These days, each one of the 43 police ‘forces’, (it is now more politically correct to term them police services), of England and Wales is run very much on a business footing, with published accounts and customer satisfaction surveys, budgets and budgetary constraints, staff shortages and working time regulations and so on.

Of course, we are all contributors to this ‘business’ by way of our payment of council tax, a large proportion of which goes towards the provision of Emergency Services. Many times over the years I have been irascibly informed by a particularly enraged ‘customer’ that they actually ‘paid my wages’.

It is against this generalised background that the police service is provided, whether it be attending the scene of a domestic dispute, a road traffic accident (RTA), a missing person, a murder or a major incident.

The Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) has many balls to juggle, not the least of which are the costs of the forensic examination, staff deployment, overtime and any assistance that may be sought ‘cross border’, all of which has a very real and often very large price tag.

In the past, this has inevitably led to villains sometimes being able to evade capture and their due justice, but generally not for long. These days however, there is a much greater level of structured cooperation throughout the police service. The inclusion of other agencies in many and varied police operations is now commonplace. Furthermore with the prospect of police forces being merged into much larger ‘super forces’, the cost effectiveness of this proposition should prove advantageous, as should the associated streamlining of communications, resource distribution and availability.

The extended police family, including Neighbourhood Safety and Environmental Enforcement Wardens and Police and Community Support Officers (PCSO’s), now engenders a much more diverse resource capacity, which can readily be applied to any policing problem.

Finally, the newly formed Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) greatly broadens both our nationwide and our international policing capability, with comparisons being drawn with America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It perhaps takes us ever closer to the concept of there eventually being just one single policing service throughout the country. The question of whether or not this would be a good thing, remains to be seen.