Keep on keeping on, because really, what choice do we have? If we’re on duty and we’re called, we respond. No matter where, no matter what to, no matter when and no matter who called us. Whether you love us, hate us, support us or fight us, if you call us, we will be there. Always. This week has been hideous. I can almost guarantee that when the headlines broke out that a serving officer had been arrested, every other Cop felt a punch to the stomach. That is a headline nobody wants to read; least of all those who work alongside them, who’ve taken the same oath as them, who do the same job as t ..read more

I tweeted the other day about how I was struggling to process the last 8 years and everything that happened within them. The desperate need for closure on that chapter of my life, but the overwhelming fear of what happens next. When you’re busy fighting, mentally rather than physically in my case, you don’t have time to process. I didn’t allow myself time. It is becoming very clear to me now, that this was some what of a faux pas. The past is very much catching me up and I don’t know how to process it, for a number of reasons. Firstly, when we were still married, we didn’t properly address the ..read more

I haven’t written in a while. I haven’t known what to say or how to say it or sometimes even work out what I’m thinking enough to make it even half-literate! For the past few weeks, building up to today in fact, I have felt like one big ball of anxiety. There are some situations that you can’t really prepare for, you’re not entirely sure what to expect, and often our minds make them worse than reality.  Sometimes however, those situations are all as difficult as we expected, but what is important to remember, is that we made it through. Perspective. Today I saw my husband for the first ti ..read more

With a head full of thoughts, you’d think it would be easy to get them onto paper, but nope! Sometimes, with the best of intentions, I turn on my laptop, open a new blog post and just stare at a blank screen. The combination of not knowing where to start, not knowing how to make things sounds remotely coherent, and not being able to take them back once they’re written down makes me end up not writing anything at all. Lockdown has been for about two months now. It’s affected everybody in different ways, and understandably some more that others.  I think it’s fair to say that we all feel un ..read more

As I sit here writing this, I think about this time last year, and how wildly different everything was. This time last year I was going through 91 exhibits for a Crown Court Trial due to start the following morning, which ended up running for 10 days. I was a teenie bit stressed. You never feel more “trial ready” than just before you meet with the Prosecutor and they pick out all the holes!  Trying to predict what they’ll ask is an art yet to be perfected. This time last year I had a husband, a home and a future. Boy how that changed in 24 hours. This time last year three horrendous criminals ..read more

I’m sat writing this post ten months after my world came crashing down, ten months after I was kicked out of my own house, and ten months after that one person I was meant to have been able to trust with my life, broke that trust into one thousand tiny pieces. I don’t know whether I will ever share this, but I’m at a point where talking about what has happened is a little easier, but given that I’m one for bottling everything up, I think I just need to write it down, get it out, and hopefully feel better for it. I’ll take you back to August 2018. Two months after I got married. One month after ..read more

If I wanted to be honest and really tell you how I feel when I think of 2019 I would say it was shit.  2019 was the year I lost my Grandpa, the year my husband walked out on me, and the year I felt more alone than I possibly ever have. Losing my Grandpa was so incredibly hard.  He was my hero, the person I looked up to for everything. I would ring him every Friday night, we would talk rubbish, put the world to rights and he would tell me “you don’t want to be on response forever, you want to be on CID don’t you”.  Talk about a rhetorical question! I miss him every day, but in the same breath I ..read more

It is an understatement to say that it has been a truly, truly awful couple of weeks for Policing. 3 outrageous assaults on our colleagues, and one murder.  It’s the kind of headlines you expect to see from other Countries, not from England, not here. When we join the job, we do so to help you, to support your families in their times of need, to protect the most vulnerable and pursue the most dangerous.  We do so knowing that sometimes we may come home a little bumped and bruised.  We never joined to be killed.  It feels surreal even writing that, I don’t think any of us can really believe wha ..read more

We, as Police, constantly seem to want a new project. A new scheme. A new way to do things. One thing I will never understand is this incessant need to try and fix something that isn’t broken. If something works, if the public know what to expect, and the Police know how to do our job, leave it alone. It works for a reason. We are really good at finding something that works, and rocking the boat so hard it actually breaks. New policies or working practices which change so frequently you can’t get your head around them before the next one is rolled out. There’s many mixed reviews around the Dir ..read more

At what point do we start properly acting on what is being brandished in the media as a knife crime epidemic? An epidemic is “a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time” Ebola was an epidemic. The Ebola outbreak received mutual aid from across the world, the Army were sent with little to no notice to Sierra Leonne for an unknown amount of time in a hope to help. It took the Government virtually no time at all to hold a meeting to agree that immediate action needed to be taken. They saw people die, children die, thousands suffering, for months on end. K ..read more