If Greater Manchester Police was a Premier League football team, they're a few points adrift of safety and facing relegation. The board sacked Ian Hopkins mid-season and in came the policing equivalent of Sam Allardyce.
Like Big Sam, Stephen Watson has a well-earned reputation for miraculous escapes. He did it at South Yorkshire Police.
Our new chief constable is really a rugby man but he appreciates a good metaphor whatever the sport: recent results have been great, team morale is good and, if the results keep coming and the upward trajectory is maintained, relegation will be avoided.
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The results are impressive: 999 calls are being answered much more quickly, arrests have almost doubled, the number of people charged has risen sharply, response times have been slashed and the use of stop and search has soared. Whisper it, but almost all burglary victims are getting a visit from the police. This wasn't the case under the old 'manager'.
It feels like criminals, who were 'laughing ', are at long last feeling a bit of heat after years of austerity augmented by - and these are the words of the new chief in an interview with the M.E.N. - 'defeatist' and 'shameful' policies from those at the top who were too ready to blame cuts for poor, or even no, service.
Although those results and the current trajectory may see GMP lifted out of special measures imposed in December 2020, they only tell part of the story. They've been inspired by a cultural change inside Greater Manchester Police, what the £204,372-a-year chief constable likes to call 'back to basics'.
Rank-and-file cops have spoken out in favour of the new approach and the greater emphasis on discipline, standards of dress and - yes - a new-found enthusiasm for arresting people.
PC Sarah Taylor, 34, based on the Rochdale division, has been with GMP for three years. Before that she worked in the military police for eight years.
Insp Rod Ashton, 47, based in Salford, has been with GMP for 15 years. Before that, he spent twelve years as a Royal Navy police officer.
Both have noticed a distinct change since Stephen Watson - who had himself envisaged a career in the Royal Navy before joining the police, was installed as chief constable in June 2021.
"I can see a clear plan. There are more arrests. It feels better, you know 'let's get out there and catch the bad guys'. said Insp Ashton.
PC Taylor agreed: "I feel like the senior leadership team have a clear idea of what's going right and what's going wrong, which has fed down to us guys on the ranks. There's also a big drive in recruitment which is clearly better for us."
Like other police officers, these two remember just how bad it got inside GMP around the time the force was plunged into special measures in December 2020.
"It was stressful," said PC Taylor. Insp Ashton is firmer: "There was no clear plan or direction. What are we doing? Locking people up? Are we asking people to come down to the police station for an interview or are we arresting?"
The latest figures show the new GMP is close to doubling the number of arrests. In May, some 4,527 suspects were arrested compared to 2,881 in May 2021.
Under the old regime, the criminals of Greater Manchester were 'running rings round us, they really were', said PC Taylor. "We weren't respected by the public. There wasn't enough trust in the police as there is now because they've seen big changes."
Many victims of burglary were routinely ignored by the old GMP - victims would call up and get a crime reference number but nobody from GMP would visit to gather evidence let alone provide some assurance. At the moment GMP is visiting 94 per cent of burglary victims, according to the force, who say that figure would be higher but for some turning down a police visit.
Insp Ashton said: "Not turning out to somebody who has been burgled or had their car broken into is absolutely poor policing. A victim of burglary is a proper victim of crime. For someone to go into somebody else's house is a total invasion of privacy and a police officer should be there. There's nothing better than catching a burglar."
Aside from the 'back to basics' drive, both officers described how standards of discipline - and dress - have also been transformed. Before he was installed, GMP had clear code on how officers should be presented, for instance that there should be no visible tattoos, but it was not enforced.
"Slovenly police officers will not flourish in the future GMP," Mr Watson vowed in his first interview with the M.E.N. There has been no puritanical purge requiring officers to remove tattoos, but there is an insistence they should be covered up.
With tattoos now so common, this was 'common sense', said Insp Ashton. Hats had to be worn and boots had to be polished, he said.
Tellingly, when police officers were 'parading on' in front of their sergeant at the beginning of their shift, they had to refer to their boss as 'sergeant' or 'sarge'. The informality of the previous regime meant this had been lost, according to Insp Ashton.
"Standards are better. We're becoming a little bit more professional in what we're doing. It's going to an incident and looking the part," he said.
The officers, and others inside GMP, say back office and IT support also markedly improved, allowing cops to go out on the beat to concentrate more on fighting crime than performing bureaucratic tasks. The records management system of the discredited iOPS computer system will be replaced.
Not everyone is sold, however. One experienced frontline police officer told the M.E.N: "The new chief constable was supposed to be the saviour of our moribund and underperforming police force. But, after the initial surge of hope and expectation, nothing has really changed because the underlying problems have not been rectified.
"No effort had been made to address GMP's addiction to bureaucracy. Officers like me spend all day, every day engaged in endlessly chasing documentation around the organisation, rather than investigating crime or policing the streets."
Although it will be replaced, he said the much-maligned iOPS computer system remained a huge problem: "I once saw an entire response team gathered around a computer terminal for two hours, attempting to enter a single piece of intelligence. They failed. And left it in a post-it note on my desk.
"It is difficult to put into words how bad it really is. But the combination of unnecessary bureaucracy coupled with unusable IT is the reason it takes weeks to carry out the kind of simple investigation which, years ago, you could knock-off in a couple of hours.
"It’s the reason that things are simply not getting any better. Whilst the latest data will no doubt show that GMP is moving in the right direction, those of us who work at the coal face know that nothing is getting any better. If I make an arrest, I still have to wait two hours for a prisoner transport van to arrive.
"Operational teams are still hopelessly understaffed, under-experienced and overworked. And, we’re still light-years away from being able to even attend emergency incidents in a timely manner, let alone resolve them.
"Morale is still poor, officers are still leaving at a faster rate than they are being recruited, and the same old problems are still the same old problems. I hate to paint such a bleak picture. But these are the facts from the front line of policing in Manchester."
When the M.E.N. interviewed Mr Watson about the recent upturn, however, he was bullish about the prospects of the policing inspectorate finally lifting GMP out of special measures. He declined to personally criticise his predecessor but singled out one of his policies for stinging criticism.
Mr Watson said: "For me it's important not to personalise things because it's important not to become unpleasant. The fact of the matter is I have replaced the leadership of this organisation and I have repudiated much, if not all of what had been put in place, or not, as the case may be, by the previous regime. I don't need necessarily to personalise it."
He needed no encouragement, however, to criticise the introduction of the 'Citizens' Charter', by the then chief constable Ian Hopkins in October 2018, a move that was endorsed by deputy mayor Beverley Hughes. The charter - which came to symbolise the approach of the old leadership team - urged the public to understand why some crimes would not be investigated because of cuts in funding.
Mr Watson, who axed the charter soon after he was installed, has criticised it before but he went further when he told the M.E.N: "I described it as tosh, and not only was it tosh, but it was patronising tosh, because I think that what it was essentially inviting the public to do was to resile itself to a future in which a diminished GMP would stop doing things for them. And that just flies in the face of the policing philosophy that I and, I know, the vast, vast majority of the people who work in GMP ascribe to.
"It was defeatist and frankly I think it was a bit shameful because it involved, for example, not investigating things, which is why we stopped arresting people. It's why we have to reflect at the very basic level that we are now picking up the phone very much more quickly, we are judged to be fully compliant with national crime recording standards which means that we are now accurately recording crime. The point about that is that that then drives what is happening on the ground."
The previous GMP regime was reluctant to use stop and search powers. Research shows black people are far more likely to be stop-searched than white people. But since Mr Watson was installed its use has soared, particularly following serious stabbing incidents.
He said: "People are concerned about the use of the power. My attitude has always been that stop and search powers must be used objectively, lawfully and respectfully but they must be used because we're the police.
"And when you have youngsters in our streets carrying knives stabbing other youngsters we have a duty to intervene proactively. That is what it is to be a police officer. But really importantly we've seen (stop-search) increase by 135 per cent (and) no reduction in the outcomes, ie the fact that we find stuff, and we've had a 38 per cent reduction in complaints about our use of that power.
"The point is we're doing a lot more of it, we're doing it to a high degree of accuracy and we're doing it respectfully. That number will grow. I confidently predict that that number will grow dramatically because we're becoming all-together more proactive."
The chief constable said he was 'absolutely loving' his job despite the challenges he faces: "It is a huge, huge privilege. I know we're not where we need to be and too frequently we don't get this right. But the evidence of what is being achieved in GMP is dramatic and it is undeniable.
"And the fact of the matter is across all of those indicators of basic policing the improvement in GMP right now outstrips the improvement that is being made anywhere else in the country.
"And that means we are very, very quickly working to the space where we will earn the right not to be in special measures and we will be the most improved force in this country, and I'm seeing the evidence of that emerge increasingly strongly. In all of that, what's not to love about the job? It's a huge privilege."
He laughs: "Being chief constable is a bit like a football manager. It depends on your position in the league table." A year into the job, the miracle escape is on.
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