Dear reader I am typing this slowly as I know it’s a dry, boring subject that most of us don’t bother with, but unfortunately for you, I do. You may want to make yourself a cup of strong coffee before you read any further.

I have been looking at the strength of the various Police Forces post 2010.  The Home Office and HMIC like to quote these numbers as “officers per 100,000 head of population”.  I took a small liberty with this and I used “Constables per 100,000 head of population” as I don’t really care how many top-floor oiks there are, it’s the ground floor that interfaces with the public in the important ways.

Having aquired all the relevant data from official government statistics I laid it out and, unsurprisingly, EVERY single Force now has fewer Constables per 100,000 head of population, but the spread is not fair and even. Some have lost a far bigger percentage than others.

The luckiest Forces have only lost about 2% of their Constables (Surrey) , but others have lost as many as 30%...

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Let’s deal with the title question straight away.

Actually, I don’t think it is time for a Royal Commission on policing in this country. I don’t think it’s time for anything that has the potential to be drawn out, bureaucratic and enormously expensive.

But I do think there is an urgent need for a proper, grown up, joined up, honest, objective and constructive conversation about policing in this country.

Take a glance at the current headlines:

Crime is up

The latest ONS crime figures point to an increase in overall crime of more than 175,000 offences. Of particular concern has to be the 18% increase in violent crime and the 14% increase in sexual offences.

And behind each number, there is a person – amongst them some of the most vulnerable people in society.

A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about knife crime. Last week we are talking about acid attacks. Both weeks we’ve been talking about mopeds. This week it may well be something else.

And we ask and expect the police to deal with it all.

Risk is up

The...

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Or it was at least, and it gives me absolutely no pleasure to write these words.

When I joined the Met a million years ago in 1972 the old sweats took delight in telling me that I was now part of the finest Police Force in the world, they were referring to the Met of course, but a case could have been made for almost any UK Police Force. British Policing was a model for so many others across the world.  You only had to spend a handful of days at Hendon to trip over any number of foreign students studying something there, if only how to drive and skid.

I wasn’t originally going to write this post, and if you inhabit the world of Twitter you will have seen much of it already in separate tweets, twats, whatever.

I have had much to say about “the cuts” over the years, and I take none of it back, but today it finally hit me how deep the Crisis In Policing truly is. However, I’m not going to mention money at all in this pcost, but there will be a few numbers. Grim numbers.  I’m not even going to rant, this...

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You may have noticed the Care Quality Commission published a report this week on the State of Mental Health Care.  Or maybe you were getting on with your life or your job, but I’ve given it as much time as I have spare and was very interested in what I read.  The CQC run an ongoing programme of inspections across the mental health trusts of England (there is a separate inspectorate for Wales) and they are also the statutory regulator for the use of the Mental Health Act 1983. This week’s report seems, to me at least, to be a overview of the individual reports they produced in their last inspection round, peppered with a sprinkling of MHA insights. I hope I understood it correctly.

As ever these days, with so many reports to read and keep an eye on, I tend to sometimes use my iPad just to search for terms within the report that will be relevant to my work.  Things as obvious as ‘police’ often through up little nuggets and so it proved with the CQC report.

Page 38, worth quoting a block of the text, if you have a...

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