Apparently one of the main Scottish police control rooms spent eight years fiddling their response time figures by deliberately assigning call response to a fictitious patrol car, most of which incidents never received any actual response at all, including hundreds if not thousands of calls explicitly at the "holy shit dispatch this NOW people are gonna die" severity level.
I am having several reactions to this, including:
- this is a BBC story about Scotland; what English political fuckery happened in the last eight hours they want to dead cat?
- this happened under a police chief who was really big on Cracking Down On Performance Targets, and that means this was a 100% predictable and 100% open-secret management problem all the way down.
- total lack of surprise.
- if they were getting away with it then, and only stopped this particular fiddle because a change of operational software caught them out, I can guarantee they're still doing whatever the equivalent is under their current system because when I say management problem, I mean management invented and insisted on the fiddle, and coached more junior managers in it at least several steps down the chain before the most junior managers coached the frontline staff in it
- because that's how it works in aggressively target-driven environments where the targets are impossible and the problems the targets supposedly address are directly and deliberately inflicted by the same management both imposing the targets and coaching their juniors in how to cheat them
- (the problem is understaffing; they fired too many people to maintain the system, and the entire system of targets is an elaborate pantomime that We're All Just Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This. The fiddles are to protect managers from having the finger pointed at them. Frontline staff failing to hit targets, getting caught fiddling the system, or standing out for having worse figures than all the cheats because they don't will take all the rap for everything)
- it's sad that this works exactly the same as retail jobs, and also that I lack any kind of surprise that it does
- no seriously this is a legitimately awful thing, what horrific English breaking news are the Beeb misdirecting from