Phill Matthews

Retired Cop - ex Board member & Conduct lead for PFEW. Still passionate about fairness! Now dabbling in Training & a spot of local politics.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

So within 60 seconds of arrival at what must have been a cramped chaotic scene on board an aircraft, officers have it under control and are providing medical assistance, yet this is the headline you choose?

[Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) @policeconduct]

We are independently investigating following the death of a man who was detained by @gmpolice at Manchester Airport

All officers involved are being treated as witnesses to the investigation.

▶️Read more: https://t.co/TXN86hdO91

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

Great thread from someone who has been there!
Use of Force is never pretty, often judged frame by frame in slow motion over months/years by those that have never experienced it!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

Zack it’s views like this that make you completely unelectable. Smashing an officers spine with a sledgehammer is not “protest” and this decision should definitely not be cause for any normal person to be celebrating or voting Green ever again

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Pleased to see the jury make this decision.

We need to have eyes wide open this is exactly why the Government wants to abolish juries.

People protesting against a genocide are not the criminals here - it's the politicians who continue to provide cover.

https://t.co/sWWF12V0qq

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@jeremycorbyn you are a disgrace to all right minded people & an embarrassment to this country & should be kicked out of parliament & public life.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

A monumental victory for Palestine activists protesting against the government's complicity in genocide.

In the face of inhumanity, they stood on the right side of history.

Let this be a reminder of the importance of jury trials in protecting the civil liberties of us all.

There are other Palestine prisoners still on remand. They should be granted immediate bail, now.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ukhomeoffice How about investing more in training and making systems easier for the front end officers rather than the statisticians in Home office. Give protected face to face learning rather than NCALT on line courses which officers have to complete whilst also responding!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ukhomeoffice You can bet there will be no time allowed for officers to do this. Undoubtedly will come at a cost to the officers. They already have this “licence” is called a warrant card! Probationary period is to prove competency! Another idiotic spin campaign from Home Office ☹️

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ukhomeoffice You can bet there will be no time allowed for officers to do this. Undoubtedly will come at a cost to the officers. They already have this “licence” is called a warrant card! Probationary period is to prove competency! Another idiotic spin campaign from Home Office ☹️

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ukhomeoffice How about investing more in training and making systems easier for the front end officers rather than the statisticians in Home office. Give protected face to face learning rather than NCALT on line courses which officers have to complete whilst also responding!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

A powerful watch on the effects on those they leave behind. We loose 20-30 officers each year, a lot whilst under investigation. Accountability -yes, but do it quickly. #TimeLimits desperately needed.

[Police Federation of England and Wales @PFEW_HQ]

"Someone needs to step in and stop this witch hunt of police officers. It needs to stop before we lose anyone else.” - Michelle Websdale, wife of Sgt Ben Websdale, who died by suicide while under investigation.

Government must act. Cap misconduct investigations at 12 months.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@NadiaWhittomeMP Nadia you have to look at it as a slightly higher tax rate for 30years (if indeed you continue to earn a high wage) for the privilege of having everyone one else’s tax’s pay for your education. Alternatively your an MP change the system!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@PC_Angry And don’t forget in respect to Police pensions it was all paid for by officer contributions! For years government raped money out of the system & spaffed it away. Then bleat when life expectancy rose. Should have invested the surpluses!!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ABridgen Could you sink any lower!
Stop peddling Russian propaganda!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

I think we all know they will undoubtedly criticise everyone and find fault very publicly with individuals but not the lack of resources & political leadership etc. My bet is that we won’t see any report though for about 4-5 years !!
What do you think?

[Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) @policeconduct]

We have started an investigation into @cambsconstab handling of an incident in #peterborough in September.

Read more here: ▶️ https://t.co/BzmFQTORIo

[Starbuck @starbuck24601]

OK one last go..... for those who follow or interact with me the usual caveats around apologising for repetition.

For anyone remotely interested in protecting the vulnerable from sexual and physical harm, particularly children please read the below. All of the facts and statistics I will refer to are openly and relatively early verifiable. Yoy can even use Grok to check should you have difficult believing me.

I work in Public Protection. It comes under many names in different forces, MOSOVO, Jigsaw e.t.c but it all concerns the same thing. Managing the risk posed by Registered Sex Offenders and other Potentially Dangerous Persons to the Public. I have done this role for approximately six years as Police Officer and have a number of other skills and roles which are part time including being a level 2 Officer (riot Officer in common parlance) and a CBRN Officer alongside some additional skillsets. Prior to this I was on a mixture of Response and C.I.D. teams. In my current role I have arrested and taken to Court approximately 300 Registered Sex Offenders for further offending. I say this not to boast or for self aggrandisement but to try and establish my credentials and to demonstrate that what I am saying is backed by experience and profound knowledge of the subject matter.

We are fucked. It is the fault of successive Governments and public apathy. If you wish to know why and the reality of the situation then please read on. If you don't then do so in the knowledge you are making a choice to not understand what is happening to the people trying to protect you and your children from RSO's. That might make you feel angry and upset. It should do. We would not be in this situation without your apathy. If you wish to do something about that we need you to harness those emotions and utilise them accordingly.

The Sex Offenders Register began in 1997. It's genesis came from the realisation and acknowledgement that sex offenders need a degree of monitoring and controlling to protect the public. Thus was born VISOR. The Violent and Sexual Offender Register. This is a database maintained and updated by the Police which monitor and tracks Sex Offenders and tries to ensure they are tracked, monitored and adhering to the requirements needed of them. This was further added to by the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and formally codified in the Sex Offender Notification Requirements. These are requirements incumbent on ALL rso's to register their names, aliases, addresses, passports etc. Failure to do so is a criminal offence with a maximum sentence of breaching being 5 years imprisonment.

At this juncture it is worth pointing out that we are one of the few countries to have such a Register. America and Australia (along with a few others) also have one. Almost none of our European contemporaries do. Indeed the idea of a European Sex Offenders registry has been mooted numerous times and has failed to come to fruition. A number of European countries including Spain and France have explicitly argued that such a Register would breach the human rights enshrined by the ECHR for those subjected to it. All these countries despite not having such a Register to manage and Police have vastly greater Policing resources available to them. The U.K. has one of the lowest Officer to population ratio in all of Europe. Approximately half that of France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Russia. About a third less than Germany. Bear that in mind as and if you read on as despite us having such low numbers and resources we have correspondingly far greater duties. All whilst being routinely unarmed.

In the U.K. when the Register was first established it was recognised that it would need officers and staff to manage the RSO's on it. To visit, monitor, support and if necessary arrest them for infractions of their conditions or further offending. When the guidelines for workload were drawn up it was decreed that no individual Officer would have more than thirty Offenders to manage. Anything more was seen and inherently unworkable and likely to result in increased risk. This number and the time it was created is, again, very important to bear in mind as you read on. The limit of thirty was imposed before the creation of Sexual Offenders Prevention Orders and their later successor Sexual Harm Prevention Orders. These are Court Orders bespoke and tailored to an RSO's offending. They will limit things such as an Offenders access to children, Internet access, apps they can use, registering internet enabled devices with Police e.t.c. e.t.c. Their use has vastly increased and results in large numbers of arrests and investigations as Offenders breach them. Again the maximum sentence for breaching such an order is 5 years.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Home Office quietly changed the maximum number of Offenders an individual Officer could manage. Instead of thirty it was now fifty. This was not debated in Parliament. It was not really debated at all. It was not imposed due to increasing resources or lack of work the stark naked truth was there were too many Offenders and not enough Officers. Indeed despite the ever increasing number of RSO's there had been an approximately 20 percent in the number of Public Protection Offficers to deal with them with greater workload and complexity due to the introdution of SOPO's. You will note the date. 2010. The start of austerity. Bear in mind how bad the situation was therfore prior to austerity and brace yourself accordingly for what has come next.

Since 2014 the number of RSO's has doubled. From approximately 50,000 to 100,000. In that same timeframe Police funding has been catastrophically slashed. The Met alone has lost a billion pounds in real term funding. My own force has lost hundreds of millions. Between 6 to 8 hundred Police Stations have closed. Tens of thousands of Officers have left. That was all needed experience. As of today around a third of Officers in the U.K. have less than five years experience. That is an appalling, disastrous figure. Government spokesman about healthy churn. In reality they wished to gut Police of experience as it was cheaper to have lots of inexperienced Officers bith in terms of general pay and pensions.

Governmental Ministers will often talk about protecting the front line. This is meaningless jargon. Back office staff are crucial and critical. Worse when they are gone the tasks they performed still have to be done..... by the front line. Remember this when you are struggling to get hold of emergency response officers with their tiny numbers and horrific myriad of duties and tasks they need to complete. You were warned about this. You were warned of the consequences of the cuts and what it would mean to Policing. You did not listen. The Government gambled, correctly, on your stupidity, myopia, apathy and ignorance. They knew that when the chickens came home to roost that the Police would be Blamed for the effects of the cuts imposed upon them. They were, heartbreakingly, entirely correct to gamble as such.

So 100,000 RSO's, decreasing staff and Officer numbers, greater tasks. On my team the current average is now 64 Offenders each to manage within the community. Over double the number to manage than when the Register started. Every single member of my team failed their last psychological screening which we have to complete yearly. Every single one. If one of them goes off sick or decides they can no longer bear to carry on the number we will manage will jump to around 76 each. This isn't manageable. It isn't right. This is a national disgrace replicated across the board. If you think my colleagues seem weak or unmotivated consider the conditions they labour under on your behalf. Due to our tiny numbers we have noone to hand onto. This means if we arrest someone we deal with them entirely. Arrest, searches(section 32 and 18), interview, casefile building, going to CPS to obtain charges e.t.c. An arrest will usually result in a remand given the level of risk we deal with. That means a shift of, ordinarily, between 16 to 20 hours. On average we arrest 2-3 RSO's a week. Our stations are often, literally, falling apart with leaks and crumbling infrastructure. Waiting for solicitors which, like us, have been denuded of funding and investment so there are not nearly enough. This means my team are exhausted with massive impacts on their personal lives and missing out on children and family events e.t.c... even basic expectations of sleep cannot be met. My colleagues and I regularly deal with extrme offences and exceptionally dangerous people. Two weeks ago one of the men we deal with was sentenced, amongst the things we uncovered, for assaulting two of my colleagues whilst arresting him. To say nothing of the appalling material we regularly are subjected to when gathering evidence. Having to grade multiple videos of babies and toddlers being raped and provide a statment after 16 hours on duty in a station so stripmined off funds it cannot even supply sachets of squash for its officers to drink is not an ideal work environment. All this before we get to the Courts..

The Court system has, broadly, ceased to function. There are not enough specialist lawyers and Judges to deal with normal cases let alone specialist and sexual cases. Trial dates are, in of themselves, a national emergency. Basic task like transferring Defendants from prison to Court or getting liveliness to prison regularly simply fail to work. Accelerated by the privatisation of these services. The prisons themselves are collapsing. In the U.K. the Prison estate is operating at just under 100% capacity. That is a disgrace. Again successive Governments have failed to invest and fund. The Public have failed to hold them to account. Prison Officers operate in squalid, dangerous, terrifying conditions. They don't have the equipment and backup they need because Governments have "allowed" themselves to be led by pressure groups and activisits because its chepaer than properly equipping them. Something that many of these groups may wish to ponder. Yoy are simply carrying water for Governments looking to do things on the cheap. Prison Officers don't have tasers because the reality is it costs money. Both for the equipment and training. It is cheaper to "listen" to pressure groups to provide the political cover as a reason. The Government don't really believe or care that violent prisoners might be "traumatised" by the sight of a taser that may have been used on them outside of prison. It's just a hook to hang failure to resource on.

This complete abrogation of responsibility from those who Govern in our name has made our prison estate woefully over populated, highly dangerous and open to corruption and subversion by organised crime. The tactics and technology are readily available, for instance, to prevent drone drops of money, drugs, phones e.t.c. They are not implemented because they cost money. Or indeed because the tentacles of corruption have embedded themselves ever further up the chain. It is hard to believe our ministers are such paragons of virtue that they are beyond the purview of being corrupted by organised crime.

I am now arresting and breaching Offenders who are arriving at bail hostels with undeclared internet enabled devices, simcards and USB sticks that they have brought with them from prison. Prisoners in many establishments openly film and record themselves, they have YouTube channels and update their dating profiles from inside.... and continue to offend.

That prison crisis directly impacts the management of RSO's. Prison terms have been cut from 50% of a sentence to 40% now to 30%. Ministers have repeatedly assured us that violent and sexual offenders are exempt from th3se releases. That is a straight lie. Sexual and Violent Offenders as graded by Police and Probation are regularly being let out using these schemes. I have already arrested and remanded quite alot of them for further offending. Ministers language has now changed saying that dangerous offenders will not be released. Again this is pure mendacity. Mendacity erected on your gambled ignorance. What Ministers are saying here is that those prisoners designated as a dangerous offender by a Judge and sentenced accordingly are exempt from these release schemes. That is a very rare designation. It means that an offender who is found dangerous will serve two thirds of their sentence and be subject to an extended license period. The vast majority of sexual and violent offenders are not so designated. From rapists to domestic abusers north of 95% of such individuals will not be deemed dangerous. When Ministers say dangerous offenders will not be released they are lying. They are deliberately using technical legal terminology not in any way shape or from the meaning of dangerous as the public would understand it.

There's so much more to discuss but most won't ever read as far as this. Asylum seekers? There's a hot button issue. Are yoy aware that the Home Office won't deport someone (as rarely as they do anyway) if they have an active criminal investigation against them? Repeatedly raped a child?when you're released and waiting for the deportation process carry on committing crime. It stops the process. What a design system. I haven't even touched on Probation and their crucification and disintegration. Reactive management of RSO's? Such a cornucopia of horror and decay you are all kept deliberately ignorant of

I can only use the tools and resources given to me by the Government to protect you. The Government will only give to me what it feelsit can get away with. It is up to the Public to redress the balance. I cannot strike. The Police and the Military give up the right to strike to serve You. You will note that bith organisations have been filleted and gutted by successive Governments. The Police are the Public. The Public the Police. When you denigrate me and mock me for failings that I have had no hand in creating and you have allowed you are simply engaging in self-harm. The results of that are now manifest everywhere in our society. If you want to start to redress the issues than do so. Ask politicians about what i am saying. Demand answers. Is anyone marching and protesting about this? Are they bollox. I have said it before but it is worth repeating I find it more stress relieving and rewarding to drive aid convoys to Kyiv them I do serving the British public. I go again October. I will be met by people who are kind and decent to me, pleased to see and grateful for my meagre efforts at help.

Go on ask your local MP about all thus, ask your elected officials. They will not answer me. I have tried. They will all, uniformly, ignore me.

It's cheaper that way.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@ABridgen It’s very sad that someone who was once an MP has turned into a Russian propagandist to make money with such nonsense.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

About time these changes were made. Although I suspect through gritted teeth by Home Sec only after lots of hard won cases supported by PFEW & local Federations.

[Metropolitan Police Federation @MPFed]

ICYMI Police officers who use force in the course of their duty should only face future misconduct charges if their actions meet the threshold for criminal proceedings, the Government has announced. https://t.co/chm1p5mqnA

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@DrRebeccaTidy If spending all your reserves and borrowing money to police is “efficiency” & potential!

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@DrRebeccaTidy @ValVerdePres Exactly! You can have a different opinion but as someone who has faced & dealt with individuals suffering from this, doing nothing is not an option. Intervention saves more lives.

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@DrRebeccaTidy It says that the Home office want savings but the NAO says there’s no evidence how that can be achieved?

[Phill Matthews @Conduct_Phill]

@DrRebeccaTidy Correct