Crime commissioner says Beds needs police force that is representative of the county

Lots of people just see the uniform and “don’t care” about the sex or race of a police officer, they just want one to attend, a councillor has said.

Councillor Patrick Hamill (Central Bedfordshire Council) made his claim during Tuesday’s (June 6) Bedfordshire Police and Crime Panel.

The panel was discussing the Casey Review, which was commissioned following the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens.

The deputy police and crime commissioner, Ian Dalgarno, told the panel that if Bedfordshire Police hadn’t been successful in restoring public faith in the police it wouldn’t have an “extremely high level” of female recruitment.

“We’ve brought in hundreds of new officers, and over 50 per cent of those are women,” Mr Dalgarno said.

“And they’re coming from the diverse background across all different parts of our communities.”

Councillor Hamill said promoting diversity and the number of female police officers “probably is laudable”.

“But when you’re making a phone call to the police, you don’t care who comes to you, all you want is a police officer there,” he said.

“You don’t care what colour the police officer is, whether it’s male, female

“It’s [sic] got a uniform on and a lot of residents just see the uniform, not the concentration of what you want to call diverse.

“They want to see an officer that is employed on merit, and I hope that’s being done,” he said.

Police and crime commissioner, Festus Akinbusoye, said: “What I will say, councillor Hamill, is that I’m yet to meet a police officer in Bedfordshire who was not appointed on merit.

“While you might not care who comes to you, there are some people who do.

“That does not mean that if I as a black man called the police I want to see a black police officer, that is not the case.

“We do want to have a police force that is broadly representative of our county because there is a benefit to having different sets of eyes, different sorts of backgrounds, different sorts of experiences around the table, because police officers have got a huge amount of powers.”