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A series of crucial figures published today by @ukhomeoffice & @MoJGovUK. Follow this thread for details…. First, police recruitment: 42% of all joiners since April 2020 are women. Home Office statisticians say it’s a “notable increase” on previous years...
Overall 45,996 police officers in England/Wales are female - one-third of total ‘headcount’... but slower progress on diversity: 10.6% of new recruits who stated their ethnicity identified as belonging to Black (1.5%), Asian (5.0%), Mixed (3.4%) or the Other (0.8%) ethnic group..
That 10.6% proportion of BME recruits is below population representation in Eng/Wales (14% according to 2011 Census) and hardly changed on last year. Overall: 10,218 police officers identify as belonging to Black, Asian, Mixed or Other ethnic group, 7.6% of total officers...
In March, provisional police 'headcount' from @ukhomeoffice was 137,704, up 6,128 in a year. This is different from the way police officer numbers have traditionally been counted - by calculating 'full-time equivalent' (FTE) officers: this number is about 2% lower...
So, is Govt on track to meet its target of recruiting an extra 20,000 police officers by March 2023? Looks like it: on an official baseline of 128,434 the numbers are up 9,270 of which 8,771 were funded by @ukhomeoffice Police Uplift programme...
Now onto prisons where Covid-19 led to a record number of prisoners dying in first 3 months of this year: 154, that's 45 more than in previous quarter. In the last 12 months deaths in jails were up 42% on the year before, with 143 due to or potentially linked to Covid...
Sharp drop in prison population last year, mainly because fewer offenders were tried and sentenced, together with restrictions on out-of-cell activities, led to reductions in assaults and self-harm incidents. But worryingly, rate of self-harming among female inmates was up 13%..
Other prison stats: although jail population in Eng/Wales is 6% down on a year ago, there are 22% more remand prisoners, 12,262; number of people remanded for drug offences almost doubled. Increases also in foreign national offenders and IPP prisoners sent back to jail..
All the figures are on the @MoJGovUK and @ukhomeoffice websites. Click on http://crestadvisory.com for details of our research on policing, criminal justice and prisons and projects we're currently working on.
