This article considers the current decision of the Home Secretary to scrap the 43 police forces and replace them with 12–15 regional strategic police forces. This follows on from the recent report of HMIC, entitled Closing the Gap, published in September 2005, which was to conclude that as currently constituted the police structure for England and Wales was no longer ‘fit for purpose’. Using the ability of police services to provide an effective response to NIM Level 2 crime as a yardstick, HMIC was to find that any force with fewer than 4,000 police officers would be unlikely to be able to provide an adequate response.
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