Forces asked to check all officers against police database in wake of David Carrick case

30 comments
  1. Should this not happen at least annually anyway?

    Are there not enhanced DBS checks for police that should pick this sort of thing up?

  2. Oh. Yes, well, that seems like a good idea. I’d start with the ones who have jolly work nicknames like “The Rapemeister” and “Roofie Ed”.

  3. Police officers are checked pretty thoroughly when they are hired, and from what I understand, they get rechecked several times throughout their career, I believe either every 5 or 10 years.

    The issue is, and has been for a long time now, that there isn’t funding to put into the teams that do these checks. New recruits have been known to take up to a year, or sometimes longer to get their checks and vetting done. To re-do every police officers vetting would either take years to do, require the complete halting of recruitment for ages, or require a massive investment in staffing the vetting teams to expand capacity (and all of those extra vetting staff would also need to be vetted themselves).

    Don’t get me wrong, I massively support regular vetting of police staff, as with any public sector employee. After all, we need suitable people in those roles. However, I cannot see it being an even remotely realistic prospect without a lot of money being poured into vetting teams. Money which police forces currently, do not have.

  4. I’d expect everyone who works for the police, officers and support staff, to be DBS checked before employment and at intervals. These are routine checks that apply to lots of workplaces.

  5. So quite extensive vetting is done when you join, it’s very in-depth and includes your family associates, social media footprint as well as the regular stuff you’d expect. Mine took about 4 months from start to finish.
    Police officers are vetted in intervals periodically however to put it quite frankly, it’s comes down to having the resources to adequately vet staff. 40000 people or close to work for the Met alone, that is a massive undertaking to do every year. So while yes it should be done every year, I don’t think any police officer who joined for the right reasons would disagree, like anything, resources are prioritised and if your force can’t respond to emergency calls, the money is going to be moved.
    It’s all very well the government saying to do this, well help with the funding then!
    It’s a bit like when they wanted the Met to work on lowering the homicide rate, as if major crime want a high murder rate and don’t work all the hours under the sun to catch some awful people, without giving more money and resources to do it.
    We DONT need more powers!! We need more people!! The whole thing is a shambles!

  6. Oh, so not when anything else happens? Not regularly? Only because this case has come to light (which they knew about already)?

  7. Fuxk me I had to do a DBS when I got a delivery driver job, police not under anything like the level of scrutiny they should be.

  8. “We’re actually supposed to call it “the service” now. Official vocab guidelines state that “force” is too aggressive.” – Sergeant Nicholas Angel. Sandford Police

  9. Just officers? Or the whole force, staff, admins, everyone with access to sensitive data or in positions of power? It should be top to bottom, and automated.

  10. Put their DNA through the database while you’re at it and find out how many unsolved crimes are suddenly solved…

  11. Don’t tell me this is not happening by default, since forever, at peast once a year. Fuck, you get more scrutiny working for an amazon warehouse…

  12. So… does asked, in this case, mean ordered to? Because I can ask someone to give me a thousand bucks, doesn’t mean they will.

  13. I could still bet some real money that even after this a nonce won’t be looked into enough and will commit a serious crime within let’s say… the next year

  14. I know government IT is a bit crap and this sort of stuff is always more difficult in practice when you’ve got a bunch of rickety old systems held together by pritt stick, hope, and no budget for replacements, but this should be ongoing and automatic. When someone in the police officer database shows up in the crime/arrest database then that should be in reports going to the right people for investigation or whatever as appropriate.

  15. >Forces asked to check all officers against police database

    Erm, were they not background checked before starting work?

  16. This sounds like the first step of makig a police force. The fact its not step 1 already, let alone also not step 5, 9, 13 etc is insane.

  17. You’d think they would anyway???

    My favorite comment this week was “people need to know that not all police are like David Carrick”

    That’s reassuring.

  18. Enhanced and/or more regular checking is great, but you may never know if someone is just biding their time or if that ‘switch’ hasn’t gone off inside someone’s head yet.

  19. If they weed all of the sadists out, they’re going to end up with a police force that will baulk at cracking striker’s heads.

  20. The way I think the world works is so fukn skewed, i had my background checked just to cut grass for a job. How the fuck are people not checked before becoming a police officer.

Leave a Reply