I noticed some ANPR gantries going up around the city centre recently, so I rang Brum City Council (BCC) to try and find out some more info about them (planned completion dates, etc).
Three calls later, I was given umpteen different numbers for various different departments – not even the Highways department could help me. The guy I spoke to at Planning was helpful, but didn’t know himself – there was never any planning permission applied for, possibly because those kinds of camera gantries are exempt from the planning permission requirements… But still, c’mon!
I ended up ringing West Midlands Police’s Press department to try and get some information… No joy. Turns out that they treat small fry and more important journalists alike: with complete and utter disdain. Richard McComb from the Birmingham Post wrote of his similar experience during a recent attempt to extract some fairly menial information from West Midlands Police’s press department recently – read it here. In case you need convincing, here’s a good bit:
Press officers love being “proactive,†nor least because when they are pro-active, their “team leader†is tickled pink and can tick a performance monitoring box that records “proactive actions.†Armed with this fascinating information, all manner of charts and graphs can be constructed to dazzle the gullible. It doesn’t matter that the subject of the proactive action – usually a press release – is dull, just that it is proactive.
However, when press officers have to be “reactive†– that is, answer an unexpected request from a journalist – they generally do two things: first, they get highly suspicious about the reason for the request. Secondly, they stall. Some don’t bother to do anything. In the last two to three weeks, I have called the press office of a major force, left requests and nobody bothered to call me back. Rude? Inefficient? I’d name names but it would probably spark an internal investigation, which would be funded, as usual, by the taxpayer, which really is throwing good money after bad.
It is for this reason I celebrate the fact that requests to West Midlands Police under the Freedom of Information Act continue to rise. During 2005, 830 Freedom of Information Act requests were made to the force – a figure which rose to 1,052 in 2008. The force, the country’s second-biggest, now receives about four inquiries each working day.
It’s just ridiculous – the police are in charge of maintaining and administering the ANPR scheme, yet they aren’t even willing to dispense a little information to publicise the fact to the general public? Are we all fucking terrorists or something? ‘Oh no, they can’t know about the camera gantries which everybody can see if they go on the 128 down Broad Street, because (whisper) *they’re secret*’. It’s just ridiculous, and I hate it. I hate being left in the dark about this kind of thing! As a Birmingham resident I feel entitled to be kept informed about these things, particularly as I am a law-abiding road user who pays his Vehicle Excise Duty, car insurance and has a full (clean) driving licence.
Urgh, collective unwillingness to help out really pisses me off sometimes (that and the good old Right-Hand-Left-Hand syndrome which plagues Birmingham City Council – the largest City Council in Europe as council employees sometimes extol as a virtue, like it justifies the continued year-on-year rise of our council tax). Why can’t I just be given a straight answer for once?