A police officer is living her teenage dream of being a bobby on the beat – despite it briefly looking like she’d be doing something ‘completely different’.
PC Lydia Day is a familiar face around Newark, as she spends her days interacting with people and walking the streets to keep them safe.
PC Day, who is now the beat manager for the Magnus and Devon wards in the area, only joined Nottinghamshire Police two years ago and was actually plotting another career entirely not long before that as she studied English at university.
But having grown up with aspirations of being like a ‘traffic cop’ from TV and with serving the public already in her blood, PC Day admits she was always destined to do a job where she could help people.
“I’m the first person in my family to join the police, although my dad was in the Armed Forces and my mum is a nurse, so I’m definitely from a uniformed family already,” she said.
“I first wanted to be a police officer as a teenager when I was watching all of the cop shows on TV and thought how great it’d be to be a traffic cop. I don’t really know what happened between then and now though because I ended up going to university and studying English, which is obviously completely different!
“I don’t regret doing that at all because I loved English but when I graduated from university, I just thought ‘this isn’t me’ and that it seemed like I was applying for someone else’s jobs.”
After switching back to her childhood dream of being a police officer, PC Day joined the force at the start of the pandemic and hasn’t looked back since – going on to work as an officer on the response team and then joining the Newark neighbourhood policing team.
She said: “I did enjoy racing around with the response team fighting crime when I started out but when you get down to it, neighbourhood policing is where you actually get involved with the communities, which is what I like the most.
“I did jump to the beat team a bit earlier in my career than most people, which is a bit different in that respect, but it was always my goal when I was in training school to go on and do neighbourhood policing, which I’m really passionate about.
“The best part of this job is engaging with people to build better relationships between the police and our communities, which is why I got into neighbourhood policing.”
At 25, PC Day is the youngest member of the Newark neighbourhood policing team and classes reducing antisocial behaviour in the area as something that takes up a large chunk of her time.
She added: “It is a challenge to meet the expectations of everyone in the Magnus and Devon wards because they cover a big cross section of society, with completely different types of crime, so people have different priorities.
“We deal with quite a bit of antisocial behaviour and rural crime, which we are particularly focused on cracking down on right now.
“No day is ever the same working for the force – you can come in with a full plan of all the things you’re going to do on that day but it only takes one incident for all that to go straight out the window!
“Your whole day can then be completely different – sometimes in the very best ways though as you end up doing some really interesting and rewarding things.
“I just love my job and definitely feel at home at Nottinghamshire Police.”
