Kim McGuinness, Police and Crime Commissioner
Kim McGuiness was elected as Northumbria’s Police and Crime Commissioner in 2021. She works tirelessly to improve the safety of communities in the NE, to increase the number of police officers and to reduce crime, especially anti-social behaviour and violent crime, including knife crime and violence against women and girls.
People here in the North East tell me they want more police officers out on the streets, in the heart of our communities. I’m with you on that. To deliver this though, we need the Government to properly fund local policing and fully reverse the cuts and lost officers stretching back to 2010.
Just like our councils and NHS, I’ve called on Government to rethink how we back our essential public services, but those pleas have fallen on deaf ears, and we’re left facing difficult financial choices in the Northumbria force area.
Next year alone we face having to find £11m in savings as a result of rising inflation and pay costs – extra pressures the Home Office has refused to fund.
The good news though is that we’re restructuring the force to give you more of what you want – and that means 134 new neighbourhood officers will be out policing local communities soon, the largest single increase in our neighbourhood policing numbers in a generation. I’ll be setting out more details of these plans in the coming months.
