Profile: Chief Inspector in charge of policing in South Bucks

CI Cook, 47, is a busy man. On the day I met him he had got into his office at Burnham Police Station at 6.45am, and admitted that he is usually working for twelve hours a day.
CI Cook is responsible for 36 police and community support officers in neighbourhood teams who walk the beat in towns and villages, 43 police in reactive patrol teams who respond to emergencies and 18 officers in CID and priority crime investigation teams.
He starts each day by reviewing every crime that took place in the previous 24 hours.
He asks me how many I think that is, given that South Bucks has a population of 64,000. I guess ten each of burglaries, car crime and other crimes.
He says: "You see, this is what most people think, that crime levels are high. When I do talks to the business community they often think there are 50 crimes per day. But actually crime is very low in South Bucks."
He points to a whiteboard which states that on average each day there currently two burglaries, one stolen car and two cars broken into in South Bucks with other crime such as assault happening less frequently. He adds: "The fear of crime is much higher than the level of crime."
I notice that around his room are cards, pictures and notes from his family, including a photograph of his law lecturer wife Sarah on their wedding day. He has four children, boys aged 12 and ten and twins aged nine, a boy and a girl. A card says he is the best dad in the world.
CI Cook would prefer to talk about the crime figures, which are down a massive 19 per cent in South Bucks from April to November 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. Theft of vehicles, for which two men were jailed last month following a spree of thefts in Gerrards Cross, Denham and Seer Green last summer, is down 31 per cent.
He explains that in 2005 police nationally shifted their focus towards preventing crime rather than simply catching criminals, and this has resulted in year on year reductions in crime nationally, with crime in South Bucks falling faster than in most places, despite the recession, according to the British Crime Survey.
He says: "It's about making sure that crime doesn't happen in the first place, and we run a whole host of initiatives in partnership with South Bucks and Neighbourhood Watch to achieve this.
"It drives us made when people report thefts and say that they left a door open, or left a handbag on the front seat.
"Most criminals are opportunists. If your house or car is hard to get into, your house has security lights, your car has a tracker, and your property is marked, and the guy is still prepared to break in, then he'll leave so many clues that the chances are we'll catch him. But if you leave a door open, we've got nothing to go on."
CI Cook has been in the post for three months, having previously worked in the Public Protection Unit. He's been a police officer for 25 years. Brought up in Perivale, West London, he left school at 16 and worked in a warehouse, for the AA, and labouring, before joining the police.
I ask how he'll spend the rest of the day. This morning he held a daily meeting with key managers for a review of on-going investigations and a daily conference via video link with his counterparts elsewhere in the Thames Valley Police region - he is one of 16 local area commanders - to talk about strategic issues or cross border investigations.
After lunch - a sandwich and fruit at his desk - he's meeting his Neighbourhood Police Teams who are based at Beaconsfield, Gerrards Cross and Iver police stations. He'll be back to the office later to catch up and will leave around 7pm, because tonight he doesn't have an evening engagement, although at least once a week he attends a town council meeting or similar.
On his way home to Berkshire he'll listen to Five Live or Radio Four, to catch up with the news, but he he's "really feeling wild" he'll turn on Led Zeppelin. At the weekend, to unwind, he'll do some off-road cycling.

This article to be published in The Advertiser on Jan 7 with photograph.