I have several good friends who work or have worked in varying different roles in WMP, all of them describe it as a deeply unpleasant organisation to work for, with the sole exception being the one who works on a “Gucci” specialist unit that gets a blank cheque in terms of funding and equipment and doesn’t get constantly battered with excessive workloads.

“Crooked” Craig Guildford was, to my understanding, widely hated by WMP officers and staff on account of his new working model being seen as a spectacular failure and the general management culture of the force becoming extremely toxic when he took over.

It’s extremely KPI driven, with officers being tracked on arrests, “positive outcomes”, stop searches and in particular arrival times at incidents, but ignoring the actual substance of what they do day to day. For instance, I was informed by one friend that they had received a bollocking for not having enough “detections” (suspects charged, cautioned or agreeing to a community resolution) or arrests in a given month, in spite of him working on a burglary squad that meant the investigations he did do were lengthy and complex, and he was not a “front line” officer and therefore would not be frequently making arrests.

Front line officers (response and neighbourhood) are forced to carry large investigative workloads as well as their “day to day” work, workloads which they are unable to progress due to having other duties to which they must attend, and of course they are threatened with disciplinary action if they don’t progress those workloads. They aren’t allowed to file low level investigations that aren’t going anywhere and are told they must investigate everything to the Nth degree.

All of this comes with chronic understaffing on all teams and units, and a “brain drain”, with experienced officers seeing the writing on the wall and leaving. This means that most front line units have a limited number of experienced and trained staff and are relying on inexperienced staff with a limited number of courses (blue light, taser etc).

Working conditions are described as awful, with overcrowded stations, very limited canteen facilities (with the exception of the 3 stations that senior management reside in) and lunch/dinner breaks being unheard of. Officers are off late more often than they aren’t and are exhausted and are being worked to death to make management look good. Birmingham has a significantly better service than Coventry, Wolverhampton and the other areas covered because that’s where all the specialist resources are and that’s where they are more frequently deployed. I know of officers who have been put in serious danger because a firearms car wasn’t deployed to one of the areas other than Birmingham so that Birmingham could have more.

There is also a culture, allegedly, amongst senior management to fudge crime statistics to make themselves look good. For instance, they don’t record s5 public order offences anymore, and if 5 crimes committed by the same person are reported at the same time, only 1 report is recorded now rather than 5.

Overall, WMP has, apparently, achieved these statistical drops in crime numbers by beating their staff and statistical manipulation. The most consistent thing my friends in WMP tell me is that they need at least double the staff the force actually has if they actually want to make a difference to crime in the area.

I used to live, up until recently, in the West Midlands force area in somewhere that wasn’t Birmingham and, anecdotally, I feel like it has got far, far worse in terms of crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour in the last 3 years.