Mr. Alan Todd:

It is the same, as the Deputy might imagine, and it is not unique to Ireland. It is pretty much the same picture across the United Kingdom. This debate on the visibility of local policing has been going back and forth since I joined the police service and that was not yesterday. I can remember a chief constable in Bristol saying 25 years ago there will be no more cops on the beat and coming under significant political fire for making that statement. That debate has continued until now in the way the Deputy outlined it.

Local communities take a significant degree of reassurance from seeing their local police. I spoke earlier about visibility as well as accessibility and familiarity, in other words, people see the police, can make contact with them when they want to and they knows who they are. This means people feel linked and engaged with the police. The significant reassurance that comes from that should not be underestimated. Similarly, we talk about police stations and the very fact that bricks and mortar provide confidence for local communities because they have a police station. If a police station is closed or moved, it is generally a source of significant local stress. All of those things have a value for the community.

In light of changing demands and the complexity of the circumstances we face, it is difficult to put one's finger on the cash value of having police officers on patrol providing reassurance. Then we get into the debate as to whether we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. The honest answer to this question lies betwixt and between the cost and the value. Most emerging models try to bridge that space by having local based teams which are also responsible for a substantial amount of service delivery. Depending on how this approach is modelled, it can work very well because every time a crime or an incident is reported, it presents an opportunity for the local team to engage and be involved in problem solving and building of solutions around that. If one puts too much into that aspect, the teams do not get to engage in policing and instead become response teams engaged in what amounts to fire-fighting, which is a pejorative term in these circumstances. Everybody draws a line and strikes a balance in a different place but finding the right balance is one of the tricks in designing a model. The stress has been there for many years and no one professes to have the wisdom to solve this issue.

On ways to do this differently and sometimes better, the PSNI now has a social media outreach with more than 900,000 followers. In most towns in Northern Ireland more people follow the PSNI on social media platforms than ever meet a police officer. We need to be clever about how we use this platform and publicise it daily. For example, we can show people that while they were at work, we were patrolling their area, making arrests or recovering property. This is a way of showing the value of the police work that takes place through the use of social media channels and outreach. It provides visibility in a wider sense, rather than only seeing officers in uniforms on the streets.