GMP celebrates national Response Policing Week of Action

This week marks Response Policing Week of Action – a time in which we are celebrating response policing and those who work within it.

While we are of course looking at ourselves as a force, the week is marked nationwide and pays tribute to the thousands of response officers across the UK.

We want to show you the hard work, dedication, and professionalism of our response officers and those who contribute to our response service throughout the week.

We will be sharing plenty of content to showcase those officers, their stories, and what they do every single day. By the end of the week, you may well fancy becoming a response officer!

There are more than 2,100 response officers when GMP is at full-strength, each serving different areas across the borough and responding to everything from burglaries and robberies, to fights and car accidents. In the force’s most recent attestation ceremony, 99 new officers joined the ranks of GMP, ready for their new career in response policing.

There are thousands of 999 calls to GMP across any given week and stats from the beginning of the month show that we have been averaging around four seconds on answering them – an important stat as we strive to get out as fast as we can.

From there, the call is rapidly handed to the relevant district and team, who will be able to handle the incident appropriately. Grade 1 responses require immediate action, and those are the jobs you will likely see when officers are speeding past with their blue lights on.

Response officers deal with everything and anything, and through our content this week, you will be able to learn more about response policing and the people who work within it.

The below shows the number of incidents GMP has recorded over the last month (May 2023) and past year (June 2022 - May 2023), including those marked as Grade 1 and Grade 2 response, which will see response officers leap into action. It also shows the incident type they are most likely to face on any given day. 

Assistant Chief Constable Matthew Boyle said: “Our response officers are often the youngest in service and yet the first to respond to danger, in doing so they display bravery, commitment and professionalism in challenging circumstances.

“The Response Policing Week of Action is an opportunity for us to recognise and draw attention to the work that our Response Officers and supporting teams do every hour of every day to keep our communities safe.

“I would like to say thank you personally and on behalf GMP”.

This week is all about showing you what our brilliant response officers do – keep an eye out for our hashtag #ResponsePolicingWeek.