ONE of Britain’s most senior police officers told a conference he had “yet to be persuaded” those who inspect the police had caught up with a “fundamentally different way of doing business”.

In his opening address to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire today (Tuesday, June 17) president Sir Hugh Orde outlined some of the successes and challenges facing policing.

He referred to the “frustration” among senior colleagues at the recent controversy over crime statistics and accusations that some were being under-recorded. He described it as reducing the “complexity of policing to a binary level".

He cited an example of how one police force was taken to task for incident where three boys bared their bottoms to passing traffic, which according to the policing inspectorate, HMIC, should have been recorded as a crime.

He told the conference: “If my eight-year-old had behaved in a similar way I would be entirely satisfied and indeed grateful to the officer. But apparently, (according to HMI) that should have been recorded as a crime.”

He said chief officers were having to make choices in how they deployed their resources against increasing demand.

He said: “To be clear, policing is not funded in a way to deliver everything, and any such assumption is deeply flawed.”

The three-day conference, at Harrogate International Centre, featured a welcome address by North Yorkshire Police’s Chief Constable Dave Jones and the county’s Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan.