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About Us
Introduction
West Midlands Police is the second largest police force in the country, covering an area of 348 square miles and serving a population of almost 2.8 million.
The region sits at the very heart of the country and covers the three major centres of Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton. It also includes the busy and thriving districts of Sandwell, Walsall, Solihull and Dudley. Leisure, retail and conference amenities, together with Premiership and Championship football teams, attract millions of visitors annually.
The West Midlands is an area rich in diversity, with 18 per cent of its population from ethnic minority backgrounds.
An average of 170,000 motorists travel through the region daily, making its motorways some of the busiest in Europe.
Against this backdrop, the force deals with more than 2,000 emergency calls for help every day, as well as patrolling the streets and responding to incidents 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week.
Our Vision, Values and Behaviour
Traditionally, police forces have measured how they are performing by purely focusing on crime data – how many offences have taken place and if crime has gone up or down.
From April 2011, West Midlands Police took the decision to move away from this sort of counting and introduced a new way of judging its performance against a framework based on what the public tell us they want from their police service. This new way of measuring our performance is based on our vision, our values and the behaviours we expect of staff.
By adopting these three layers, we believe we can increase the public’s trust and confidence in us, improve the quality of service we provide and better protect our communities from harm.
Our vision is to serve our communities and protect them from harm. This is at the very core of what we do.
Our values inform how we want to achieve our vision. Our values are:
- to put the public first in everything we do
- to act with integrity, fairness and humanity
- to operate as one team working together
- to ensure we listen, learn and strive to improve
To do the right thing and deliver a service that our friends and family would be proud of.
The next part of our new performance framework looks at our behaviours - the behaviours that we want staff to display and demonstrate at all times:
- Doing the right thing - things that keep people safe, like catching offenders
- Keeping our promises - making sure we do the things we say we will
- Involving the public - making sure we look at ways of getting more people involved
- Involving our staff - making sure we get our staff involved
- Being productive and efficient - making sure we really make the best use of our time and our resources
For more information about how we judge our performance, and the type of activities we believe are critical for achieving the public’s support, please click here.
Our Structure
The force is divided into 10 local policing units (LPUs), each headed by a Chief Superintendent who is responsible for the overall policing and management of the area.
The 10 LPUs are divided into 171 neighbourhoods, each policed by a dedicated neighbourhood team consisting of police officers, police community support officers and special constables. Neighbourhood policing is supported by a range of forcewide specialist teams.
