The stereotypical image of a police officer is difficult to dismiss. There’s the peaked cap, the pressed uniform, and above all the expectation that the officer is patrolling a busy street, crouched in a speed trap, or helping to guide traffic. Simply put: the assumption is that the officer is in public. But at the 2015 Public Safety Summit, Chris Sims, the Chief Constable of the West Midlands (UK) Police Department, explained how, upon taking office six years ago, he realized that in his jurisdiction, that “iconic” image would soon become a thing of the past.
Over the last half-decade, the West Midlands Police (WMP) has been in flux. When Sims took office, the agency had approximately 13,500 staff members; but after experiencing extensive budget cuts, it is now down to approximately 10,000 personnel. Making matters worse, the department needs to generate another $190 million in savings over the next five years, meaning that by 2020, it will have to pare back its staff to 8,000 total personnel. In a county with 3 million people spread across nearly 350 square miles in west-central England, it is becoming physically impossible to have a highly visible police presence.
Although the fiscal pressures seem daunting, Sims does not consider them devastating. He believes that technological innovations—like the development of communications and imaging technology—mean that an enormous amount of patrol work can now be done remotely, as the nature of crime changes. In the past, West Midlands had primarily grappled with acquisitive crimes (e.g., burglaries). In recent years, those crimes have fallen, but West Midlands has witnessed an increase in crimes like child abuse and exploitation that deal with encroachments on private space. As a result, WMP has had to make, as Sims said, a “massive shift” to focus more on this latter category for which it is less important to have a highly visible police presence.