the act by giving false answers and to claim subjects are vexatious and therefore out-of-bounds.  Never do they think if they told the truth to start with then no-one would seek disclosure of the real truth through freedom of information.  It is the lies that need to be unmasked

And the duplicity continues.  Under instruction from higher powers the HR managers do not tell the federation nor narpo the truth.  Letters to the Temporary Chief Constable go unanswered.  Internal Dispute Resolution Procedures go ignored.  Any communication asking for updates and answers go to the black hole of Legal Services.  Concerns raised by Members of Parliament are bounced back with glib half-truths that do not match and therefore blatantly contradict the letters and emails given to the IODs that are being reviewed – vapid answers to the MPs given purely with the intent to throw the enquirer off the scent and to get them off their back.

A&S chief officers run a police service and the bar is set high for professional standards. If the police service fails to be ethically and morally sound in the decisions of it’s leaders then it loses it’s position of authority on all counts.

Misconduct of an individual is one thing – a culture of lying and masking the truth is group think.  Endemic to A&S HQ.  This group think has infected and poisoned Portishead HQ.

PC Standard wrote

“Their tactics work. I’m typing this, nervous that I should ever be found out. If they ever found out who I was I would be shown the door via a reg 15 for gross misconduct for bringing the force into disrepute, my reputation destroyed and vilified for being a trouble maker

That is exactly how those with an A&S IOD feel.  Magnified due to the vulnerability of being disabled.

How can this scandal hit force be allowed to continue with its current leaders?  It is no coincidence that the current abuse of IODs is simultaneously occurring with all the other  morally and legally wrong  decisions of A&S.

It is how this force rolls …

So yes, DCC Morgan, it seems you and your close friends are the only ones that don’t know.

Apologies to Taylor Swift for the following misquote

“If you’re horrible to me, I’m going to write a song blog about it, and you won’t like it. That’s how I operate.”
― Taylor Swift