Home Office will launch £7m police recruitment drive
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Your support makes all the difference.Britain's first national police recruitment campaign, costing £7m, is to be launched this month in an attempt to boost the falling number of beat officers and to encourage more ethnic minority and female candidates.
Britain's first national police recruitment campaign, costing £7m, is to be launched this month in an attempt to boost the falling number of beat officers and to encourage more ethnic minority and female candidates.
The Home Office has hired the advertising agency M&C Saatchi to promote the police service as a quality profession in advertisements on television and radio, and in the cinema and national press.
Part of the strategy is to persuade black, Asian and those from other ethnic minorities that the service is a worthwhile and respected career, as medicine and law are. Research has shown parents in ethnic minorities often write off police work as a low-status job riddled with racism.
In an attempt to recruit women, the campaign will emphasise the intelligence aspect of the job rather than macho elements. It will also focus on positive stories about encounters with officers and how they change people's attitudes.
But targets set for the recruitment of ethnic minority officers still look wildly ambitious, with research showing the number of non-white officers is falling in many forces.
The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, wants to see a total of 8,265 black and Asian officers in England and Wales by 2009. But the number has risen by just 209 in two years, from 2,483 in March 1998 to 2,754 in March this year.
The Government has also pledged to fund an additional 9,000 officers over the next three years. Yesterday, it gave full details of how the funding will be allocated.
Police numbers in England and Wales have fallen by nearly 1,700 in the past year to their lowest level for more than a decade. In March there were 124,418 officers in England and Wales, compared with 127,158 in March 1997.
Even with extra recruits, it looks increasingly likely that there will be a similar number of officers at the next general election to that when Labour came to power in 1997.
Police chiefs welcomed the new money but privately expressed doubts over whether they would be able to attract enough quality recruits.
A separate £5m national campaign is being launched this month to encourage people to take measures to cut car crime. The advertising aims to "empower" people take practical measures to reduce their chance of becoming a victim of crime.
The Home Office is keeping details of both campaigns under wraps and plans a major launch in the next few weeks.
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