Warwickshire Police must improve call response times, inspectors say
Warwickshire Police must improve how fast it responds to 999 and 101 calls, the policing watchdog has said. A report by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found whilst the force's call handling had improved since its last inspection in 2022, inspectors still had "serious concerns" about how quickly officers responded once the calls had been answered. But inspectors also found the force was good at preventing and deterring crime, and reducing reoffending.Warwickshire Police said it was already taking steps to improve on its response times and now had additional officers and staff in its investigation teams.
Inspectors found that the force met its attendance times in only 33 of 68 relevant cases - and informed callers of delays in only 15 of 31 relevant cases.They said that the force had not improved in this area since its last inspection and was still failing to meet its own published targets.But the report also found that the force had improved how it investigates crime, with an increase in the number of cases closed.The force was found to be inadequate at responding to the public, and requiring improvement at protecting vulnerable people, building, supporting and protecting the workforce, and leadership and force management.Inspectors graded Warwickshire Police as being good at recording data about crime and preventing and deterring crime and antisocial behaviour, and reducing vulnerability.
'Work in progress'
His Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary Lee Freeman said while it was positive to see that the force had made progress in some areas - he was concerned about how well it protected vulnerable people. He said: "The force needs to make sure that its governance and performance structures are capable of quickly identifying and addressing any potential harm to vulnerable people. "It is evident that the force is committed to achieving this. However, given the scale of the changes required, this is still work in progress."Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith said: "We were already taking steps to improve and have been working closely with HMICFRS in the months since the inspection. "We have changed how we respond and investigate and now have additional officers and staff in our investigation teams. This has resulted in a better response and outcome rates."
'Overall lack of people'
Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Seccombe said the report highlighted the work to improve the force's service to the public was already taking place.He said: "Since the inspection period, the force has continued to sustain these improvements, despite increases in demand."He said the overall grade of inadequate for public contact was "disappointing", but added: "Nevertheless, the report needs to be seen in its full context, many of the issues it has highlighted come down to an overall lack of people to meet the increased demand or process investigations more quickly and effectively. "Warwickshire Police receives among the lowest amount of central government funding per head of population of any force and similarly ranks among the forces with the lowest numbers of officers compared to the population it serves."I have been clear for some time that there needs to be a fundamental review of the funding landscape for policing."
Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
44 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Subpostmistress remembers 'terror' of supporting her young children during the Horizon IT scandal on new Mail podcast
Former subpostmistress Pamela Church revealed she suffered panic attacks and felt as though she'd 'let everyone down' after going bankrupt due to the Horizon IT scandal on a new Mail podcast. On the latest episode of 'The Apple & The Tree', Pamela, 47 told daughter Rebekah Foot, 28, of her experience losing everything after becoming embroiled in what is seen as the largest miscarriage of justice in British history. The podcast, hosted by the Reverend Richard Coles, brings together parents and their adult children to answer questions about their shared family history. The Horizon IT scandal was a faulty Post Office computer system that falsely showed financial shortfalls at branches across the country. The fault led to over 700 subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted and convicted for theft and fraud between 1999 and 2015. 'I remember being seen as a pillar of the community', Pamela said. 'But once all that happened, everyone thought we were dodgy. We were shut down in 2015. 'It bankrupted me. I tried to keep as much of it away from my children as possible, but I started suffering really bad panic attacks.' The mother-of-three recounted collapsing in the toilet in front of her young daughter due to the stress of being pursued for tens of thousands of pounds. The technical fault potentially affected as many as 25,000 postmasters, yet fewer than 2,500 have been compensated. She told the podcast: 'It got to a really bad point where I could not carry on. I felt like I was a massive letdown. 'I'd had this massive panic attack – I was in the bathroom. My young daughter saw me on the floor and then took herself to school. 'My daughter told the school's receptionist: 'Mummy's poorly, she's not well and I can't live without her. 'After that, I went to the doctors, and they proscribed me fluoxetine. It stopped the panic attacks, and I started seeing a future again. 'But everything had been taken away: I was bankrupt, I had no money, no business – at least I still had my children and my partner. They set me up to go forward.' Pamela remembered noticing something was wrong when she ran both the old and new bookkeeping systems at her north Wales Post Office and discrepancies of thousands of pounds appeared. Despite her protests, the Post Office threatened to seize her business unless she made up the shortfall. 'My first panic attack, £10,000 had gone missing out of the Post Office and they phoned me up and told me I had to pay it. 'They said if I didn't, they'd take my business away from me. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to die. 'I collapsed with my daughter Evie in my arms. When I woke up, I saw my daughter playing in a pool of my blood.' The truth about the scandal emerged through persistent legal action by subpostmasters who took the first High Court case against the Post Office in 2019, securing a £43 million settlement. It gained widespread public attention in January 2024 after the ITV drama 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office' brought the issue to millions of viewers. Pamela said she hasn't yet completed all the paperwork for her compensation as she 'doesn't want to bring back' memories of the scandal. 'I am in an alright sort of place at the moment', she said. 'I don't want to bring it back. But I know that if I want my claim to go forward, I have to finish all this paperwork. I will do it, just in my own time.' To listen to the full episode, where Pamela remembers her Post Office being robbed at gunpoint when she was five months pregnant, search for 'The Apple & The Tree' now, wherever you get your podcasts.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Prison was the first place we felt sisterhood': six women return to the ruins of Holloway
The directors of Holloway use a simple but powerful visual device to demonstrate how badly the British prison system is failing the women it incarcerates. Towards the end of their eponynmous documentary, six former inmates are invited to play a version of Grandmother's Footsteps in the chapel of the deserted ex-prison, where they have been filming for five days. They begin lined up against the wall and a voice tells them: 'Step forward if you grew up in a chaotic household.' All six women step forward, before being instructed: 'Step forward if you experienced domestic violence growing up.' Again, they move ahead in unison. 'Step forward if somebody in your household has experienced drug use. Step forward if you grew up in a household where there wasn't very much money. Step forward if a member of your family has been to prison …' By the time the exercise is over, almost all the women have silently made their way from one side of the room to the other, starkly highlighting the film's fundamental theme: the UK's prisons are full of vulnerable women being punished – at great expense – and not helped. Shortly before Holloway prison began to be demolished in 2022, directors Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson secured permission to film inside the abandoned site in London, watching as six women returned to the cells where they were once held, to explore how they all ended up imprisoned as young women. Directors of a more conventional documentary might have plonked the participants on the bare iron frames of their old prison beds and instructed them to pour out their life stories, poking and prodding them for all the shocking details. Compton and Hudson take a subtler approach, arranging the women in a circle, supervised by a trained therapist, and waiting to see what emerges. It is a risky strategy. The flow of the conversation is faltering, interrupted by nervousness about how their words will be used, suspicion about the directors' intentions – and a sudden, uncomfortable request for the most difficult conversations to continue without the cameras rolling. The film includes all this uncertainty: they debate whether they should proceed before realising their desire to talk about the justice system's failures mostly outweighs their concerns about sharing chapters from their complicated pasts. Compton (Emmy nominated for her documentary on deepfake pornography, Another Body) and Hudson (who won a Bafta Breakthrough award for her film Half Way, documenting her own family's experience of homelessness) have the confidence to make their subjects collaborators on the project, inviting them into the editing process, to ensure everyone feels happy with how their experiences have been handled. 'They could say what they did and didn't like,' Hudson says. 'They wanted more laughter included. Our wish was that they felt proud of the film.' Once western Europe's largest women's prison, Holloway has a significant place in British history. More than 300 suffragettes were held in a wing of the original building during the early 20th century. Ruth Ellis was hanged there in 1955, the last woman to be executed in the UK. Greenham Common protesters spent time here. Sarah Reed, who had previously been a victim of police brutality in 2012, died in her cell in 2016. This is not the story the film sets out to tell. 'It's not a film about Holloway; other films can tell a historical story or show the realities of being in prison,' says Compton, who I meet along with Hudson and two of the film's participants, Aliyah Ali and Mandy Ogunmokun. 'This is about a group of women returning to Holloway, and finding they are not the same people they were when they were in prison.' The women each respond differently when they walk through the corridors of the site, which closed in 2016. Some take delight in defying forgotten rules, skipping along walkways that were previously out of bounds. One begins by cheerfully telling the cameras how she viewed her time at Holloway as a holiday camp experience – it takes days for her to admit the extent to which her attitude is just a protective front. Another observes approvingly the way that brambles and ferns have started to reclaim the space, springing from beneath the plug sockets and creeping through the windows. 'It feels kind of healing to see that Holloway prison is falling apart,' she says. Some remember with horror the noise of night-time screaming, but several are surprised by the unexpected feelings of affection the building triggers. 'It was probably the first time that I was in an environment which was controlled and felt safe,' Ali, 31, tells me. 'It's sad that for a lot of us, the first time we felt that connection of belonging and sisterhood, we found it in prison. What does that say about society?' She was sent to Holloway at 18. 'Growing up how I grew up, you're conditioned to just brush things off and get on with things, and wear masks and stay strong. When I went back to my first cell, I felt my 18-year-old self cry out.' Ali is initially the most reluctant of the six participants. The founder of a non-profit organisation, The Daddyless Daughters Project, she has rebuilt her life, radiates strength and seems visibly irritated by the entire setup. 'I was worried they could edit our voices and create a narrative that we weren't hoping for,' she says. 'I was thinking, 'We're trusting them with a level of vulnerability that we're not comfortable with. What are these people going to do with it?'' Gradually she was reassured and slowly began to reveal some of the childhood events that catapulted her into prison – family breakdown, domestic violence, a move to a women's refuge, then later into a residential children's home at the age of 12. Her problems escalated when she got caught up in county lines dealing, as a child exploited by criminal gangs to move and supply drugs. 'I was introduced to selling drugs, which I was very good at, and it was the first time that I started to feel a sense of worth,' she finally reveals on camera. She is dismayed to remember how little support she received as a child. 'The system saw me as a bad girl … as somebody who asked for all of this,' she says in the film. 'It was always, 'What's wrong with you? Why can't you just behave? Why can't you just stop doing this?' Nothing was asked about what actually happened to me,' she says. Her fury is echoed by Ogunmokun. 'It's so frustrating to see how similar the stories of people going in and out of prison are. Change is so slow,' she says. The daughter of a woman who struggled with addiction, she also spent some of her childhood in care, went to Holloway first aged 20, and was in and out repeatedly for two decades until she shook off her own drug addiction aged 40. 'I'm angry that some kids are born into certain circumstances, and what chance do they have?' Ogunmokun, 66, has dedicated the 25 years since leaving Holloway to helping former addicts break the cycle of addiction and offending. 'Every time I reoffended the judge would say: 'You haven't learned anything.'' She didn't get the support she needed to change while she was in prison, through no real fault of the prison staff. 'The officers see horrific things, but they're not trained counsellors – they're not mental health trained, they're not sex-trafficking trained, they're not domestic violence trained. They've got a regime they have to run by.' She hopes the film might persuade viewers that there needs to be a revolution in the way that female offenders are treated. It is almost 20 years since the seminal Corston report on vulnerable women in the criminal justice system called for a radically different strategy, but many of the report's key recommendations have yet to be implemented. Hudson and Compton struggled for several years to raise funding to finish their film. Now they feel happy that it is being released at a time when there is some emerging optimism about the possibility of change. 'The simple truth is that we are sending too many women to prison,' the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said earlier this year. 'We need to do things differently.' The film will be screened at an event with the prisons minister, James Timpson, in parliament later this month. Hudson's first fiction film, Lollipop, which comes out this month too, also features a woman who has recently left prison. She says both projects examine the way vulnerable women are shamed and blamed, as well as trying to showcase 'the power of women that society tries to put on the outskirts'. Ali is satisfied with how the film has turned out, and wants it to be shown to young people in prisons, to offer hope that lives can alter course. Despite her early reservations, she is impressed by the directors' creation. 'It's been emotionally turbulent,' she says, 'but they've done an amazing job.' Holloway is in UK cinemas from 20 June.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Confessions of a Parent Killer review – a grisly tale of the murderer who lived with her mum and dad's corpses
Well, what do you think a 90-minute documentary entitled Confessions of a Parent Killer is going to be about? That's right, well done! It's the story of a murder by an (adult) child of her parents. Virginia – Ginny – McCullough killed her mother, Lois, and father, John, and confessed immediately to police when they raided her home in 2023 that she had done so four years previously. The twist was that she had been living with their bodies ever since. 'She was weird at school,' says a childhood friend. 'But not 'kill your parents and hide the bodies' weird.' You can probably tell from such unimpeachably phlegmatic commentary that this case occurred in England. Great Baddow, Essex, to be exact, and the film paints a portrait of quintessential small-town, almost-rural life in these sceptred isles that has gone unchanged for generations and, you suspect, will survive for many more. Everybody knew the family, yes. Grocer Paul; Alan, who rented John and Lois various bits of kit from his electronics shop on the high street; florists Rachel and Debbie and, of course, a number of thirtysomething women – 'Ella', Bethan, Kirsty, Lisa – knew Ginny from school. Everyone thought the family was a bit odd, yes. There were rumours that John, a university lecturer who liked a drink ('very curt, brusque', never said goodbye to Alan after he paid his monthly rent), was relentlessly strict with his daughters and that was why they all left home as soon as they could, though Ginny kept having to come back when her various jobs left her short of cash. And Lois was strange, quiet, unsmiling, 'subdued', 'withdrawn'. Ginny was more outgoing. She started coming in instead of her mum or dad to pay Alan. Spent a lot of time and money in the florist, too, since she came back to sort the house out four or five years ago. Always full of stories ('a bit of a fantasist', 'always some drama going on'), perhaps a little needy and annoying; you can see in the descriptions of her as an adult the shadow of the bullied, friendless child Bethan et al remembered. 'I don't like my mum at all,' young Ginny once told Bethan, on whom she lavished presents that 'she'd obviously just nicked from around the house' when they sat next to each other in year 2. But, well, every community has these people, don't they? It takes all sorts. You just accommodate them, make allowances, they don't hurt anyone. Until. Unless. Then you look back and, you wonder, don't you? Ginny returned the equipment to Alan in 2021 – she said her parents had moved to Clacton. People do. It was their GP who first contacted the police, after becoming concerned that John and Lois had missed numerous appointments. It turned out that no one had seen them for years. Investigations resulted in the raid. Bodycam footage shows an unfazed Ginny assuring officers of her cooperation and telling them that her father's body is in the sitting room. And mum? 'That's a little bit more complicated,' says Ginny, delicately. Mum is in a sleeping bag in a wardrobe upstairs, the doors taped against the flies and maggots that had been struggling to escape. 'Cheer up!' she cajoles the shocked officers. 'At least you caught the bad guy!' But why did she do it? Here, the programme becomes as manipulative as any psychopath. Numerous suggestions are trailed. 'Exclusive' letters (written, it seems, to one of the film-makers) from McCullough herself suggest an abused child of a mentally unwell mother and alcoholic father, who finally cracked. Some of the Great Baddowan testimonies appear to back this up. But a detective insists that she is a cold-blooded killer. A forensic psychiatrist – not the one on her case – does the intensely annoying thing of dressing up common sense as professional insight (she may have kept the bodies because she felt connected to them, or it may have been because it is so hard to dispose of corpses. Either way, it must have been 'psychologically taxing'). It is not until the final minutes that all the facts are laid before us. The new ones make it clear that psychopathy and a financial motive should have been given more weight, and that the viewer has been kept in a state of much greater uncertainty and intrigue than we would or could otherwise have been. A narrative must be shaped and an amount of storytelling leeway granted – but this goes far beyond that and taints the overall endeavour to an unpalatable extent. Confessions of a Parent Killer is on Paramount+ now
