A commitment by police leaders to ensure the force is representative of the community it serves has led to the force being seen by the Home Office as best practice.
Nottinghamshire Police is recruiting a greater proportion of officers from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds than any other force in England and Wales.
Today the Government is announcing how forces are doing across the country in terms of recruitment to its Operation Uplift programme – which will see 20,000 new police officers in England and Wales by 2023.
Nottinghamshire is already a year ahead on its recruitment trajectory which has already seen 279 new officers in post as part of the 390 total allocation by the end of the programme.
Following this successful recruitment, over seven per cent of Nottinghamshire officers now come from a BAME background – up from 3.8 per cent at the start of the uplift programme two years ago.
And today Policing Minister Kit Malthouse is talking to the Chief Constable along with some of Nottinghamshire’s officers in a virtual meeting to discuss the uplift programme and how the force has achieved this change.
The force has taken a long term approach using engagement to build community trust; investing in neighbourhood policing, linking in with residents over stop and search; working in local schools and building on neighbourhood surveys to listen and act on what matters most to local people.
It is the only force in the country to have a dedicated youth outreach worker, a school careers outreach worker and an apprentice officer. The team work closely with the BPA and existing staff who really know the local community. They have designed a very supportive positive action package.
The approach to engaging harder to reach communities to come and work for the force has been done through this team using a targeted approach with specialist events and webinars and managing growth to the force on a one to one supportive basis, rather than simply taking a more traditional route. We have been keen to recruit both officers and staff as part of our approach.
This has even resulted in people from outside Nottinghamshire wanting to be in the force, as the word about the trust and confidence both internally and externally has spread beyond the local area.
Now the force is about to pioneer a new entry route into policing for Specials with the College of Policing, which will manage new recruits into force in just eight weeks rather than the usual 21 weeks. This follows the forces unique 2 year Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship launched with the University of Derby in 2020 with professional support from the College of Policing.
Alongside this the force has invested heavily in its graduate police staff investigator programme – turning those staff who excel into regular officer detectives on a bespoke programme, which in turn is helping to bolster detective numbers and mitigate the national shortages seen elsewhere.
And coupled with all this has been a targeted growth in bringing young people into the force at an early age with the ambition to encourage them to want a job as a police officer in the future while at the same time building lifelong relationships with some of the more difficult to reach communities, some of which have an historic distrust of the police.
Crucially all this includes the outreach work, the work in schools and alternative educational provision, the mini police, the cadets and the volunteer Specials.
All of this is seeing representation start to level up, but the force knows this is just the start.
Chief Constable Craig Guildford said: “It is great to be able to showcase what our Uplift team has achieved and how much hard work the force has been doing to the Policing Minister today.
“While of course we are very proud of the work we have done to get this far we know it is only a step in the right direction and we still have a way to go to close the gap to ensure we are fully representative of the communities we serve. For me this is an enduring operational imperative.
“Community policing is fundamentally about the strength of relationships and legitimacy we have in the communities we serve, the trust they have in us to respond to their concerns and our desire to solve problems with our partners for the greater good.
“That’s why it’s important that people from all of our communities are represented in our workforce – because they make us better at serving the public, more understanding of local need, culture and language. We are a force that strives to deliver for all as a big team with a wide range of operational skills to meet the policing challenges we face.”
He added the force is also now seeing new cohorts which comprise 45 per cent of female officers which is a radically different position than just a few years ago.
Whilst undertaking all this recruitment, the force has continued to make significant changes to bring down crime rates, which have fallen by double the national average largely as a result of the work done to bolster both neighbourhoods and specialist teams including its dedicated Operation Reacher teams aimed at disrupting and deterring would be criminals across every neighbourhood.
While all forces last year saw a drop in crime due to the impact of lockdown, Nottinghamshire Police were already seeing a significant drop in crime rates, which are continuing to fall year on year across all areas apart from. The single positive exemption cited is drug dealing which has seen many more crimes recorded as a result of proactive operations to arrest and prosecute more dealers cited by each local neighbourhood as a priority.
Mr Guildford added: “It is a matter of great personal pride to me that more and more people from BAME backgrounds look to Nottinghamshire Police not only as a potential employer, but also as an organisation they want to help develop and make stronger for the future.
“That is happening because of the huge amount of work my officers and staff have put into our recruitment processes, which includes a real longer term focus on community and youth engagement programmes, schools outreach, and positive action. I would like to place on record my thanks to everyone who has made this possible including my staff and all those members of the community who have helped us to achieve this.”
Paddy Tipping, Nottinghamshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, said: “I’ve been clear from the outset that I wanted to see a workforce that represents the communities it serves. I’m delighted that Nottinghamshire Police is so far ahead, not just in the recruitment of new officers but officers from diverse backgrounds. But I know that there is more to be done and the recruitment plans for the coming year will help us achieve that.
“I know that these figures are the result of a lot of hard work by the force and our communities. Policing is a good career with a lot of opportunities and I’m pleased to see that Nottinghamshire Police is an employer of choice.”
When compared to the diversity of the communities it serves based on the last Census, Nottinghamshire Police also has the highest BAME representation in the country across the core conurbations – at 57 per cent of the last Census figure which showed 11 per cent BAME for Nottinghamshire’s resident population. That compares to 53 per cent in Greater Manchester, 37 per cent in Leicestershire and 38 per cent in Greater London.
