Die Zahl der Polizeikräfte in England und Wales soll im Zuge einer großen Umwälzung gekürzt werden

Various Governments have been proposing this for years and it never gets off the drawing board, be interesting to se if it does this time. Lots of political opposition to mergers so it may be a bit of a bun fight in Parliament.

We cut down to 1 force in Scotland and it’s made all the difference.

^^^/s

Multiple Police Services were set up in an era where hardly anyone ever went more than fifteen minutes from their own home, where people would be born, live, and die in the same village, where mass internal migration from city-to-town-to-city-to-suburb hardly ever happened. Before motorways were a thing. They were set up when everyone pretty much stayed „in their patch“ and a bobby knowing their patch knew 90% of everything actually happening.

Before interconnected technology, where state of the art data storage was a file cabinet. Where data analysis and processing was something Alison in the office did in the afternoons. It had to be done locally, because there was no way to do it any other way, certainly not at the volume policing an entire country required. You had multiple forces because you could break things down into little bits, and pretty much had to break things down into bits to be able to do it. Because it was too much otherwise.

This led to massive intelligence gaps, of the sort which led to us naming laws after kids, and also massive duplication of tasks. Honestly, if we were starting this whole police thing all over again today then we would never do it that way. Just like how the Army amalgamated Regiments once it was clear the reason for all the little regiments had gone away, it probably is time to amalgamate some of the police services and have others become truly specialised services.

Awful idea. Basically taking The Met and applying that shitshow nationally.

All this means for the average taxpayer is that they get less of a service for their tax contributions and a less visible Police presence. And it’ll cost us fucking tens of billions to implement.

It makes sense and should have been done ages ago. The logistics of doing it is going to be horrible. Having 43+ Police Forces and other national units makes no sense especially when each one often has its own individual and often bespoke IT system. There should be one system for all the forces and that’s it

I will put money on “ grooming gangs and criminals in Wall Street, the Bank of England/board rooms aren’t chased”. They will go after small crimes, not massive things, that makes the 0.1% even richer.