[holding answer 22 May 2007]: The information requested is not collected centrally in the police personnel statistics. The available information is the number of police officers and police staff who are primarily involved in the function “scenes of crime”. These data are given in the following table.
The “scenes of crime” function refers to those staff who are predominately employed in providing scientific support, or supporting those who provide scientific support, including scenes of crime officers, their supervisors and those engaged in administrative duties relating thereto.
Total number of officers/staff Percentage of civilian staff in total number Avon and Somerset 73 100 Bedfordshire 42 100 Cambridgeshire 0 — Cheshire 41 100 Cleveland 36 75 Cumbria 34 100 Derbyshire 62 100 Devon and Cornwall 75 89 Dorset 33 94 Durham 38 97 Essex 72 34 Gloucestershire4 8 — Greater Manchester 145 95 Hampshire 103 66 Hertfordshire 54 94 Humberside 51 86 Kent 95 100 Lancashire 74 93 Leicestershire 46 100 Lincolnshire 0 — London, City of 13 54 Merseyside 89 92 Metropolitan Police 732 92 Norfolk 40 100 Northamptonshire 42 100 Northumbria 70 62 North Yorkshire 36 95 Nottinghamshire 51 100 South Yorkshire 78 74 Staffordshire 50 100 Suffolk 24 100 Surrey 48 100 Sussex 81 92 Thames Valley 92 98 Warwickshire 21 100 West Mercia 56 100 West Midlands4 2 — West Yorkshire 146 97 Wiltshire 26 96 Dyfed-Powys 13 52 Gwent 39 62 North Wales4 0 — South Wales 36 3 1 Staff with multiple responsibilities (or designations) are recorded under their primary role or function. The deployment of police officers is an operational matter for individual chief constables. 2 Overall force totals including those on career breaks or maternity/paternity leave. The data in the function breakdown are from unpublished sources and therefore totals may not match totals found in the published data. 3 This table contains full-time equivalent figures that have been rounded to the nearest whole number. Because of rounding, there may be an apparent discrepancy between the totals in this table and totals in similar published tables. 4 Data are not available for police staff only.