First day on the job for Merseyside’s new chief constable

Feb 2 2010 by Ben Rossington, Liverpool Echo

Merseyside Police Jon Murphy

MERSEYSIDE’S new Chief Constable took up his post and declared: “I’ve come home”.

Jon Murphy became the sixth chief of Merseyside Police (as it became in 1974) and the first to rise right through the ranks from a cadet at 16 to become the man in the hot seat.

The 51-year-old dad-of-two was deputy to Bernard Hogan-Howe before leaving in 2007 to take up a post with the Association of Chief Police Officers.

He has spent 28 of his 33 serving years as an officer on Merseyside, and on his first day yesterday told the ECHO: “I took the chief officers’ Monday morning briefing, which I haven’t been at for more than two-and-a-half years, and it felt like I had never been away.

“Walking back into here was like coming home.

“It must be very difficult to go into a force as new chief being unfamiliar with the geography, the community, the people within the organisation and the politics.

“These things are all bread and butter to me and that means I can get on with focusing on what needs to be done straight away rather than having to build relationships and remember names and faces I have never met before.

“It is business as usual for us. The force is performing exceptionally well, confidence in us from the public is high and we won’t look to fix what isn’t broken.

“A lot of leaders come in and feel a necessity to re-engineer an organisation. I was part of the old regime, I am not going to come in now to rip that down.”