Inspector Stacey Pope

My name is Stacey Pope – I'm one of your Local Policing Community Inspectors in St Helens.  Because it’s Neighbourhood Policing Week – which is where we try to encourage you all to get to know your Local Policing team a bit better – I’d like to share a bit about myself and what I do with you. 

As a child I wanted to be one of three things: an architect, a police officer or a solicitor.  

That being said, I struggled to draw even the most basic of houses, and following some incredibly dry work experience with a solicitor’s firm when I was in year 10, I made the decision there and then that a career in policing was for me. I joined in 2003. 

Fresh out of university, I started my career in Walton, and was promoted to Sergeant in 2010.  It seemed like I was going to have a steadily progressive career in Local Policing – which I loved – but then my health took a turn.  

Affected by mobility issues I was diagnosed with hypermobility syndrome and osteoarthritis, I was posted to a resource management role and involved in business change projects. It was closer than I’d envisioned, or wanted to be, to my childhood ambition of being a solicitor.  I wanted to be in an operational, local policing role, making a tangible difference to an area – to a community of people.   

Fastforward to 2022 (post three lots of hip-surgery, learning how to walk again, suffering prolapsed discs and further rhematic conditions), here I am in St Helens, happily immersed in local policing again! Sometimes life takes you on a detour – but it all works out in the end. 

Every day looks different – but usually starts the same way: identifying threat, harm and risk to the St Helens community.  Are there any new crime patterns I can identify? Are there are new vulnerable people that need our help? If so, what can we do with our partners to support them? Are my team out there doing the things that the people in St Helens tell us they want us doing? Every single day should be about changing lives for the better.  

Here in St Helens we're one of the most deprived area in the country with a higher than average number of families who really struggle financially, with support and need more care and interventions. We have children who suffered traumatic adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) which negatively affect who they become and what they go on to do in life. These families are more prone to criminal exploitation so we need to intervene early and help them on the right path. But we can't do it alone.   

We need communities to come together and tell us. Tell us what’s going on in your area. Tell us who’s responsible.  Let us help.  

I’m so grateful that a lot of you are already working with us like this.  You’ve worked with us to tackle antisocial behaviour, as well as ketamine use, supply and exploitation in the St Helens area.  You also work with us, not just as individuals, but as members of charities and agency professionals.  The St Helens Connects event, which saw 30 partner agencies come together to promote the work they already conduct and raise awareness of the help that’s out there was so successful that now, it’s become an annual event.  

If you want to know more about what we, your local policing team, are doing, give us a follow on the St Helens Policing Facebook page.  Or come and say hi at one of our surgeries.  

Thank you for being such an amazing community to be a part of.