What makes a chief constable?

There was a certain irony to be observed recently when a national newspaper ran a feature suggesting that the nation's Chief Constables were more a collection of degree-holding social scientists than a group of thief-takers and grass roots policemen.

Especially when you consider the career of Oxfordshire's top cop, Charles Pollard, who, earlier this year called on the experience gained during his 36 years in the force when he encountered a blazing car on the A34 Oxford bypass near Botley. While his driver helped tackle the fire, the Chief Constable organised traffic officers and the fire brigade to attend - and then got out and began to direct the traffic himself.

"It was my duty to assist as best as I could until specialist traffic officers arrived," he said at the time.

Sitting in his imposing office at Thames Valley Police's Kidlington HQ, Charles Pollard, at 54, looks every inch the distinguished senior policeman. He's also a distinguished senior policeman with an Honours Degree in Law.

Thames Valley is the largest non-Metropolitan force in England and Wales, with 6,000 staff and a revenue budget of 238m. Charles Pollard has been in charge of all this since January, 1991. Before he arrived in Oxfordshire, his career had already taken him to the Met, at a time when the IRA was trying hard to bring the British government to its knees with a central London bombing campaign.

Charles Pollard - then a Chief Superintendent with the Operational Support Branch - was also at the forefront of the policing of the Brighton hotel bombing by the IRA which almost wiped out a Prime Minister and her Cabinet and the senior officer in command of the police operation in the 1987 Hungerford massacre.

A father-of-three, his own upbringing included a strong family tradition of service, mainly in the RAF and it was this, he says, which steered him towards a career in the police force. "I wanted to do public service rather than make lots of money," he says candidly. "The ethos of service was a family value and by joining the police, I could engage with the public directly. "

At the time of writing, a decision on the funding of the Thames Valley force had yet to be made and while Charles Pollard agrees that it isn't fair that Oxfordshire, as a predomiantly rural county, could miss out financially because it forms part of Thames Valley as a whole, he has hopes that things will improve, while pointing out that comparitively, Oxfordshire has no high level of crime - and therefore no need for higher funding.

"Ministers," he says, "are under no illusions." As a member of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, juvenile crime is a problem which greatly concerns him.

"It's all about holding young offenders to account," he explains. "Instead of having a multiple cautions system, they are now given a reprimand, a final warning and then taken to court. It's a more sharply focused system and we will see a significant reduction over time on crime committed by young people."

"The courts get a lot of flak for not imprisoning more people for longer terms - but the numbers are more or less right."

But did he think that prisons were more like 'universities of crime', turning out a cleverer class of criminal? "This is a difficult one to answer," the Chief Constable replies. "Prisons have several functions and the criminals who are inside by and large are the right ones to be there. Some will learn the tricks of the trade while they are there, but we must strike a balance - if a criminal is inside, he can't commit crimes against the public - and hopefully, we can stop some of them from reoffending."

Drugs, of course remain a major worry to parents and a continuing issue to the police. Did he believe that cannabis, for example, should be decriminalised? "No, I don't think the case has been made for that - but in enforcing any law, we have to exercise discretion - we have to, because we haven't got the resources to enforce all the laws anyway." With football hooliganism recently having reared its cropped and ugly head yet again, Charles Pollard is in no doubt about the only way to treat it: "Very firmly. The cause goes deeper, of course - there is a whole degree of criminality in the UK which we can recognise, a change of attitudes in society. It's a very difficult question to answer but we have to be very firm in dealing with the problem. In the Thames Valley, we are regarded as being very good at dealing with it - because we have the officers out there."

"Parents today worry about their children falling into bad company with people who have low standards of behaviour regarding drugs or alcohol, people who have had a disruptive upbringing.

"The police are here to reduce crime and be visible on the streets and to reduce the fear of crime - to detect it and arrest criminals is one part of a wider objective." Lessons, he says, were learned during the costly and long-running Hillgrove cat farm demonstrations.

"This was a new type of event to police in a rural setting," the Chief Constable explains. "We got most of it right. It was about an ongoing siuation and we were very clear from the start that there could be no threat to anyone's livelihood - the farmer concerned had a Home Office licence; suppose he'd been a butcher or had owned a garage? It was very serious.

"That's why we're very firm. We made some mistakes but I think we did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances."

Which more or less sums up the qualities required in a Chief Constable - whether they possess degrees in social science ot not. It always comes back to being a good old fashioned copper.