SIX Police Constables – and Essex DCC Derek Benson – have been awarded Queen’s Police Medals in the Birthday Honours.<\/p>\n
PCs Karen MacDonald, Keith Openshaw, [of Avon and Somerset] Robert Bowman, [of West Yorkshire] John Keen, Robert Brown [of the Met] and Gaynor Grout [of Surrey Police] have all been awarded the QPM.\u00a0Over recent years, this is an unusually high proportion of constables gaining the award.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n Chief Constable Jon Murphy, from Merseyside Police, was Knighted in the highest honour for the police service.<\/p>\n Other gongs include an MBE for Ch Supt Robert Atkin, of the Met, for his services to the Care of Police Survivors charity.<\/p>\n Mr Benson, who joined Essex Police in 2006 following a career with the Metropolitan Police, said: \u201cIt\u2019s an honour to receive this award. I have been lucky enough to work with so many fantastic colleagues both here in Essex and in the Met. It has been a privilege to work for two such great forces. To receive the QPM for doing the job I love is just the icing on the cake.\u201d<\/p>\n Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh said: \u201cThis award is fantastic news and I would like to say a huge congratulations to Derek. He truly is dedicated to serving the people of Essex and it\u2019s great to see his hard work recognised.<\/p>\n \u201cDerek has been a huge support to me since I became Chief Constable in May last year and he is also a huge support to officers and police staff. He spends a great deal of his spare time raising funds for charities that are close to our officers’ hearts, recently completing the New York marathon for one of his causes. I am sure his family is equally delighted\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SIX Police Constables – and Essex DCC Derek Benson – have been awarded Queen’s Police Medals in the Birthday Honours. PCs Karen MacDonald, Keith Openshaw, [of Avon and Somerset] Robert\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}