A bit about me and the role I do. I’m a Police Sergeant with West Midlands Police currently based in our Contact Management Centre, covering the whole of the Dudley Borough. I will come back as to what a Contact Management Centre is a bit further down and how it fits into the overall policing of Dudley.
I have been a police officer for more than 22 years, spending that time in a variety of roles across Birmingham and Dudley. The bulk of those jobs have been uniform based, either with our ‘Response’ or Neighbourhood Teams. Most recently I was the Neighbourhood Sergeant for Sedgley in the north of the borough moving to take up my current role at the start of March 2011.
Contact Management Centre
It’s a bit of a mouthful but it’s basically what it says on the tin! We manage all initial contact with the police in Dudley, either by phone or in person to the police stations. We also manage all the incidents across Dudley whether an emergency 999 call or a routine appointment. I work directly with a mixed team of Police Staff and Police Officers as part of a rolling 24 hour cover.
Why a Blog?
Difficult to say but six months ago I would never have even considered committing to writing a blog. Social Media was something that I was vaguely aware of, others were clearly using it, certainly the growing number of reports that we were getting relating to bullying on such sites showed how the world was changing. On the Neighbourhood at Sedgley I dipped my toe into this new world (new for me anyway), initially with a Twitter page and then expanding into a full-blown Blog, The Sedgley Beat. I have always felt that an essential aspect of policing is to engage, in a meaningful way, with the communities that we serve and that blog gave us another way to do that, particularly to reach people that we may not normally do using our usual meetings, etc. Writing that Blog I found that the world didn’t end and I hope I didn’t make too much of a fool or a nuisance of myself. Finding myself now in a new area of work, I thought can I do something that will help to explain what we do, what happens when you contact us and how we manage all our resources to help the communities across Dudley? So the Blog that follows is an attempt to do that, particularly from my perspective, sitting in the occasionally ‘Hot Seat’ of our control room.
