The Japanese Police.

Today I visited a Japanese police box and the Wakayama District Headquarters. This was quite an experience and a surprise. The Japanese Police in Wakayama are very much like our own and are working hard to integrate community orientated policing. They have senior policemen who man the small police boxes scattered around the area and many officers, 61 working from the main headquarters.

The Commander agreed to answer my many questions and greatly helped to improve my understanding of the Japanese police including giving me some statistics to take home and compare with our own.

They have a detection rate as of last year of about 21% but even though that sounds low they only had just over 500 crimes reported and the majority of them were bicycle thefts!!

Just before I left there were over 1000 reported crimes in Newport.

The population however is quite different and needs to be taken into account (Newport approx 150,000 Wakayama approx 400,000) but their methods are very close to ours. I was surprised to learn that the Japanese Police were all armed, having been under the impression only certain officers like our own at home were. But each has a small service revolver and the rest of the kit is almost the same as ours.

They also don't have many specialist small units but train a lot of officers to be multi skilled. They have a CID department, dogs and helicoptor but don't seem to have squads to deal with other crime issues. Police here also join the force at 18 years of age but there is also a specific police university that has to be attended prior to joining.

I attended in dress uniform which went down well and I exchanged a Gwent Police shield with the commander and gave a number of officers small Gwent Police pins as thanks for them showing me around. They were patient and even though language was a barrier answered many of my questions as best they could. For a vocational experience this was fantastic allowing me a small insight into police work and life in the Wakayama district.