Chief Inspector Kate Firman
Chief Inspector Kate Firman admits to mixed emotions as she prepares for her retirement after 28 years with Cambridgeshire Police.
Kate says she feels sad to be leaving the Force but is also excited for the next stage – including escaping the great British weather for some sun.
“Policing has been such a big part of my life for so long it’s going to feel very strange,” said Kate.
“I think I will be sad to go but I’m also quite excited.
“Once you’ve done all the jobs you want to do in the house and visited the people you want to see, you realise you’re not actually on holiday and that you haven’t got a job anymore.”
Kate has been clearing out her locker over recent weeks ready for her retirement on 1 November and has discovered something of a treasure trove.
“I’m decanting it bit by bit,” she said. “I mainly work from home and in there I’ve got 28 years of courses I’ve been on, folders you think you’ll look back at but you never do.
“I found a wooden baton and the original silver handcuffs.
“The old NATO jumpers that I much preferred to the fleeces, because they are much warmer.
“There are a few items that should probably go to the police museum rather than back to stores.
“It’s been really interesting.”
Kate worked in insurance for 11 years for Peterborough-based Pearl Assurance before her career in policing.
“They got taken over by an Australian company and things began to change,” she said. “And I was getting bored.
“One of my friends had left insurance and joined the police and I thought it was quite appealing because you can do lots of different jobs, be that in uniform or CID, there are lots of opportunities so I thought I’d give it a go.
“I got voluntary redundancy which meant I could afford the drop in pay.”
Kate started at Thorpe Wood in Peterborough and had an eye-opening introduction to policing.
“I remember we went out on our first week for familiarisation before we’d even gone to the classroom and we went to a cannabis grow,” she recalled.
“That was my first introduction to policing, bagging everything up and it was all very strange, very surreal.
“The thing that really sticks in my mind is doing one of my first interviews and somebody I was interviewing coming up with a stupid story about what had happened and me sitting there thinking ‘well, maybe’.
“I was so naïve to being lied at and to who people are, because you meet people who are dishonest and I hadn’t had that in my background at all.
“My previous career in insurance was very ordinary and very routine and all of a sudden there are these people lying to you and growing cannabis and everything else.”
Kate’s career has been predominantly in uniform.
“Community policing has been a big chunk of my career,” she recalled “I really enjoyed that.
“I was head of custody for a few years and I enjoyed that too.
“The pinnacle of career was Oscar One, control room inspector. I was a firearms commander. I did that for four and a half years and really loved it.
“I wanted a promotion to chief inspector and I wasn’t going to get the evidence in there so made myself leave, which is a shame but I still have lots of fond memories.
“We ate too many cakes because everybody has got a birthday or something to celebrate, but also people had a wicked sense of humour.
“We did our active shooter training and I was sat there one day getting on with my work when one of the despatchers shouted out ‘active shooter’.
“As Oscar One you would tune into certain words to do with firearms and listen to conversations so you could get ahead of the game.
“My heart was going frantically and I looked at her and said ‘what?’.
“She went ‘only joking’.
“That was a scary moment but also that wicked humour.
“They were really nice people and good to work with.”
Kate completed a Masters in applied criminology and police management, and her thesis was on procedural justice in custody.
On the back of her qualification, Kate has been delivering procedural justice training throughout the organisation – and it’s been a chance to catch up with some old friends and colleagues.
“It was nice to go back and see people I worked with all those years ago,” she said.
So how does she look back on her career?
“There have been ups and downs, with any career that long,” she said.
“I might have made some different choices.
“Once I went down the uniform route I found it difficult to get out of that.
“I closed some doors in terms of more lateral development
“If a student officer was asking me today, I would say grab every opportunity and make sure you make the choices that allow you to have that breadth of opportunity.”
Kate acknowledged that policing has evolved hugely since she joined in the 1990s she says that a lot of it remains unchanged.
“The basics are still the same,” she said. “People join because they care about their community and want to make a difference, and you can still absolutely do that.
“We didn’t have the technology when I joined.
“I can remember writing one of my first traffic tickets out in the pouring rain and that was a real challenge.
“It’s all electronic now, and quite rightly so.”
Kate has also been chair of the Cambridgeshire Women’s Network and organised a hugely successful International Women’s Day conference, which included presentations by the most senior female police officers in Jordan.
She also described visiting Jordan to lecture on how we police in the UK and some of the theories of evidence-based policing as a highlight of her career.
“It was a fantastic week where I learnt a lot from their police officers too,” she said.
Kate was instrumental in the Force being awarded the Menopause-Friendly Accreditation earlier this year, alongside Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, as part of their tri-force collaboration.
The award has only been given to five police forces nationally and highlights their ongoing commitment to promoting awareness, understanding and supporting of the menopause.
“I’m quite proud of the progress we have made with that,” she said.
“We are a Menopause-Friendly Accreditation constabulary, us, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire because of the work we’ve put in.
“I’m leaving it in some very capable hands in Beverley Davis, who is committed to that.
Beverley is a police staff member, which is great because police staff sometimes feel like second-class citizens in the police family because it’s all about officers, so I’m glad she is taking on that role.
The Women’s Network will be run by Chief Inspector Claire Hewson, a police officer who has been working hard in the background since I’ve been chairing.
Kate’s work in these areas saw her nominated for a British Association of Women in Policing award earlier this year, and she’s just been nominated for a Commitment to Health and Wellbeing Award.
So what does she have planned when she leaves all this behind?
Kate said: “My husband is a good golfer so in the summer I caddie for him anyway, so it will be really nice not to use all of my annual leave to do that.
“That’s a big part of the plan.
“We might go somewhere warmer than here – that wouldn’t be hard would it?”