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Q3 2005 |
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Ref:44/09
February 26, 2009
ACPO response to Reform Report
Commenting on a report from the Reform think tank, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police and ACPO lead on futures Sir Norman Bettison said:
“This report presents a collection of the authors’ views about the challenges facing policing. While based squarely on opinion rather than evidence, it does highlight some key issues for the future which continue to be the subject of debate within ACPO, the wider police service and beyond.
“At the heart of these debates is the ever-widening mission of the police service, the subject which ACPO placed at the centre of its submission to the Government’s green paper on policing. That policing mission runs from the delivery of a locally-tailored neighbourhood policing presence right through to tackling national and international serious organised crime, along with everything in-between. In positioning the police service in order to cope with that ‘mission stretch’, the structures within which policing in this country is delivered are rightly the subject of analysis and debate.
“In jumping from this analysis to some of the solutions presented, the report does avoid some key questions. Without further resources, any new structures created are bound to take away from the current capacity of the police service to meet future challenges. Specifically, it does not recognise the unique advantage, which the current model has, of ensuring a single interconnected approach to the way in which the service tackles crime from the local to the national.
“Serious organised crime is not an abstract phenomenon – the drugs are dealt, firearms used and acquisitive crime committed in local neighbourhoods. The perpetrators and their violence plague local communities. There is therefore a benefit to a single structure, able to build intelligence and the means to tackle criminality at neighbourhood, force, regional and national level.”
ENDS
Notes for Editors
• The ACPO Press Office can be contacted via 020 7084 8946/47/48 (office hours) or via 07803 903686 (out of office hours).
• The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is an independent, professionally led strategic body. In the public interest and, in equal and active partnership with Government and the Association of Police Authorities, ACPO leads and co-ordinates the direction and development of the police service in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In times of national need ACPO, on behalf of all chief officers, coordinates the strategic policing response.
• ACPO’s 341 members are police officers of Assistant Chief Constable rank (Commanders in the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police) and above, and senior police staff managers, in the 44 forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and other forces such as British Transport Police and States of Jersey Police.
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