Training | 2010.01.11
A patchwork of personality | Peter Preston
We are all imperfectly human. So how can centralised structures be imposed so rigidly on us?
Inevitably, our justice secretary has got it in the neck from all and unionised sundry for his mild new year observation that "some police officers, whatever they say, quite enjoy being in a police station in the warm" – and therefore taking four toasted hours or so to fill out a few report forms that, for chaps in the force next door, might take an hour of their time.
Cue a spectrum of outrage from "inflammatory and irresponsible" to a "stab in the back". But in fact it\'s Jack Straw \'s next sentence that carries the real message for politics in 2010. "We are dealing with human beings," he said, before going on to talk about "culture and discipline" in the service. What, human beings? You mean the kind of people who round up their expenses, forget to put £5 in the Christmas box, have a drink or three too many at party time and may, in extremis, attract a £15 impost for occasionally leaving a car parked two minutes too long? You mean us ?
Look around a little. Why is it taking X over there 20 minutes longer than Y to eat his canteen soup? Why has P finished his classroom test long since while Q is still sucking a pencil and looking out of the window? Why have we been waiting three hours in A&E when the hospital closer to town turns the same things around in 90 minutes or less? Because human beings are involved, that\'s why – because this particular X factor (though perennially denied) conditions most of the things that go right or wrong in life.
How do we recruit police constables – the chief police officers of the future? Not by requiring any formal educational qualifications (compare and contrast the way nursing is going). No, the business of finding the new boys in blue is left to your local top brass working within what\'s called the "national competency framework", involving just over 90 minutes of variegated testings – including "two written exercises of 20 minutes each". It\'s not exactly Sats.
So, of course, some plod more lugubriously over casework than others. Perhaps they have a better nose for crime on the beat. Perhaps they have a sweeter line in public relations. But it is utterly, deludingly unrealistic to expect them all to be equally adept, and quicksilver slick, at everything. They aren\'t standard products. Only their complaints about overload, once collated by a general secretary or head of some professional body, come as standard.
Does such overload exist? Sometimes: in harassed social work departments, on time-trial postal rounds – even among police ranks when too many sick days strike together. Yet stress, too, is a variable feast. One friend of mine turns nervous wreck over the challenge of catching a train (and usually arrives at Euston 40 minutes early for safety\'s sake); another will drive around for days with his no-petrol yellow light flashing. And it\'s the fate of all governments to affect to impose uniformity on this patchwork of personality.
Targets, new laws, more management consultancies? Take your pick. This isn\'t an argument about them. It rests, rather, on what\'s left after all the training courses and jawboning: just things, human things, going pear-shaped. Create a new superstructure to combat terrorism, and what do you get? The same barely watched watch lists, the same hapless dozing over tens of thousands of foreign names. Will it be better with mounds of fresh hi-tech kit on board? Not if human beings are standing guard.
There will always be a bungle here or there as supposedly masterful bombers try vainly to light their underpants. There will always be another Baby P , another duff buying spree at the Ministry of Defence, another dossier of dodgy assumptions overheard in the Travellers\' Club bar.
Do judges occasionally snooze on the job? I\'ve been there when they did, adjured to awed silence over snores that "didn\'t happen". Can doctors make grotesquely wrong diagnoses? Read Barbara Ehrenreich and weep. Is there truly a job called "security expert" when insecurity is the name of his game?
Straw said something profound in a subclause, then. He said that, no matter how relentless the education, how rigorous the testing, we will always mess up somehow. He said that a warm office on a freezing day is even better than a warm Z-car cruising round. He said that there will never be perfection because we are all imperfect human beings. A glimpse of the bleeding obvious? Naturally: except that we never include it in the roster of retribution when something that "must never happen again" comes down the slipway one more time. Shut the door, please, officer. It\'s snowing outside.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]police-jack-straw-human-beings
