Many calls for assistance received by the police are issues of non-emergency, and with public spending cuts ever-present, there is need to revisit the uses of a single nonemergency number (SNEN) as a way to reduce the non-emergency call volume. This paper is a review of one local service in England. We examine the need and development of SNEN, report the findings of our own research, and conclude that a service such as SNEN is a worthwhile approach that helps reduce the number of inappropriate calls to the police, increases access to services and reduces fear regarding low-level disorder.

This study examines in depth a group that is very difficult to get access to, and from which, arguably, it is harder still to get frank responses in the context of roles, attitudes and responsibilities, that is, chief police officers (from Assistant Chief Constable 'up'). Bryn Caless has approached this not just as an academic, but also, I would argue, as an 'insider-outsider' researcher in that in a previous life he spent 10 years as Director of Human Resources for Kent Police. So, to some extent, he has been able to obtain 'privileged access' to a very elite group.It has been a while since something of this nature has been attempted, with perhaps Robert Reiner's 1991 study Chief Constables: Bobbies, Bosses or Bureaucrats being the most obvious precursor. More recently, in policy terms, there has been the seminal work on the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) by Steve Savage, Sarah Charman and Steve Cope, entitled Policing and the Powers of Persuasion: The Changing Role of the Association of Chief Police Officers (2000). However, that focused more perhaps on the role of ACPO as a policy group/policy network. Bryn Caless's work does not seek to cover that ground, and perhaps has its roots in Reiner's seminal but now quite outdated piece. Caless's book gets us back to the contemporary world of the Chief Police Officer with a vengeance, albeit at a particular moment in time given the rapid changes that are currently facing chief police officers. Not least of these was the Home Secretary's broad acceptance on 15 December 2011 of many of the elements of Peter Neyroud's review of police leadership and the concept of an 'institute of policing' underpinning a move towards a notion of police professionalism and leadership.What Caless has been able to achieve here, through questionnaires and direct interviews with 43.