Lost property

There was moaning in Tooting last Friday about the fact that if you lost something between, say, Tooting and the Shard, you had to contact every police stations on or near the route to ask about it. Lost property is a matter for police stations and information is not shared. The general tone of the conversation was that this was pretty awful in this day and age and one might have thought that some sort of shared spreadsheet over the splendid, secure & expensive police network might be an easy enough solution which they ought to have thought of.

But as an ex-bureaucrat, not that far removed from the people dozing away in the lower reaches of police stations - and one has to remember that most people like dozing and do not want to spend their day promoting themselves or anything else - I got to thinking.

As things stand, this is an unimportant activity. Not worth a senior officer's time, let alone a management consultant. When stuff is handed in they probably write out a label with some basic information on it - like date and place of finding - attach the label to the item and chuck the whole lot into the lost property cupboard. Then when someone comes in asking for something one just takes a quick gander at the cupboard and the job is done. From time to time, or when the cupboard gets a bit full, the older stuff is disposed of. I remember that when young I once found a five pound note in the road and handed it into the police station. After six months I was invited to come and collect it, it not having been claimed in the meanwhile; a serious sum to one such as myself at that time. But I think this part of the lost property operation has been discontinued: too much bother to be writing down names and addresses of finders. Doubles the time it takes to write out the label. There is also the question of how much stuff is claimed? 5%, 50% or what? Should one have key performance indicators for police stations rewarding high percentages of returns? If the figure is 5%, is there much point in bothering to do anything at all about the lost property operation?

So supposing there is much point, what does one need to do to smarten the operation up? Maybe each police station keeps a spreadsheet containing a row for each item of lost property, a spreadsheet which is kept on the network with all other police stations having read access. For the system to work, all the spreadsheets had better be organised in the same way.

We then write a bit of Visual Basic to interrogate these spreadsheets. One search term might be the police stations to be interrogated. This might be done by organisation, area, or distance from some specified point. Another might be date of loss, which should be a good approximation to date of handing in. Another might be sort of item. The catch here being that someone has to devise a workable classification. I guess a preliminary study of lost property in hand across the Metropolitan Police area is indicated to inform such devising. The sort of thing an apprentice statistician ought to be able to help with - and such a person might even be able to economise a bit by doing a bit of sampling. Might also be helpful to get a handle on volumes along the way.

Then find some luckless officer - presumably some civilian - to own the application on behalf of the force as a whole. To show people how to use it, to monitor activity. All that good service provider stuff. Spend a lot of time and effort persuading every police station to use it, probably by simply delegating the task of logging stuff into the spreadsheet to some other luckless civilians. Job will probably just pile up when they are sick or on holiday. Not worth making alternative arrangements. And, unfortunately, delegation does not work when it comes to dealing with enquiries about lost property, the front office people need to learn how to used the shiny new application. They need to have a suitable computer terminal to hand. All so much more complicated than taking a gander in the cupboard.

So the bottom line is that there needs to be some central will to do this thing, enough will to hire some consultant to build the thing and drive it through. Presumably central will which is presently lacking with plenty of other things to worry about which are far higher up the agenda. Perhaps something that one might take up with one shiny new Police Commissioner, a man or women who ought to be well placed - or at least better placed that most of us customers - to make a fair assessment of need?