It’s almost two years since a car belonging to councillor Angela Cosgrove’s elderly mother was firebombed outside her home in Derker, Greater Manchester.
‘It was like a war zone back then,’ Angela revealed to the Mail. ‘You couldn’t even look at someone the wrong way or they’d put your windows through. It was horrendous.’
By the end of last year, Derker had become a by-word for everything wrong with Greater Manchester: gangs acting with impunity, ten-year-olds peddling drugs in exchange for nicotine vapes, families afraid to go about their lives.
And, perhaps worst of all, the area had become notorious for the horrific practice of ‘cuckooing,’ in which criminals take over the homes of vulnerable people – such as the elderly or unwell – and use them for stashing and dealing drugs. Quite simply, something had to change.
Then earlier this year, salvation arrived in the form of Operation Vulcan: an elite multi-agency task force run by Greater Manchester Police to combat crime at source.
Since Vulcan’s inception in 2022, the operation has brought order to some of the most lawless parts of England’s second city including the notorious ‘counterfeit capital’ of Europe, Cheetham Hill, as well as Piccadilly Gardens and now Derker.
‘In a month, Operation Vulcan has turned things around massively,’ said Angela, who was born and bred in Derker. ‘You can walk down the street at night now. People already feel safer and more confident.’
Earlier this month, the Mail met the mastermind behind Operation Vulcan: Chief Constable Stephen Watson, whose anti-woke, no-nonsense approach to policing has revolutionised Greater Manchester Police (GMP) since he took over in May 2021.
Strong arm of the law: Stephen Watson’s anti-woke approach has revolutionised policing
GMP was placed under special measures in 2020 the police watchdog found that the force had likely failed to record more than 80,000 crimes in a year
This week Watson hit the headlines when he told Times Radio that police officers should stop wasting their time investigating ‘guff’ and tell people reporting ‘fluff and nonsense’ on social media to ‘grow up’.
It’s par for the course for this plain-speaking cop who has led GMP to become a shining example of a common sense force.
This is the story of how one proudly old-fashioned Chief Constable – who cites Winston Churchill as his inspiration – brought law and order back to Greater Manchester.
Back in December 2020, GMP was in disarray. A damning report from the police watchdog found that, in one year alone, the force had likely failed to record more than 80,000 crimes. Shockingly, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate also found the force was ‘wrongly and prematurely closing substantial numbers of recorded crime investigations, including a high proportion of crimes involving vulnerable victims’.
GMP was placed under special measures and Chief Constable Ian Hopkins – who’d been off sick since October – stood down.
In many ways, Stephen Watson was the obvious choice to step into the vacant role and assume control over 8,000 officers, a further 6,500 staff and a budget at the thick end of £1billion.
‘By the time this job came up, I was already an experienced Chief Constable,’ Watson told the Mail, recalling his five years from 2016 to 2021 dragging South Yorkshire Police out of the doldrums.
‘And, candidly, if you’d asked me as a probationary officer, what would be my dream job, it would have been to be the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester.’
Stephen Watson alongside Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, when he was sworn in as Chief Constable in 2021
More than six feet tall with shiny shoes and a booming voice, Watson is reminiscent of an Army general. Indeed, it’s military efficiency that the 56-year-old has brought to GMP.
It now takes the force an average of just two seconds to answer a 999 call, down from 47 seconds in 2021. It made 67,306 arrests in the year up to February 2025, more than double the number from four years ago. And, in the same period, GMP solved 40,000 crimes, up from 23,500 in 2021.
So what is the secret behind Watson’s success? Surprisingly, a vital first step was making sure his officers looked the part. ‘We were giving them rubbish kit,’ Watson reflected. ‘It was the cheapest we could get away with. It looked shoddy.
‘It was a visible symbol of a lack of professionalism.
‘And it seemed to me that if we cannot even adequately equip the lads and lasses who are putting their lives on the line to look after us all, then we’re in a really bad place.’
Subsequently, GMP spent £28million on 11,000 personal-issue laptops, equipped officers with the best body-worn cameras and body armour available, and – in the words of Watson – ensured the team ‘looked as though they could at least pull the skin off a rice pudding’.
On the ground, Watson has added an extra 690 neighbourhood coppers and made sure every crime is investigated to the highest standards. ‘We’re not going to turn out the murder squad just because you’ve had your fence kicked in,’ he explained with a smile.
‘But we can’t be too busy not to bother with that sort of stuff.’
Stephen Watson, regarded as an ‘old school’ chief who pitched himself as ‘anti-woke’ when he joined GMP, had blamed a ‘failure of senior leadership’ for GMP’s problems
This approach has also led to a radical increase in stop and search, something Watson fiercely believes in.
‘I’ve been in the cops for 37 years, and I just know that if you don’t stop and search, bad things happen,’ he warned.
Since Watson took over, GMP has increased stop and search by an astonishing 392 per cent. And what’s more, according to the chief, 30 per cent of those searches end in an arrest.
However, above all, it is the change in attitudes that Watson is most proud of.
‘There used to be this attitude of, “these are the things we haven’t got, and therefore these are the things we can’t do,”’ he revealed as we drove through the streets of Oldham.
‘Now, our approach is, “This is what we have got. This is what we are going to do. And we’re going to do it brilliantly. We’re going to do it now. We’re going to do it in a way that makes an impact”.’
Such a no-nonsense approach to policing has turned an unwitting Watson into something of a poster boy for anti-woke causes. Characteristically, however, it isn’t something he’s paid much attention to.
‘If suggesting that taking the knee in the middle of a rally is a bad idea makes me anti-woke, then I’m anti-woke.
Chief Constable Stephen Watson meeting then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman in 2023
‘But actually, I’m just being a professional police officer. Which is about being impartial.
‘To that extent I’m proud to be somewhat old-fashioned. I actually think policing is well served by old fashioned values, providing those values are current, contemporary, decent.’
Of All Chief Constable Watson’s interventions, Operation Vulcan has without doubt been themost impactful.
In 2022, Cheetham Hill in the north of Greater Manchester was swarmed by specialist officers – some heavily armed, others with angle grinders, batons and police dogs – with the aim of clearing the street notorious across Europe for selling counterfeit goods such as football shirts.
Over eight gruelling months, the force seized almost 1,050 tons of counterfeit goods including 400,000 illicit vapes and three million illegal prescription drugs, as well as £500,000 in cash and £2.4million worth of class C narcotics. An astonishing 216 counterfeit shops were shuttered and 238 arrests made.
This was policing on steroids. Operation Vulcan has since been rolled out in other areas where – as Watson describes – there exists ‘entrenched criminality,’ such as Derker in Oldham.
However, for all Stephen Watson’s success, there is one day that has a special place in his memory – receiving the Queen’s Police Medal in 2019 from Her late Majesty. ‘It was a great honour, of course. I felt genuinely humbled,’ he said.
Mr Watson took over in May 2021 after his predecessor, Chief Constable Ian Hopkins (pictured) quit
Naturally, however, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Watson. His force came in for serious criticism after the farcical incident earlier this year when a pair of plain-clothed officers knocked on 54-year-old grandmother Helen Jones’s door to warn her against posting critical comments online about Labour politicians. The fracas prompted a national backlash with GMP accused of acting like the Stasi.
Although Watson refuses to be drawn on the specific incident, he has argued: ‘We investigate every single report of crime in Greater Manchester… However, if it turns out the allegation isn’t valid… we will also drop it really quickly.’
Chief Constable Stephen Watson has just had his contract with GMP extended to 2028. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are already murmurs he may be next in line for the top job at the Met.
‘Whatever opportunities there might be in the future, I’ll see what they look like when they come,’ Watson assures me, before adding, wryly: ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t be in the position that I’m in if I wasn’t an ambitious person.’
