MinimumCover Nominated for Twitter Awards

The month of November brings with it a few notable events. Movember is gaining momentum year on year and is now widely. Unfortunately my attempts to get a few chief officer ranks on the MC team this year have not been as successful as hoped but I will be starting the campaign earlier next year so be warned. Good luck to all who are taking part!

A slightly less high-profile event is the annual competition forTwitter users known as the GoldenTwits. I have been nominated again this year following on from moderate success in 2011. This blog and the associated Twitter account @minimumcover are competing in the ‘Writing’ category. In an attempt to promote my entry a little I have included a few links below which take you to the most popular stories on my blog. Please take the time to have a read and share them with your friends if you feel they are deserving of it. Please also take 30 seconds to click on the VOTE button to the left hand side of the front page and support my nomination – shortlists are announced on 3rd December so there are about three weeks left to register your vote!

‘…and then there was silence‘

‘Attacked Because Her Daddy is a Cop‘

‘Graphic Post: The innocence of youth… ‘

‘The Reality of a Rape Allegation’

‘Shattering Lives…‘

…and finally

I hope to publish the second Guest Blog later this month. If you like what you have read and think your writing would be of interest to my readers if it were published here, send me an email and I promise to get in touch very soon.

400,000 and counting…

Just a quick post to say thanks for the continued support of all those that have visited this blog over the last year and a bit. As I write I expect the hit counter to click over the 400,000 mark which is almost double my original 18 month target. The various reactions that my posts have received have shown me a lot about how people perceive the Police and their role in modern society. The vast majority have been supportive, or at least understanding. Some have been less so and there are a few out there that simply want to pick a fight. To that end, it would appear that there is a good cross-section of the general public having a browse through my posts as well as the natural target audience of Police officers and other emergency services staff.

I have recently managed to attract my 3000th follower on Twitter and have had my material shared widely over social networks and in print. I have had the opportunity to foster some good relationships with a number of senior officers and the various Federations throughout the country.

My hope is that I can push for the half million mark by the time the blog reaches its second anniversary. In the hope of achieving this goal I ask for your feedback and suggestions for how I can increase my readership and any new features or developments that you, as readers, feel would make the blog more appealing.

Thanks again – without readers a blog is nothing than more than a black hole cyberspace. I look forward to the future and hope you will all continue to keep me company on the journey.

MC

Why doesn’t Inspector Gadget like me?

Thought I would just throw this out there in case anyone has heard anything on the grape-vine that might give me a clue…

I have been reading The Inspector Gadget Blog for about five years now and would be lying if I said that he wasn’t one of the main reasons why I started to write. His posts have been an inspiration to many and I have lost count of the number of times his posts have been pinned up on the noticeboard in the canteen by the troops, only to be torn down again a few hours later by the Chief Insp! I have spent the last year or so writing about Policing and other relevant issues and, throughout that time, have continued to read Gadget’s blog religiously along with a number of blogs written by others. Since the earliest days of MinimumCover, however, I seem to have attracted some degree of hostility from the boss. Comments made in response to Gadget’s posts have been randomly blocked, links have been ‘Rick Rolled’ and others have attracted some fairly blunt replies. I wrote to him a few times to ask for my blog to be added to his ‘Gadget Reads’ section but never got a response, let alone a link.

Now, I have never had anything but praise for the Boss. His blog has snowballed in popularity recently. It is now well past 11,000,000 hits and he has more than three times the twitter following as @minimumcover does. He has the attention of the Police Federations, the Government, the media and many other high-profile sets of ears. For God’s sake he even has his own entry on Wikipedia!

I cannot imagine any possible reason why my modest offerings should upset, offend or threaten in a way that could attract such disdain. Any ideas…..anyone?

I am writing this, making my feelings public, in the hope that any issues can be put aside. All I want is for my blog can be accepted by those that inspired it as well as those that are regular readers. Let’s face it, with recent events taking chunks out of the flanks of the Police Service left, right and centre; with Government cuts and political grudges being used to destroy any chance of saving what’s left of the job I joined; we should all be pulling together to ensure we have some chance of getting through the next few years.

So, if you are reading this boss, for whatever I have done or written that annoyed or upset you I apologise. I don’t expect any public acknowledgement or to get handed an olive branch with a bow on it, you might not even care! But, if you do, maybe you could see your way to pushing a few barriers aside, resist the urge to be mean to the little blogs in the playground and let us write as colleagues.

Cheers,

MC

Where has Jody McIntyre gone…

Self proclaimed political activist, author and disgraced ‘journalist’, Jody McIntyre has fallen remarkably silent in recent months. There was a time when his words were being reported everywhere – that time appears to be over.

A little over a year ago McIntyre alleged that the actions of the officers who removed him from his wheelchair during the student protests on 9th December 2010 were both unlawful and discriminatory on the basis that he was doing nothing wrong and was disabled. In his own blog he wrote:

When we reached the front, the batons began to fly. One came landing straight onto my left shoulder, sending a sharp, shooting pain down my arm. Others were taking blows to the head. Children, women, men, all being brutalised by the police. Then the horses came, horses that could easily kill people, but we would not budge. We held our ground.

Suddenly, four policemen grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out of my wheelchair. My friends and younger brother struggled to pull me back, but were beaten away with batons. The police carried me away.

He embarked upon a campaign against the officers he believed were involved, naming them by shoulder number and posting pictures on the internet. He took part in a string of interviews on TV and appeared sure that his case would be made out…attempting to stir up the media and his swell his numbers of supporters as he went.

High Tech Investigations and the Victims of Internet Crime

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networks have emerged over the last fifteen years to have become some of the biggest forums for internet based crime. On a daily basis I read more new stories about people, including children, becoming victims of crime, being intimidated and victimised by online bullies or, most worryingly of all using these sites to publish their very own explicit creations.

The latest example of this was reported in the National Press today after a 14 year-old boy from Cheltenham received a final warning for making and distributing an indecent video of himself and a 14 year-old girl engaging in a ‘consensual’ sexual act via the Facebook website. Although the video was quickly removed from the site following the involvement of Police it is thought to have been watched or downloaded by thousands of others – many of them potentially being friends of the 14 year-old couple.

I have dealt with many cases involving social networking sites and they keep coming at an ever-increasing rate. At one point last month my crime account contained 40% computer-based crime and 60% real-world crime. With advances in modern technology increasing at an exponential rate the job of detecting these crimes and securing the evidence is becoming harder and harder every month.