AS A YOUNG boy growing up in Springfield, Stephen Kavanagh used to annoy the chief constable's wife by kicking a ball against a wall at police HQ so loudly that it used to make her dog bark uncontrollably.
But he never dreamed he would return 40 years later to lead the same force and its 10,000 staff through one of the most radical overhauls since it was founded more than 150 years ago.
"My father served for 30 odd years in Essex Police and I used to play football on the back wall here at HQ when I lived in Kingston Crescent and Lady Nightingale, the wife of the then chief constable, used to come out and tell us off for making her dogs bark," he told the Chronicle.
"This is the ultimate role for me having been born and brought up in the county, to actually be responsible for the force."
But the 48-year-old married father-of-one, who lives in Chelmsford, has a tough task ahead. In the past 12 months, he has overseen £42 million of cuts, resulting in the loss of 388 officers, 100 Police Community Support Officers and 600 support staff.
And this week he met with chief officers to discuss where the force can find another £27.4 million of savings by April 2017 to offset the reduced funding from central government.
Unison, the union responsible for PCSOs, warned recently that a 28 per cent drop in the number of PCSOs patrolling the streets of Essex in the past four years will undoubtedly lead to a rise in crime.
The £192,000-a-year officer said: "The reality is Essex police is one of the cheapest forces in the country.
"If you look at the precept and the history of no investment into the force, if you look at the estate and the IT, we are delivering in spite of processes rather than because of them.
"But our job is to say that out of those savings some of them can be found from efficiency. We're using technology better and we are trying to use intelligence more.
"The point is some of this is going to be reduction, we are going to reduce the number of officers further, we are reducing PCSOs and police staff, but until I can turn round to the Police and Crime Commissioner and say I am as efficient as I can be, then I've got to be very careful."
But while admitting there is uncertainty in the force about the future, when so many more staff are facing job losses, there are plans to introduce "local response teams" – moving away from a centralised model where everything is orchestrated and dealt with from Chelmsford.
He has already introduced three Crime Investigation Departments (CID) serving the county, and now wants to make those teams responsible for response to call outs too.
He says it could make the force much more locally-driven, while saving time, money and precious resources, although the plan is yet to be given the go ahead.
But it will be a far cry from the Dixon of Dock Green approach of local bobbies on the beat.
"We can't go that far because you can't with the number of people we've lost," said the chief, who was educated at Perryfields and then Boswells.
"I know the visibility of PCSOs now is much less than we had three years ago, but what it does mean is the people responding to 999 calls and CID know their areas more."
Mr Kavanagh, who met 800 senior staff in his first six weeks in charge and has weekly meetings with the chief officers, pointed to three recent Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) reports that praised the force's improvements in responding to domestic violence cases after much criticism over the past few years following the deaths of three women, and the improvements it had made in its custody suites.
He also applauded the force's accuracy in recording crime data – making it the second best force that had been examined in the country – in the wake of an HMIC report last week that said tens of thousands of offences across the country, a fifth of crimes, could be going unrecorded. Of 73 incidents examined by HMIC, five were incorrectly recorded as "no crime".
Meanwhile 120 crimes examined revealed 110 were recorded correctly – around 92 per cent.
He also said the force had conducted a staff survey for the first time in five years, while he had made greater strides in his bid to share more information with partnership agencies, like local councils and social services to protect the public.
"The next person who sues Essex police for information issues should be a violent thug who we've shared information on, or a sex offender where we've warned a woman he's now grooming so he can get access to her children, not the grieving family of a domestic abuse victim," he said
"We have got to be braver about how we share information."
Around 400 officers now have body cameras to film at domestic violence scenes in a bid to capture vital evidence to help in prosecutions where the victim may be too frightened to give evidence against an abusive partner or it is simply one word against another's.
Mr Kavanagh says the cameras have already led to 120 prosecutions where the victim was unwilling to give evidence.
And in the run-up to Christmas last year, the force visited 50 of the county's most violent domestic abusers to warn them that if they stepped out of line they would face it behind bars.
"There was not one incident involving those abusers or their partners," Mr Kavanagh said.
"In the last 12 months after we've made £42m of cuts, we've seen more people arrested and convicted, crime is lower than it was, for the first time in 16 years it's below 100,000, and satisfaction is up too," he added.
"Now if we can do that with those savings, it's going to be difficult, but when you use intelligence, technology and when you have a confident work force, guess what?
"We will do the very best with what we're given.
"The people of Essex don't want us to sit back and feel sorry for ourselves, we're public servants, it's very difficult to be made redundant. We have job security so our job is to do our best regardless of the circumstances.
"I would like more officers, I would like more technology and a more modern estate, but my job isn't to moan about what I've been given, it's to do the best with the officers and staff at my disposal.
"And from what I've seen in the past 12 months, the men and women of Essex police are up for that challenge."
