Having attended the same school as a previous President of ACPO, I can only imagine the reaction from teaching members of the English Department had this been submitted as a piece of work. It would have been something along the lines of a recommendation to follow a career where communication with people was not a requirement.
It's in English?
This looks like a document put together with extreme overuse of the thesaurus, without regard to the context of the words it returned.
He's saying they're going to cut the bullshit and become better policemen. Surprised you can't see it.
Maybe the author gets paid by the length of the word!!. I think my favourite bit is 'amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms...' Does this mean the Met is about to attack Thames Valley????
Mind you, sadly this is not unique to the Police...you should try reading ANY consultation document that comes out of a civil service Department. I think theres a whole college at Sunningdale that teaches this drivel.
Those of us who try to write plain English should now know where we have gone wrong! Write like them and you might be "Sir Bystander."
The final paragraph of the article is interesting. "Kent Police has revealed that it is sending 30 members of staff from its corporate development department to a Plain English training class this month."
One wonders just how many people are in this "corporate development department" and also how many forces have similar departments.
What about the cost of this training? Where is the democratic accountability for all the public money?
A police force has a "corporate development department"? WTF?
I have read a lot of this kind of tripe from my more educated betters, this isn't too bad, as it actually says something.
PS. Bystander, please stop using tinyurl, what's the point if you're encoding the link with HTML in your post? (yes - browsers display the link URL when you hover over the hyperlink - so on Bystander's blog all you get is tinyurl.com/xyzyzx, you have no way of knowing what you're clicking on!)
I don't know about a "corporate development department", but that lot appears to have been produced by the coprolite development department of ACPO.
Cadbury.
"Amorphous challenges are those whose criteria are insufficiently parameterised. Discuss."
Gosh, this is a game anyone can play!
@Hibbo
Clearly you're wrong. tinyurl is clearly great. It doesn't matter that it hides what link readers who are at work are following, or that it adds an extra weak link in the chain if it goes wrong. Or that tinyurl might disappear one day, leaving a bunch of broken links in old articles.
The point is, surely, that it can mean anything that the author, or indeed the reader wants. It is meant to convey an impression of meaning without actually doing so.
And much easier easier than actually coming up with ideas or proposals that might be mistaken for policy.
Enough with the inappropriate and stupid use of tinyurl already!
Oh woe is me! This kind of tripe is rife all through the public services. In my experience Local councils are by far the worst.
I worked for the Charity Commission once, and I saw that in a public service the best decision is no decision at all, dressed up in this type of language to make it seem like something had been done. I pointed this out often when asked to produce this kind of twaddle. I felt like that child pointing out that the Emperor was naked.
One of the reasons I joined the police was to escape this rubbish, and on the whole I hear a lot of straight talking at work up to the rank of Inspector (to a fault sometimes). Then something odd happens, and messages like the one from ACPO start to appear around Superintendents and above. I suspect this is because they have to spend most of their day speaking to civil servants and the civilian 'corporate' staff at HQ, and feel left out if they don't join in.
My force also has a 'corporate services' department. I have no clue what they do but I doubt it helps me prevent crime or succeed in having criminals charged.
The wall at the station is covered in glossy, expensive looking posters about 'performance excellence', being 'a strategic force' and 'working closely with partnership agencies', but at 4am this morning, having spent 15 hours dealing with an actual criminal I could not find a pen that would write on a CD label. Aggghhhh.
I attended a 'training day' about two years ago which used the following example, and I paraphrase,
'American Airlines in the 1970 decided that it would put massive investment into the safety of its aircraft, become the safest airline and hence attract more customers. They put in the investment and after X number of years had the best safety record of any airline in the world. However, the lack of investment in other areas meant that the uniforms of the air stewards were a bit tatty, as were the carpets and what have you at the check in desks looked thread bare, and because of this customer numbers fell. Over the next x number of years investment was taken away from the safety aspects of the business and put into promoting a glossy and slick image, and customer numbers rose, even though the safety record suffered'.
This was held up as a model of how we would be running a police force fore Gods sake! Forget all that trying to be good at police work, what we should be doing is making it seem like we were a good police force, with glossy posters and messages like the one Bystander had posted. Apart from wanting to strangle the civilian giving the training, I thought this one idea explains almost everything I had found inexplicable about decisions sent down from the Home Office and ACPO.
Ye Gods!
Apologies for the spelling and grammar in the above post, I have had three hours sleep.
I wish that kind of "training" were more publicised. I am getting the impression that tens of thousands of senior police officers could safely and profitably be sacked or returned to patrol duties, and Peel's principles used to guide all police decision-making thenceforth.
Certainly it should be a requirement that all senior officers (also ones on squads) should do a minimum number of hours on patrol duty per month. Chance of that happening?
Maybe I am missing something, but I couldn't see much wrong with the 'offending' passage, apart from a missing "and" before "a renewed emphasis" and one split infinitive ("to better equip"), although objection to the latter is considered unnecessarily pedantic nowadays.
Admittedly I had a 'classical' education, and so became very familiar with the lengthy sentences of Latin prose, with their subordinate clauses, participle constructions and parentheses. As a result, I am capable of writing very long sentences in English myself, but it all makes sense, is correctly punctuated, and (I hope) perfectly readable.
The 'dumbing down' brigade don't like it, and would prefer short, sharp sentences which can be understood even by 'Sun' readers, but why should we negate our education and abandon style and quality for the sake of popularity (or popularism)? Another habit which the 'Plain English' brigade hate is the use of Latin words and phrases. I don't make make a point of doing it myself, but in any event 'de gustibus non est disputandum'.
Perhaps G O P could explain exactly what is meant by "amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms".
OK. Maybe "amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms" is a trifle obscure. I think I might have used the word "inchoate" rather than "amorphous".
What I take the author to mean is that there are certain threats (whether in the form of criminal behaviour or threatened disorder) which may affect the area of more than one police force and which represent challenges which it is difficult to identify precisely (because they are, as yet 'shapeless' or 'undeveloped').
I dare say one might play around with the langauge in various ways, but I think I have understood the general tenor of what was being said, and I have only attempted to analyse it in response to the reply which my earlier note prompted.
One should bear in mind that this was simply a list of the ways in which (in the view of the person who was writing)the Green Paper promised welcome reforms. Part of the problem which people seem to have had with the passage in question arises from taking this sentence out of context. I assume it was followed by more detail, which would have fleshed out the list of benefits which the author had identified in this sentence.
"Simples", as my favourite meerkat would say.
To Grumpy Old Planner - "vir sapit qui pauca loquitur." Bystander locutum: judicium finitum.
I expect they talk about "harms" as opposed to "crimes" as a deliberate distinction. The only problem here is that what they are discussing is very specialised, and they have their own vocabulary for things. However, they are still wrong to write in so orotund and prolix a fashion.
Grumpy Old Planner,
I fail to see how anyone can possibly regard that passage as good style. Besides the missing 'and' you already mentioned, there is what appears to be redundancy in the first clause - does the Green Paper really only 'herald the promise' of reform, or does it 'herald reform' or 'promise reform'? If it really is the former, shouldn't the writer have spelt out exactly what this means?
A further style issue is the punctuation of the list. The semi-colon in the passage should have been a colon, and the items in the list that followed should have been broken up by semi-colons, not commas. As it stands, it is not clear as one reads whether each comma is seperating two items in the list, or seperating two clauses in the description of one item. As such, the reader does not know the grammatical nature of each part of the sentence until he has read it, which makes comprehension slower and requires needless extra effort on the part of the reader.
Also, not using 'and's actually makes the structure of the whole sentence confusing; it is unclear which of the items on the list are things with which local policing is customised to local need, and which are things held by the promise of reform.
Of course, the worst issue is the incomprehensible phrases used. Yes, some vagueness is acceptable in an introduction, but at least the reader should be able to understand what the vague phrases mean. What is 'performance management', and what on earth is 'performance management at the service of localities'? What is meant by 'strategic development' - is it the development of strategies, or development carried out strategically? Presumably the word 'equip' near the end is used to mean 'prepare', rather than referring to the actual procurement of equipment, but with so little context even that is genuinely ambiguous.
So really, I don't know how you can defend this terrible piece of writing.
I am sure (though I await confirmation from actual PCs) that "performance management" is the same as "hassling PCs at the end of the month to get their statistics right so bosses look good, by 'criming' the trivial".
Ed
You are so right. It also relates to threats of disciplinary action if we dont tow whatever NuLabour line has been spouted by this weeks Home Secretary.
Absolutely loved all of the above.
Now i know i am thick !
Great stuff guys!
May I recommend to GOP (and the author of the esoteric text quoted in this poat) The book "The complete plain words" by Sir Ernest Gower.
It's on the shelf in my study right now.
You can all sneer, but meeting the amorphous challenge of managing cross force harms, risks and oppotunities is what I do every time I go to work.
Personally, I can't wait for my culture to be redesigned.
I have on my bookshelf original editions of Gowers' "Plain Words" [1948] and "ABC of Plain Words" [1951]. The "Complete Plain Words" was, I think, a later compilation drawn from these two titles.
I have been amused by the reaction I have stirred up. Perhaps I should have signed off my original comment as "Advocatus Diaboli" ! I am in fact a much-published author, and I don't actually write in the style which I now understand is known as "ploddledegook".
"ploddledegook"
What a marvelous coinage! :-)
I'm with cabbage as regards punctuation.
However, it is also necessary to remember that ACPO is, in fact, a private limited company, with all the corporate claptrap that accompanies that status these days.
Your Honour
Slightly off topic but of a most serious nature.
May I present to you evidence that someone has just tried to Murder you ( indeed most of us ).
May I suggest that we all bring charges against these people so they never have the eopportunity again.
Criminal charges against Baxter Pharmaceuticals
http://birdflu666.wordpress.com/...about-bird-flu/
http://spktruth2power.wordpress....it-mass-murder/
@Adrian Peirson
Tinfoil-hat-tastic.
By the way, a magistrate is addressed as "Sir", "Madam", or "Your worship" (though that's not used now).
Commenting by HaloScan
