Chief of Baghdad

Going out on patrol is always a good way to meet the people on your patch. However, when you are accompanied by bodyguards and protected by a convoy of military vehicles and the occasional Apache gunship, the job can be a bit more difficult.

That was the task that faced Det Ch Supt Geoff Cooper, of South Wales Police, when he spent 12 months on secondment in Iraq, helping to oversee training of the Iraq National Police.

Det Ch Supt Cooper was in charge of 16 other police officers based in Baghdad and Basra as well as 24 civilians, including scenes of crime officers and human resources experts. He says: 'We were trying to move the force away from confession-based convictions to those gained from evidence, so there was a big push to develop professional investigation techniques.'