It was a routine PSR appointment booked for 3.30pm. I had it all planned - I've been doing this for years and have a well-established routine - about an hour for the interview and if it's really complicated or issues crop up there might be time to arrange another interview before its due in court. By 4.50pm I need to be on my way to an important 5.30pm meeting - it's 30 minutes by road. It's not a meeting about work, but a regular fortnightly commitment.
By 4.15pm I begin to give a sigh of relief - he's not showed up so it looks like a 'nil' report. In the old days, when we had control over PSR allocations, diaries and interviews, I'd have offered him at least one, possibly two more appointments in the four weeks we had. Now it's only three weeks and all centrally bureaucratised. Appointments are given at court from each officers fixed appointment slots, not only is little goodwill engendered, there's also little flexibility in our increasingly management arranged diaries. I've got used to living with this irritation, but management decided some time ago that as punishment 'nil' reports come back to the PO and are simply added to new allocations. I never quite grasped the logic of that, but that's the policy. While I'm on the subject of PSR allocations, another madness of this inflexible system is that you routinely get reports to do on people you don't know, as the colleague next to you gets your old and well known client. The appointment might only be a week from the court date because all your other slots have been filled, but management knows best.
At 4.30pm a phone call signals that my 3.30pm appointment has duly arrived. Now anyone with time under their belt will not be surprised by this at all - in fact we used to reflect 'how brilliant - he got the right day'. But that was then - this is now. I've heard of people getting breached for being 10 minutes late. This is the new 'law enforcement' probation service and I'm being ever so slowly inculcated by this new tough philosophy. I've got a private life, things to do, a meeting to get to.
I bring the man into the interview room. He sits down and I let my irritation show - I start giving him a lecture about the importance of keeping appointments and how I've got to be somewhere else. As I am in mid flow, I can sense the atmosphere changing in this small claustrophobic room. I can feel the tension rising and the body language changing. I eventually start to think to myself 'if I continue in this vein the situation is going to deteriorate rapidly and I'm going to be assaulted'. I have never thought that before. Why is this happening? What am I doing? I've interviewed hundreds of difficult, argumentative, threatening people in all sorts of places, but I've always been focused on them, picking up what they and their body language are saying. The real consequence of this damned cultural shift in the probation service is that I think we are losing sight of people as individuals and are just 'processing' them. To my deep regret I had succumbed that day.
As soon as the penny dropped, I instantly stopped talking, picked up the phone, cancelled the meeting, moved my chair and said 'ok lets start again'. I'm so glad I did as that man had an incredibly sad reason for being late and he had a complicated and moving story to tell. He ended up apologising to me, but I was grateful to him for teaching me a very valuable lesson.
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