AC (3) 1.1 Practice Assessment Question (45 minutes)
AC 1.1 Evaluate the effectiveness of the roles of personnel involved in
criminal investigations.
During a criminal investigation, the police are the first to arrive at a scene and
record a crime. A police officer may conduct an entire investigation, assist the
investigation or be assisted by the investigator, this may depend on the severity of
the case. Moreover, patrol officers arrest the culprit, as well as locate and interview
witnesses. Lastly, police officers may collect and preserve evidence. As well as this,
police also attend court and give evidence.
Firstly, a strength of the role of a police officer is their salary which is between
£21,000 - £60,000, which is government funded by the tax-payer, meaning the
taxpayer is looking for their money to be used effectively. The 2023 budget being
£16.987 billion which is extremely effective as police need to be able to use their
resources efficiently everyday. Moreover, this allows police officers to allow high
profile cases to have high budgets; an example of this would be the Sarah Payne
case, Sussex police spent nearly £2 million on wages for 910 police officers and 112
staff, which included detectives, detectives inspectors and detective superintendent.
As well as this, other costs, including vehicles, came to £430,000. However, the police
do have limitations, in terms of costs, their budget has been subject to cuts from the
government. It has been cut 15% in recent years, this means that low priority crimes
are often unreported or unrecorded and this therefore results in a dark figure of
crime. This is where crimes are often overlooked due to a lack of resources and
therefore are not included in official statistics. This is worrying as a true picture of
crime is not reflected and the government cannot take actions to fulfil society's
crime busting demand.
Linking to this another strength of the police would be their availability, the police
are able to be contacted 24/7 and the police work on average 40 hours a week.
Their strengths are evident within the Sarah Payne case, as 1,022 police staff
contributed to this case, as well as £800,000 spent on overtime as officers carried
out their search for Sarah. This demonstrates the police are able to have a large
availability and use this to their strengths. However, their amount of staff has
decreased and the amount being made redundant has increased. In 2010 the police
had 79,500 staff, which then decreased in 2016, with only 61,668. This is damaging as
cases will have less support. As well as this, after a 999 call, if it is a serious threat
the police can take up to 60 minutes to arrive at the scene, and up to 11 hours and
33 minutes to a non urgent case. This could make it harder to catch the offender as
they have time to evacuate the scene and destroy evidence. Another weakness is
