Meet the officers helping to keep Essex safe 365 days a year

A desire to help people, keep them safe and make a difference are the main reasons our response officers love their job.

And they have plenty of opportunities to do this as they look after the people of Essex round the clock, 365 days a year.

From burglaries to domestic disputes, from concerns for safety and sudden deaths to reports of missing people, from anti-social behaviour and criminal damage to assaults and dealing with the results of poor & dangerous driving, the majority of emergencies are first attended by response officers on our local policing teams.

One of those teams is Southend Local Policing Team, which covers the entire district of Southend.

Inspector Emma Wells has been a response officer for 16 years, transferring to Essex Police in 2020 from Kent.

She says:

“Local policing teams are really important because generally they are always there first.
“Our local policing teams are the face of Essex Police. They are the officers most people interact with and they are out there all the time.
“They’re there first for people in mental health crisis, missing people and at critical incidents. They attend a wide range of incidents, from anti-social behaviour, particularly involving groups along the seafront, and even fires, which we see mainly in industrial units.
“They are so versatile and have a really broad range of policing knowledge, experience and communication skills.
“Response officers could be showing compassion to a family at a sudden death, at the most traumatic time for that family, and then they might be called to attend an incident of anti-social behaviour or reports of shoplifting.
“They can be dealing with people who are really vulnerable, elderly or young and, five minutes later, they could be facing someone threatening them with a knife.
“They are dealing with trauma every day so my job, and that of my sergeants is to make sure they are OK. I check my sergeants are OK and they check I’m OK.”

PC Chris Short grew up with respect for the police because his grandfather served with Essex Police in the 1960s. He’s been a response officer for six years, the past five on Southend Local Policing Team.

As well as wanting to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, Chris says it’s the variety which attracts him to the job.

“You never know what you’re coming in to. One minute you’ll be undertaking investigations, the next you’ll be running out to the car to attend an emergency.
“I get to meet a lot of people and I get to help people. That’s the most rewarding part of it – actually helping people and trying to make a difference.
“A typical day is really varied. We can attend anything from domestic incidents, road traffic collisions, and burglaries to anti-social behaviour, assaults and concerns for a person’s safety or we can be looking for missing people.
“We always want to get to incidents as quickly as we can to give us the best chance of arresting whoever’s done it and gathering important evidence.”

In the 12 months to 31 May our officers attended nearly 80,000 emergency incidents and almost 177,000 incidents in total – often dealing with people who are having the worst day of their lives.

If a crime has occurred, response officers will often be the ones to investigate it. And Chris says CCTV can be vital.

Fortunately, all teams in Southend have a good working relationship with the city council’s CCTV team.

Chris says:

“A lot of the time, they’ll call us if they think they can help with a job or we will call them to ask them to take a sweep over a certain area if we are searching for a missing person or need to see what is happening there.”

More complex inquiries – such as house burglaries, assaults causing grievous bodily harm and robberies involving knives – are handed over to CID although, often, the local policing team will have conducted initial investigations at the scene.

We also have teams of specialist detectives who investigate domestic abuse and violence, sexual assaults, child abuse and, of course, homicides.

While reports of hate-related incidents and community issues will be investigated by community policing team officers, often working with local councils and other partner agencies to resolve them.

One incident which sticks in Chris’s mind is a call to a fire in a block of flats.

“We arrived and I just ran in and started banging on doors to evacuate the block and hold the fort until the fire engines arrived.
“Fortunately, the flat where the fire started was empty at the time and we were able to get everyone else out safely.”

Every shift is busy but, if they have time between incidents, local policing officers go out on proactive patrol to engage with the public and build neighbourhood links.

Across Essex in the past five years, reported crime has dropped by 7.3% overall and incidents of anti-social behaviour have decreased by two-thirds (65.96%).

Burglaries have reduced by 42.34%, robberies by 20.39% and vehicle thefts by 15.67%.

In Southend, the figures show corresponding decreases: reported crime overall in the district has fallen by 11.54%, anti-social behaviour by 11.54%, robbery by 13.88%, burglary by 43.72% and vehicle thefts by 43.38%.

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