WMP are 18 months into one of the biggest recruitment drives West Midlands Police has ever seen, meaning Police numbers have grown significantly.
But, despite significant efforts and various initiatives, Police are still a long way off our goal of closing the gap on true representation amongst our workforce.
As Police mark Black Inclusion Week, officers are reflecting on what the recruitment drive has done to encourage more people to join us from under-represented communities and acknowledging that there is still much more to do.
Nicola Price, WMP’s Director of People, said: “Uplift has brought us a wonderful opportunity to see our numbers grow so that we can offer a better, more effective service to local people.
“We have started to introduce new, targeted teams in areas like investigations, public protection and neighbourhood policing to tackle challenging and organised crimes thanks to the extra resources we now have, and will continue to see join.
“However a key part of Uplift is using the opportunity of increased recruitment to improve the representation of diverse communities within our workforce – and that is an area where we have seen less success.
“We are working hard to attract more applications from under-represented communities through a variety of means, be it more targeted campaigns, outreach and engagement work and improving our links with local schools, colleges and job centres.
“But, that has brought us limited success in terms of people actually joining our student officer programmes which is hugely disappointing.”
In November 2019 the government pledged to invest in 20,000 extra police officers, with a keen focus on increasing representation across policing.
We have a target of recruiting 1,200 additional officers by 2023, as well as another 1,600 officers to replace those who retire or leave over the next two years. Within those numbers, the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner announced that 1,000 of the 2,800 total recruits should come from under-represented communities, underpinning our commitment to increasing representation across the force.
Already we’ve recruited over 1,000 officers and compared to a year ago we now have 663 more police officers in our ranks, working across our various departments and teams.
Since the programme started we have seen application rates from ethnic minority groups average at 23% with that number falling to 17% by the time candidates have been through the various stages of selection processes, vetting and medicals.
When we examine the number of new recruits that identify as being black or black dual heritage, we see those numbers fall further. In the last 12 months we have recruited 11 new police officers who state they are black, with a further 29 recruits stating they are of mixed black heritage.