UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Avon and Somerset Police this week confirmed a former officer was dismissed after she was found weighing her laptop keyboard down with photo frames to simulate activity. The former officer, referred to only as Sergeant X, was dismissed following what police said was an accelerated hearing, which ultimately ruled she had …

[Derezed]

King Size Homer called, he’d like to sell the seargent a pecking bird tool.

[Sloth77]

Damn, I was just about to go digging for an animated GIF :-)

[IamAProton]

same here, there is a still one:

https://cdn.kibrispdr.org/data/906/simpsons-keyboard-bird-3.jpg

[Anonymous Coward]

Drinky Bird!

[Tron]

Pets!

How big would pets have to be, corralled on the keyboard, to keep it clicking? Guinea pigs? I expect mice would be too light. Can El Reg do some experiments here?

Surely 'gross' misconduct requires coke and hookers. Seems a bit harsh for slacking off.

[Kuang]

Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

It is extremely disappointing an officer has behaved in a way which could not only discredit the police force, but also undermine the public confidence in respect of our duties and responsibilities.

I might be a voice in the wilderness here, but I'm a bit more bothered by a police force that uses key presses as a metric for productivity. I'd rather get a stolen bike back than have an inspirational essay explaining why they don't know where it is that would impress a food blogger.

If that particular officer was weighing down the keys to game the system so she could get on with stuff that mattered, I'd probably recommend her for a promotion instead.

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Exactly. Please don't pad your reports out with bullshit, I'm sure the nice constable has other things to do beyond navigating your ten pages of flowery prose. What ever happened to just the fax ma'am?

Alternatively, in industrial settings you can measure productivity via things like how many times a press was lowered because they actually directly correlate to _output_ downstream. This is such a simple observation, surely a child can tell the difference?

Of course, even with these grounded measurements sometimes you discover that apparently part of the factory is creating a tonne of aluminium per week out of thin air.

[An_Old_Dog]

Productivity Measurements in Modern Times

Please don't pad your reports out with bullshit,

"Please don't you pad out your reports with bullshit. That is what AI is for."

FTFY.

[a_builder]

Re: Productivity Measurements in Modern Times

I thought Birmingham had lead the way in using AI to hallucinate facts….maybe they are hallucinating evidence now…..CPs can then hallucinate more evidence…..they don’t have to worry as is perfectly clear from the Post Office scandal judges don’t really look at the evidence that carefully…..

[Glen 1]

Re: Productivity Measurements in Modern Times

An entire city "catching strays"?

Yeah nah, we all saw the videos coming out of Amsterdam.

The reasoning seemed plausible.

There was enough evidence without the AI slop.

The dude got sacked for asking AI an "obvious" question and not actually checking the specifics. When pushed, he then was able to come up with different *real* evidence.

Yes, he should have been sacked. The decision about the game was still the correct one.

[Guy de Loimbard]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Agree with your point.

I am not a fan of these things that suggest productivity.

I once had a boss who measured "work" by whether your Skype was green or yellow, which I note, has followed us to Teams! Cheers MS!

I mean, FFS, I was a consultant, I spent a lot of time with clients discussing their needs, not my boss's insecurities over a remote and geographically displaced team, that unsurprisingly, supported our clients, who were also geographically dispersed.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"I once had a boss who measured "work" by whether your Skype was green or yellow, which I note, has followed us to Teams! Cheers MS!"

Is it just me or has the yellow "away" timeout on Teams got far shorter in recent months?

Previously I found it would remain green so long as I was doing something on the computer. Nowadays it seems to change to "away" after 5-10 minutes even if you are actively using the machine, and only changes back to "online" if you click on the Teams window or the taskbar icon.

Glad my manager doesn't fixate on this, given my hands on repair work can mean I can find myself beating robots back into shape for a good half hour or so at times without looking at my screen.

I recall a former employer about ten years ago with a mangler that used to do similar with read receipts on all his emails in order to gauge performance. Given I was in a team of twenty with just one shared email address it didn't really work for some of us.

[IamAProton]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

you can search for 'mousejiggler', work also to prevent remote desktop sessions to asking you for password

[PB90210]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Day 1 after Skype was installed I set the status message to something like "I spend a lot of time away from my desk and this may not reflect my true status"

Remained that way, through the 'upgrade' to Teams, until I retired...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

I had a boss like that. He acted like I wasn't allowed breaks, even for lunch. I'd be on back to back calls and as soon as I had a break he'd message me, then ring me, then get a stroppy "I've been try to call you all morning. Where are you?" message. All I wanted was a visit to the loo! I found out from colleagues that he didn't do it to most of them, just a few of us.

In the end I found I could set my default status and inactivity timeout to the maximum that Skype or Teams would allow, do it looked like I was online/busy.

Didn't stop him though, and he started ringing at 5 o'clock when I was winding up for the day, and he'd then keep me on a call 'til half past six! Once we god Teams it introduced a great feature where you could set you working hours, and set you offline outside those. Worked a treat!

[Evil Auditor]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"If you pay me for being present and awake, I will appear present and awake." Seriously, there are no other performance metrics, like, I don't know, maybe work done?!

Head of the PSD said, "It is extremely disappointing an officer has behaved in a way which could not only discredit the police force, but also undermine the public confidence in respect of our duties and responsibilities."

Maybe it is just me but their reasoning for dismissal I find considerably more extremely disappointing and undermining the police force's credibility than what Sergeant X did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"Maybe it is just me but their reasoning for dismissal I find considerably more extremely disappointing and undermining the police force's credibility than what Sergeant X did."

Quite. If the only way they can measure the amount of work allegedly carried out by their staff is by measuring keystrokes, rather than actual output (however defined), then clearly the standard of line management is utterly crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"then clearly the standard of line management is utterly crap!"

Well the police are part of the public sector, so that's a given.

[Roland6]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

I presume the police officer had been informed of the relevant change to their Ts&Cs of employment and there is a signed document saying they had read the relevant change. Simply updating the office policy and procedures and sending out an email saying they have been updated is insufficient. Also they had been through the warnings process.

I get the distinct impression, the reason to go through an “ accelerated hearing” is because they really wanted to get rid of her asap. Unfortunately, given this was an internal hearing, the police force have left themselves open to an employment tribunal- I hope the PFEW does its job and helps their female officer with her appeal…

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

When I read "accelerated hearing", I presumed that there was a whole lot more going on that hasn't been reported, than just holding down a key to stop the screensaver coming on. I can easily imagine activities that would constitute gross misconduct and lead to immediate dismissal and perhaps further legal action.

Maybe that's why their anonymity is being preserved, because there is a legal case happening because of what they were actually doing when "[monitoring] calls on a separate screen".

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"I'd rather get a stolen bike back"

Good one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

> I'd rather get a stolen bike back

Unless that bike is caught going 31mph in a 30mph zone, there's no chance you'll ever hear of it again!

[AndrueC]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Unless that bike is caught going 31mph in a 30mph zone,

Speed limits don't apply to bicycles in the UK because they aren't motorised vehicles. However there are other laws which could apply depending on the circumstances.

Exactly how fast you have to be riding in a 30mph zone to be guilty of 'wanton and furious cycling' is unclear ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

My grandfather once lost his sergeant's stripes for being "drunk in charge of a bicycle"...

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Whilst it's true that speed limits don't apply to cyclists here, I have been told several times over many years that if the cyclist is found to have a car licence, points can be added to that under certain circumstances.

Sounds like cobblers to me, but if so it's persistent cobblers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Theft and burglarly are no longer priorities. Plod are more interested in heavy-handed responses to grumpy middle-aged people posting hurty words on Twitter, which they can then record as a 'non-crime hate incident'. Nice and easy, makes their clear-up rates look good, and all without having to make much effort or deal with any tricky situations.

[Richard 12]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

I see this claim fairly often from "Anonymous", but never any evidence of it being an actual policy - whether official or unofficial. Crime data is divided up by type, so it wouldn't help their "metrics" if they did.

In my experience, the police have turned up pretty quickly in full blues-and-twos to all my reports of ongoing suspected burglary and break-ins - both in Greater London and out in the countryside, much further from the nearest station.

Although they didn't always phone me back to tell me what they found. A shame, as it would have been good to know whether that telehandler 'dismantling' a building at midnight was a break-in or a planning breach. It did stop pretty quick when the blue lights arrived.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

I can confidently say, since the wife works as a civilian for the said force, and is involved in contacting victims and witnesses, that the above statement is total bollocks.

Most of the work is taken up with the most common crimes, which are domestic violence, neighbour disputes, and violent crime, "non-crime hate incidents" aren't even logged for contact any more.

In fact, much of her time is taken up having to deal with people who seem to think that once that have reported a crime, they won't have to go to court to give evidence, and who waste everyone's time trying to find various excuses for not going, which appears to be one of the main causes of court cases falling through or being rescheduled.

Incidentally, "Sergeant X" isn't the first person to be sacked for gross misconduct from A&S for weighing down a key on their keyboard, so she can't have been a very good copper to not have caught on that it's a bad idea.

AC for obvious reasons.

[Steve Button]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"I might be a voice in the wilderness here"

Nope, I think you are spot on. Measure the work, not the worker.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

"I might be a voice in the wilderness here, but I'm a bit more bothered by a police force that uses key presses as a metric for productivity"

I agree, but nothing in the article says that key presses were being used as a proxy for productivity. And it might not have been the high rate of key presses that first caused concern. Perhaps other issues drew the attention of management and only then were key logs consulted.

I say this because this was exactly what happened somewhere I worked once. A staff member's performance and behaviour were less than acceptable, and during the subsequent investigation, IT logs were accessed which suggested they were committing time sheet fraud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

Exactly this; in this case, it's almost certain that the sergeant in question was also shit at her job, but it's very hard to sack someone for that, and the process of capabilities assessment is long and costly, and potentially opens an organisation to accusations of unfair treatment, and tribunals. If they then do something that is categorically against their contract of employment, then it saves a fair amount of time and effort if they can be shown the door for that. In this case, I believe it was consistent fiddling of activity by weighing down a key, and, more importantly, the fact that this circumvents the security lock-out on police laptops.

(same AC as above, so still AC for the same obvious reasons)

[cookieMonster]

Performance measurement

A loooong time ago in an IT career far far away some fucking H fucking R drone decided that a good measure of our productivity was how many source code check-ins we made to SourceSafe (yes, it’s really that long ago). So in typical out of the box thinking I wrote, tested and documented the code, then checked it in bit by bit, instead of a single check-in I did it in 5 or 6 stages. My performance reviews were great.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Performance measurement

Sometimes you just have to play them at their own game.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Performance measurement

At one outfit, jobsworth manager was building leaderboard of lines of code committed and then had a weekly friendly chat with worst performers.

So the developers would engage in code formatting exercises most of the time. Of course that led to spending hours on debating which formatting standard should be adopted, because code reviews became unmanageable. They settled on auto formatter and next thing they did was adding essays as comments explaining how given code works.

The manager was eventually sacked.

[Petalium]

Re: Performance measurement

Anything measured by KPI will optimise for the KPI. Used to consult for a large telecom company, the boss suddenly got a KPI on the average hourly cost for consultants, obvious solution was to keep the ones he had, and buy a couple of dozen consultants from Tata to keep the average low. The Tata ones never got any work, but the KPI was hit.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Typical HR

Never mind the person is having serious personal issues, tap those keys! The managers need to take a good look at themselves here, and decide what’s important. Getting a highly and expensively trained officer back on the level or handing them to HR for what will only be a negative impact, because that’s the way it always goes.

[Henry 8]

Re: Typical HR

Number of key presses is an awful measure of productivity, but a police officer who is willing to lie and deceive at work has no business being a police officer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Typical HR

It’s the Avon & Somerset force, who have had in recent years a number of cases of sexism, misogyny and (male officers having) inappropriate sexual relationships and the person removed was a female officer. I suspect there were good reasons why she felt she had to deceive …

[doublelayer]

Re: Typical HR

They can both be wrong, you know. Measuring productivity through keystroke counting is both stupidly ineffective and invasive. Also, if someone has issues serious enough that they should not be expected to do as much work, that should be an official thing, whether they should take leave, be approved to work fewer hours, be assigned fewer or different tasks, etc. Faking working when they're not is not an acceptable alternative to any of those, no matter how they do it. In fact, if the mechanism they were fooling had been less stupid, the result could have been more dangerous, because in that case phantom keyboard activity which was ignored would not have been enough and they might have needed something else to fake productivity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Typical HR

FYI, it's almost certainly not the number of key-presses they were counting (and the force in question, along with probably every other one uses key-logging software to do this), but the pattern of key-presses. Holding down one key for a long period of time would stand out like a sore thumb compared with normal use, especially when done repeatedly over a period of many months

[Anonymous Coward]

Promotion Confirmed

"Give us an example of a time you made an unpopular decision that you would do again"

Temp Promotion becomes Substantive, everyone is happy except the person who the answer was about.

[elsergiovolador]

Measure

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Goodhart’s Law

That tells me coppers have nothing better to do other than measuring their keyboard clicks. I guess crimes have been solved, so it's a good time to engage in micro management.

[Doctor Syntax]

Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

Productivity is a measurement of output per head. In order to measure it you need a good metric of output. Devising that requires thought. Capturing the metric also requires thought.

Keystrokes are not a good metric of output. They're not a metric of output at all. They're a metric of input. Someone using them as a metric of output in place of doing the work of finding something that really does the job (in this case, something related to monitoring of calls as far as can be told from TFA) is the one who is actually "making it appear they were working when they were not." Perhaps they should be fired.

What's more it would appear from TFA that this pseudo-activity was a device for keeping the computer from going into sleep mode, thus blocking an activity which appears not to have required key inputs. She appears to have been given a device which was not intrinsically fit for purpose and been fired for fixing that.

[sammystag]

Re: Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

Okay but is the aim even to measure productivity? Now this seems like a shitty measurement of input for a copper anyway for all the reasons other posters have highlighted. However, suppose that this wasn't a highly dubious metric, then if I want to know if someone is at least attempting to do the job she's paid for then measuring the extent of her input might make some kind of sense.

Assuming she's actually doing some work, whether she's productive is another matter and sacking her for being bad at her job will be far from straightforward - think retraining, performance improvement plans, etc. Not being productive may suggest inability but not necessarily dishonesty. Not actually even attempting do any work though and attempting to falsify that is something you might want to detect and sack her for, particularly a copper who is meant to at least pretend to be honest.

[Roland6]

Re: Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

It was an internal hearing, from what has been reported, it seems the abnormal metrics had been observed for a few years, but no mention is made of any attempts to find out why her metrics might be so different, also no mention is made of verbal, written warnings et al. Hence deciding this counts as gross misconduct raises many questions…

[anonymous boring coward]

ok, weird.

But on the other hand, why are they recording number of keystrokes in the first place?

Dystopian stupidity.

[heyrick]

disappointing an officer has behaved in a way which could not only discredit the police force

Regarding the second point, allow me to introduce The Met to anybody who has never heard of those arseholes that take "bent copper" as a job requirement.

For the first point, can they please explain by what rational means they think that typing speed is an indicator of productivity? Rozzers are supposed to solve crimes, that implies dealing with people, looking at evidence, reading forensic reports, and all the other stuff you see on TV except car chases that involve people walking around carrying huge glass windows - never seen that once in my life. Where does typing speed come into this? In fact, given that what a Rozzer writes may end up being used as evidence, it is likely that they would need to think of the most concise and unambiguous way to write something, being careful about facts and clarity. So when does typing speed come into this?

[Evil Auditor]

Re: disappointing an officer has behaved in a way which could not only discredit the police force

MbO, because it makes sense, you know. Trying to find objectives for Sergeant X...

- Deliver high quality reports - it's too hard to measure.

- Adequately fulfill tasks x, y, z - nah, I'd need to actually understand what Sergeant X is doing.

- Improve process P and Q - what does improve even mean?

- Rate of key stroke - a machine can measure this. It's brilliant! This is it!!

[Carl W]

These things happen when over-zealous IT departments implement screensavers that kick in after 1 or 2 minutes and don't offer the option to change it. I've just been kicked off a Slack huddle twice because the screen saver kicked in. It's hardly a surprise that people don't press any keys when they're speaking or listening.

[BillGatesOfHell]

get a mouse jiggler

[FirstTangoInParis]

IT don’t have to be overzealous, this is default situation if you add a policy to engage what would have been a screensaver for staff who like walking away from their PC without Windows-L.

I’m getting complaints from users about this. Fixing this to a longer timeout requires an enormous amount of hoopla in GPO settings, or you let users set their own but you have to threaten them with unspeakable happenings if they don’t Win-L.

[Steve Hersey]

Don't bother threatening. Just randomly walk through the office at lunchtime, and change the user password for any machine left unlocked. Deny having done it when they come to complain that they can't access their machine. The resulting paranoia will be FAR more effective than any amount of nagging, warning, or threatening with consequences.

[0x80004005]

What happens if you leave your computer unlocked

To: All Staff

With Immediate Effect, I declare that I now support Tottenham Hotspur, and your recollection of my lifelong allegiance to Arsenal was merely a hallucination.

Also I will remember to lock my workstation before I go to lunch.

Yours,

A.N.ID10T

[StewartWhite]

Hello, hello, hello! What's going on here then?

As ever if you're considered a low-life prole at the bottom of the pile then "it's unacceptable for an officer to act in this deliberate and deceitful way" whereas the ex Chief Constable of the West Midlands Copshop gets to retire early on a full pension after having previously "resigned" for a day just so he could prise yet more money into his overflowing pension pot courtesy of the public purse.

But hey, he's an important person so must never be punished for public failure to do his job. No doubt the copper in this particular case was in the wrong but at least she didn't lie to the Home Affairs Select Committee.

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

Offbeat

The article is filed under OFFBEAT. I see what you did there.

[timrosu]

How do they know that officer used photo frames? Have they broken into his house? That would be interesting to see.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

*her

[goblinski]

I'm old enough to remember the AllAdvantage bar, and the $59 I made from it using mouse mover gizmos - just before they went belly up.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Has to at least partly be your fault, then :P

[BillGatesOfHell]

a fair cop?

She was framed!

[Aaiieeee]

Play a long youtube on your phone..

And place your optical mouse on the screen.

[sammystag]

Re: Play a long youtube on your phone..

Or on an analogue watch with a second hand

[trevorde]

Productivity != keystrokes

Worked on an obscure printing bug 20+ years ago. I managed to burn through a roll and a half of large format paper, at £120/roll. After 3 weeks of solid effort, and learning more about the Windows printing subsystem than I ever wanted to, the fix was just 2 characters in the code. That is less than a character/week!

[trevorde]

Code by the kilo

Inherited a product which was outsourced to one of the major players in India. The Indian devs were expected to write 200 lines of code per day, or they were penalised. What we got was not effective, succinct code but *lots* and *lots* of rubbish, incoherent code. It was the worst code I have ever seen in 30 years of professional development but at least the devs got their bonus.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen it where you just need to keep the machine awake

Which is simple.

A gadget is available that you put the mouse on.

(Apparently plugging in a mouse jiggler can be detected !)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've seen it where you just need to keep the machine awake

"Wee Shoogle Mouse Mover"

[herman]

Zzzz

He should not have put the weight on the Z key

[Sam not the Viking]

Nothing to see here.

I always feel that the object of the police is to prevent crime. Ideally, they should have no crime-solving to do.

"I was proceeding along Acacia Avenue and I found no crimes happening." Perhaps there is a link there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nothing to see here.

That's not been the object of the police for (probably) millennia now. It might be a good goal to work toward, but preventing all crime would require a serious adjustment to basic human nature.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Nothing to see here.

Oddly enough, that was exactly the stated purpose of the Metropolitan Police (the world's first professional police force) when it was founded; to prevent crime. They were actually forbidden from detecting crime for a number of years, because it was thought to be a violation of personal privacy. Nowadays, we take it for granted that the job of the police is to detect crime, and there's not a whole load of crime prevention going on any more.

[Sampler]

Glad I work for a smaller company...

Didn't like the computer they got me so gave it to a colleague and use my own I built out of some spare parts, I also run my own dns server with an encrypted connection between my machine and it so very comfortable to know my key presses or internet activity aren't being tracked for "productivity" and I can safely read el'reg in work hours.

They do it old school here, do you do your job? Yeah, great, crack on then..

Not doing as much as you should be, we have a chat about where you need training or why it doesn't get done as quickly as we think it should and how to solve that, you know, managers actually supporting the people they manage, I guess it's a bit old fashioned, but it works for us..

[the Jim bloke]

False or misleading statement from the prosecutors

this deliberate and deceitful way by abusing the trust placed in her, by making it appear she was working when she was not.

No trust was placed in her, for her to abuse.

if you treat your employees like criminals - its probably something to do with the management..

[Not Yb]

One of many reasons that automated employee tracking tools are not worth it.

Sure, they caught the one doing it this time, but there would be NO incentive to do this sort of thing if there was no tracking of 'number of keystrokes per officer'. Seems a bit more likely to cause the infamous 'cop passive voice', which is already rather verbose.

"You can track if your employees are typing enough" doesn't mean you should be doing so.

[Winkypop]

Ive been framed i tell you!

But it seems I’m in the picture!

[Great Southern Land]

Not the whole Story

(blatant quote of an old post of mine)

The problem with these monitoring (bullying) systems is that they never give the full story.

Sure, you can measure how often a worker's computer is idle, how often the screen is locked, how many phone calls they made or answered today, how many forms they processed, how many keystrokes, etc.....

The problem occurs in the interpretation of that data. It can never tell the whole story. Low keystrokes? Could be a slack worker, or a worker who spent the day waiting to give evidence in court, or spent the day in training (giving or receiving).... The software can't explain any of that.

From the stories I've heard over the years, management don't seem to bother checking first before using the resulting reports to justify disciplinary action against the worker. The worker usually has no access to the report data, won't necessarily remember a day's work 1-2 weeks ago, and if he/she is called in to the manager's office, the onus is usually on the worker to explain the discrepancies, not the manager/organisation. It cannot be assumed that poor results on their own mean a poor worker, but all too often that's what management assumes.

[Gavsky]

I get the annoyance of having to log in again, but you simply don't do things like this - particularly if you're a Police Sergeant! A good, moral compass; a sense of duty; simply not wanting to lose a career, even - should be enough to dissuade someone.