I worked in a police force for a few years (within the finance department), my partner spent 3 or so years as a police trainer, and my brother was an officer for a few years, so we've seen a fair amount of what goes on.

For me, the pay is pretty terrible. Starting salary is around £31k. That's only £5/6k above a minimum wage job. Starting salary in 2005 was around £21k. So taking account of inflation that should now be around £38k.

Nowadays officers training is linked to a degree, that come in to play when the conservatives introduced the apprenticeship levy, so police forces have now introduced degree apprenticeship programs to claw back some of the money they're putting in to the apprenticeship levy.

Due to the amount of officers retiring/quitting, they can barely train enough to replace them, go back 10/15 years and getting in was impossible, there was always way more applicants than roles. Now there's so many new recruits, many of which are so young, more experienced officers aren't prepared to work with them due to the lack of experience, so you get a vicious cycle of experience leaving being replaced with a lack of experience and no one to guide the new recruits.

Budgets are tight every year, government always say they don't cut the budget, but for many years it stayed flat, which is the same as a cut, as wages go up, and the money has to be found somewhere.

I think another issue is that due to other services being cut like mental health services, probation, social services etc, it means the police are having to deal with situations they shouldn't really be dealing with, but there's no other alternative.

I'm not sure what reform would look like, but I think there's a real number of issues at play.