What should be done to increase diversity in the police? How do we get a much higher proportion of women / BAME / LGBT officers so that the police look far more like the communities they serve?
I think it's about generational attitudes. Although there's still a misogynist culture, its better than it was ten, twenty years ago and I think we're already getting more women in the police. My intake was probably 40% female so still not enough to be representative of society but getting there. The team I'm on is 65% female.
I think for BME and LGBT, we need to earn their trust before we try and get them to join. It's all well and good having campaigns with BME officers on posters and stuff but the pain fact is, if people don't trust you then the thought of joining you isn't going to cross their mind. Things like the Stephen Lawrence inquiry are still fresh and the people that have been affected by racial profiling, or discrimination because of LGBT issues, are going to teach their kids that police are people to stay away from (and I'm not blaming them at all). We need to get the trust back so that we become a viable option for people and that's a long term thing, there's no quick fix.
Did you feel prepared in terms of safety after your training?
No 
that was my own worries though. When I was fresh out of training I was terrified about having my first physical conflict situation. When it happened, all my training came back to me straight away. I didn't have to think about it, I just moved automatically. So I didn't feel prepared, but I was, if that makes sense?
Are you often on patrol on your own?
Yes, my force routinely single crews officers as policy. However we look out for each other - we listen to the radio, if someone is going to a griefy sounding job we'll back them up, if someone is dealing with something and you get that "feeling" from their updates or location that something is going to happen, units start floating in their direction so that they're closer if need be. Doesn't always work, there's been assistance shouts (where an officer presses their emergency button) and there's been no one close by to attend. Officers will of course still attend, they don't just go "oh I'm not close by never mind", it's just that they could be coming from 20/30 miles away. We do the best we can with what we've got.
Hollow When you call 999 you go through to a central call centre that's used purely for connecting you to a service. There's one in Glasgow and one in Bangor - there might be more but those are the two that I remember (always introduce the call as "Glasgow connecting" or "Bangor connecting"). To put that in perspective, I work in the South East, so our callers would be put through to Scotland or Wales first and asked which service they require. Once they've requested a service, the operator then puts them through to the local service. In my area, we have three call centres, so you're not being put through to the local station, just another centralised call centre that's somewhere in the force. The call talker will take details and pass a job to a controller, who may or may not be in the same office as them. We have two control rooms, so officers are typically being dispatched by an operator who could be sat 50 miles away in a completely different town.
When on the phone, we can't hang up unless it's a time wasting call. If someone needs help, you stay on the phone and try to help them. You can't hang up because you don't like what you hear, so if someone is getting hurt on the other end of the phone, or they are trapped in a fire situation, you have to stay on and try to help them. You can hear some horrible stuff, call takers have unfortunately listened to people die over the phone.
In relation to Grenfell though I don't know if they would have stayed on the phone. I don't know what their staffing levels were like so it could be that while usually they would stay on the phone and try to offer reassurance, they were unable to in that instance because of the sheer volume of calls coming in.