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Sir
Without any fanfare, Sussex Police signed a Release to Service agreement with Airwave O2 on 23rd July for the acceptance of Tetra. This means that the police are now paying O2 for the Tetra network in Sussex. They cannot use it operationally, due to lack of training and equipment.
At a public inquiry in Littlehampton, which finished its hearings on Friday, O2 were insistent that the subject of the inquiry, a proposed mast at Patching, mightily opposed by the local people, was ‘the last piece in the jigsaw’.
A brief examination of the truth of this reveals that masts at Rogate, Patching, Trundle, Wadhurst, Warninglid, Brighton, East Marden and others are subject to dispute or not constructed. The mast at Sidlesham, despite the CDC Planning Department’s best efforts to get the mast up by inviting O2 to ‘twin-track’, which will shortly be illegal, will not go to public inquiry until September.
So the police have allowed themselves to pay for a system which is not yet complete. With our money. If you ordered a new car and on delivery found it was incomplete; you were told by the Government that the car you want is not good value for money; that it will not do what it says on the tin; has a mechanic still working on it; had not been tested; did not do what had been promised because those options would only be available in the next model, and could cause harm to some who would drive it and others in the area, would it make sense to go ahead and buy it? Not in the real world.
But when dealing with O2 and the gullible and apparently uncaring police, we have strayed into Wonderland with Alice. The police have consistently denied that any of the problems highlighted in your paper, relating to the genuine health problems reported to and by you from the people of Sussex, where Tetra has been switched on and off, are worth considering. Now they have decided to dedicate our money to making matters worse for those who suffer and those who will suffer and do not even have the courage to announce it.
But why should they? From everything one reads in your letters pages; from such as Frank Field in the National Press; from talking to local people about how the police will not investigate crimes which exercise the honest people of Sussex; from hearing that crimes do not merit the attention of the police because the ‘policy’ does not permit lower than Category A crimes to be attended by a policeman, we see that the police do not need a new communications tool until they learn how to communicate with the people. After all, as Councillors in Chichester, Petersfield and Tunbridge Wells have said at public meetings I have attended, no-one ever sees a policemen, so with whom are they going to communicate? Communications do not improve policing. Police amongst the people, preferably on foot and police in traffic cars will improve policing. They need to understand that criminal-chasing is what the people want and not target-chasing. To commit our money to something as expensive and inadequate as Tetra and not to tell us that they have done so, demonstrates that the good community relations the police rely on flow only one way.
There will be an extensive period of testing, equipment acquisition and self-justification by the police before the full impact of Tetra on our communities, wildlife and health will become fully apparent. If the impact is harmful, what possible steps can the police take to make up for their lack of consideration for all those who will have paid to suffer in health and pocket for the choices made in July? If just one person suffers as a result of this decision, that is a crime. It will be another crime for the police to ignore and allocate a number.
Yours sincerely,
John O’Brien
Arundel
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