- published: 18 Sep 2015
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Merseyside Police is the territorial police service responsible for policing Merseyside in North West England. The force area is 647 square kilometres with a population of around 1.5 million. As of March 2009 the force has 4,494 police officers, 2,221 staff, 442 police community support officers and 420 special constables.
Merseyside Police is divided into six Basic Command Units (BCUs), one in each of the metropolitan boroughs that make up Merseyside, and two BCUs for the City of Liverpool. The BCUs are:
The service operates under the oversight of the Merseyside Police Authority, which is made up of nine local councillors, three magistrates and five independent members.
Under proposals made by the Home Secretary on 6 February 2006, it would merge with Cheshire Constabulary to form a strategic police service. The proposals were later abandoned.
The force came into being in 1974 when Merseyside was created, and is a successor to the Liverpool and Bootle Constabulary (itself formed in 1967), along with parts of Cheshire Constabulary and Lancashire Constabulary.
Merseyside ( /ˈmɜrzisaɪd/) is a metropolitan county in North West England, with a population of 1,365,900. It encompasses the metropolitan area centred on both banks of the lower reaches of the Mersey Estuary, and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral, and the city of Liverpool. Merseyside, which was created on 1 April 1974 as a result of the Local Government Act 1972, takes its name from the River Mersey.
Merseyside spans 249 square miles (645 km2) of land which border Lancashire (to the north-east), Greater Manchester (to the east), and Cheshire (to the south and south-west); the Irish Sea is to the west. North Wales is across the Dee Estuary. There is a mix of high density urban areas, suburbs, semi-rural and rural locations in Merseyside, but overwhelmingly the land use is urban. It has a focused central business district, formed by Liverpool City Centre, but Merseyside is also a polycentric county with five metropolitan districts, each of which has at least one major town centre and outlying suburbs. The Liverpool Urban Area is the seventh most populous conurbation in the UK, and dominates the geographic centre of the county, while the smaller Birkenhead Urban Area dominates the Wirral Peninsula in the south.