200 more Police officers needed in Wiltshire to meet demand, says DCC
Deputy Chief Constable Craig Dibdin was speaking in a Facebook Live Q&A
A top Wiltshire Police officer has said the Force needs around 200 more officers to meet demand across the county.
Deputy Chief Constable Craig Dibdin says they're leaving no stone unturned in a bid to maximise the impact of officers while they're short of their 'ideal' numbers.
Speaking during a Facebook Live Q&A, alongside Chief Constable Catherine Roper, DCC Dibdin was asked: "Wiltshire is a huge country, do we have enough officers to tackle the day-to-day policing?"
He responded by saying the Force has analysed it's demand in the last 12 months in order to understand how many officers and staff are needed to meet demand across the county.
He described demand as a 'really complex issue': "It's not as simple as how many calls we get to service, how many crimes you have to investigate.
"There's a lot of other, a lot of other demand that we call hidden demand, which involves when we arrest people and they're injured, they have to take to hospital and sit with them until they're fit and ready to come out of hospital."
DCC Dibdin said the Force investigates around 43,000 crimes per year and admitted that officer numbers are short of what would be ideally needed to deal with that level of demand.
"We think we're probably a couple of hundred short of where we'd want to be in an ideal world," he said.
The DCC added: "We know we're getting an increase again this year following from the recent uplift, but it doesn't mean that we don't try and make sure that we meet our demand in as many ways as we possibly can."
He said the Force is looking to innovate in order to help it's current officers achieve the best possible results.
"We're looking to use artificial intelligence more we're using to use robotics more so that we can be smarter at the front end to reduce the demand and make better use of the officers and staff that we have got," DCC Dibdin said.
He added: "We'd always like a few more, but we have got as many officers now in Wiltshire as we have had for the last 15 years and we're working really hard to get those officers deployed more smartly and making better use of technology to enable the officers. We do have to meet the demand we do get."