Fraud Investigation (1107A/21)
Request
How many officers in your force are dedicated to investigating fraud?
How many officers are in your force in total?
Can I please have an annual breakdown for each of the last 10 calendar years (up to and including 2021) to show the running total of how many officers on the force were dedicated to fraud. For each of those years, please also detail how many were recruited to fight fraud, and how many left the fraud team. Please also breakdown the reason why those officers left the fraud team – for example, did they retire, step back on medical leave, or were they moved on to a different team?
Response
Please find attached (1107A_21_attachment.pdf) which includes a summary explanation of numbers to explain large drop which is due to officers previously being in more general roles. In terms of joiners, we don’t really have police officer joiners going into specialist roles straight away so any individuals joining the team would be due to internal moves.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.