Airwaves - The Wave Of The Future

This is exactly how Airwaves - the new Police radio system - was sold to us when it was introduced a couple of years or so ago.

Apparantly it's digitally encrypted with crystal clear digitally enhanced sound quality. It gives the Police the ability to communicate securely with colleagues all around the country and has advanced features like two-way point to point where officers can call each other privately.

Well, I don't know about that. I'm really not that bright. I just know they're crap. And that they've been crap since we first got them.

When there's no signal a little red light flashes at the top of the radio to let you know that nobody can hear you. Now, I'm not one to whinge, but just the fact that the red light is needed at all isn't great. Not to mention the fact that it gets so much use I'm starting to question whether the green "everything's working" light actually exists.

We report the radio fault to the Control Room. Who report it to O2 Airwave (the company who run them). And it is then the duty of O2 Airwave to come up with some excuse as to why it's our fault. Hopefully, somebody from their company will read this and I can save them the bother of using the following thin excuses. We've already heard them. Come up with some new ones:

1. It's because of the nice weather.
2. It's because of the bed weather. (This is logic you can't hope to beat. So, the radios are fine as long as there's no weather? What, like on the Moon?)
3. It's because you're in a building. (Very occasionally, we have to enter buildings. Like when we're at domestics, shoplifters, burglaries, missing persons...in fact all the time. It's a bit unavoidable.)
4. It's because you're in a car. (We'll walk to that 999 emergency then. The caller won't mind).
5. It's because the van you're in has a metal cage at the front and back. (Right, well in that case we'll lose the cage. The big, angry man won't mind sitting still in our car I'm sure.)
6. Too many people are using the same radio channel. (On a side issue, who are all these people using the radios? They're not coppers!)
7. The mast is down. (so, er, put it back up?)
8. The radios are over charged.
9. The radios are under charged. (There's that logic again.)
10. It's a "software problem" that isn't their responsability.

I could go on. But I haven't done the special "poxy excuse course" that O2 Airwaves send it's engineers on, so I probably wouldn't do it justice.

Today a female officer was attempting the arrest of a male who had stolen some beers from a shop and made off. She found him on a nearby estate and they had a tussle. He became violent, she called for assistance and for over a minute we did nothing. Because her radio didn't work properly.

Six weeks or so ago something similar happened and I wrote a comment on the incident to the effect "I've done a risk assessment and the radios are making it too dangerous for officers to attend incidents on their own" (I thought it might be nice to chuck the health and safety thing back at them!) And so I refused to send any of my officers to any jobs unless there was a clear risk to life and somebody really needed our help. And within a couple of minutes of writing this on there I had bosses coming at me left, right and centre to give me bollockings and remind me about my duty.

I couldn't help wondering why they weren't busy bollocking O2 Airwave for providing us equipment that doesn't work.

The only reason I'm bothered about things like this and low staffing levels (apart from the increased chances of me getting a kicking) is because I really want to do a good job whilst I'm at work. And it frustrates me when I can't because of something not working properly.