The excellent Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex, Roger Hirst, has done a sterling job in standing up for the officers and staff of Essex Police and Essex Fire and Rescue Service in the last decade. He has brought in funding from the Government and focussed on the criminal activity which affects people in Essex most in our cities, towns, villages and rural communities – domestic abuse, rural crime, knife crime and drugs gangs, and anti-social behaviour.
Most importantly, Roger has worked with the Chief Constable to ensure we have local, accessible policing that engages directly with neighborhoods.
But now the Labour Government wants to scrap Essex Police as we know it and replace local policing with a force that covers the whole region. This could mean decisions about crime in Essex, and how to tackle it, are being made miles away, in Norwich or Ipswich, not in our fine county of Essex.
I am clear that merging police forces will be highly disruptive. Mega-forces covering whole regions will be very remote from the communities they serve, which risks drawing resources away from villages and towns towards large cities. If we look at the country’s largest force, the Met Police, we see this has the lowest clear-up rate of any force, demonstrating that bigger forces are not necessarily better.
Essex deserves its own police force. If you agree, you can sign the petition to keep policing local in Essex here: https://www.whatlaboursaid.com/save-essex-police
