I'm PC Amy Tapping, I'm the LGBT co-chair for the National Police Network and I work here in the Force Coordination Centre in Northumbria Police.

My role here within the Force Coordination Centre is as a planner. So I help get the right resources in the right place at the right time. So for big protests or events such as pride, we make sure that we've got  enough resources and that we work with all the other  partner agencies for it to be a safe event.

So my inspiration for joining the police was I've always had quite a strong sense of justice and I want to be that person there that can help. What I love about policing is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. There's so many different roles and so many different things that you can do within policing, that there's always something for everybody.

When I was at school Section 28 was in place, and that meant that the staff in the school couldn't support any of the LGBT students. It was really a subject that was ignored. So joining the police I thought that I should really not be open about who I was. Very soon after joining my first shift I realised that I didn't need to worry about that. I was quite confident that this is what I wanted to do. People were really inclusive and asked me about my relationship and how things were and it was just a normal part of life.

I was really lucky that I met my partner through work. We're both police officers and the fantastic thing about working in such an inclusive environment is that we can be confident our relationship is open and we don't have to hide anything.

So over the years before the LGBT network was set up, I did feel there was something missing. I didn't feel that I was being negatively impacted by not having a support association, but it certainly gave me much more confidence within policing and gave me somewhere to go to know there was people like me and to have role models.

The force level associations are there to support our colleagues and to support our potential colleagues. We're there to show that being LGBT+ isn't a barrier to policing. We also look at ensuring that we provide a better service to the public and we support victims of crime, whether it's hate crime or whether it's domestic abuse within the same sex relationships or cyber enabled crime as well.

And we need to ensure that we can support those victims of crime to have the confidence
to come to the police to report. It's important for me that people understand that policing is an inclusive environment. Some of the preconceptions for those within the LGBT community around policing and becoming a police officer is that you can't be gay and in the police. Well clearly that's not true. The police is made up of a wide variety of people and we're there to represent our communities. You can be yourself within policing.