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14
Dec
How many bobbies on the beat are there in the Harrogate district?
In April, Keir Starmer announced plans to put 13,000 more neighbourhood bobbies on the beat by 2029.
The Prime Minister said the move would restore confidence in policing and make people feel safer.
But how many police officers currently patrol the streets in the Harrogate district?
The Stray Ferret has spent several weeks trying to find out.
We sent a freedom of information request to North Yorkshire Police in September asking how many days, or person hours, in each of the last five years, police officers have been on foot patrol in each of the following places: Harrogate, Ripon, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, Pateley Bridge and Masham.
Almost two months after submitting the request, a legal officer at the force replied to say “no information held”.
'A major priority'
We questioned North Yorkshire Police’s press office on why the information wasn’t available and whether its officers conducted foot patrols.
Assistant chief constable Catherine Clarke replied saying neighbourhood policing was “a major priority” and the constabulary had recently conducted a neighbourhood policing review. You can read more here.
But she added:
Day-to-day patrols whether on foot, in vehicles or cycles are not routinely recorded. However, officer locations are tracked through GPS at all times for their own safety, resourcing and to aid investigations.
The exception to this is patrols that form part of Project Hotspot, a Home Office-funded programme to provide additional patrols targeting antisocial behaviour in identified hotspots.
Assistant chief constable Catherine Clarke
Project Hotspot, which began in April 2024, involves “additional patrols over and above normal patrols” in targeted areas, according to North Yorkshire Police.
The table below gives the figures for Low and High Harrogate from 1 July to November 27.
Police figures for Project Hotspot
We asked Councillor Chris Aldred, a member of the North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Panel, which scrutinises the performance of local emergency services, whether he was surprised to discover there were no hard figures for foot patrols.
Cllr Aldred, a Liberal Democrat who represents High Harrogate and Kingsley on North Yorkshire Council, said he was initially surprised figures weren’t available considering the frequency with which politicians and the police referred to bobbies on the beat.
But he added that on reflection it largely boiled down to how foot patrols are measured and defined, and they were likely to be less useful in large rural constabularies such as North Yorkshire.
Cllr Aldred added:
In urban areas such as Harrogate and Knaresborough, foot patrols can be more effective and you would expect to see them, and I do, certainly in our town centres. But I have no idea what the police I see on foot in our town centres are actually doing.
I can see why no easy figure can be given. It doesn’t stop people calling for more bobbies on the beat though. We may think we are all calling for the same thing, when we’re doing this but I bet we’re not.
It would be great for statistics, if policing were to be undertaken against agreed targets and tick boxes, but in reality I suspect policing priorities are messy, changing day-by-day and hour-by-hour and we, as citizens, have to give a certain amount of leeway to the inspectors and superintendents doing their best to deliver for the public, to be able to change priorities as they see fit.
Officers taking part in Project Spotlight, which tackles anti-social behaviour, in Harrogate.
We asked the College of Policing, the professional body for police in England and Wales, if it was normal for police forces not to record foot patrols.
It said it had a neighbourhood policing programme, which you can read more about here, but “as your enquiry involves operation policing, it would be for the force to comment on these operational decisions rather than us”.
It seems that although the government gives numbers for bobbies on the beat, trying to drill down for figures locally is not easy.
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