Noble, Chris
Chief Constable Chris Noble has been a police officer for more than 28 years, serving for the last 10 at Chief Officer rank. In 1996 he joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland after he graduated from Queens University Belfast with an honour's degree in Law. Later, whilst in-service, he secured a Masters Degree in Criminology and Executive Police Leadership from Cambridge University under the tutelage of Professor Larry Sherman. Chris has worked in a variety of operational and strategic roles within policing and across multiple jurisdictions. He served in Northern Ireland for 21 years and held a number of key leadership positions in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and its successor the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), spanning: territorial commander roles; Head of Professional Standards and Counter Corruption; and Head of the Close Protection Command (responsible for protecting over 50 principals and visiting VIPs including US and Irish Presidents and British Monarchs). He is the only police officer still serving, who was part of the Patten Change Team which supported the RUC's transition to the PSNI across 1999-2001, where he led the Project Management Office.
In 2014 Chris passed the most senior police leadership assessment in the UK, subsequently attending the Strategic Command Course and taking on the role of a Chief Officer in the PSNI, with executive responsibilities for service improvement, organisational change and corporate performance. Chris was also service lead in the PSNI for community engagement, evidence-based policing, business crime and was the operational lead for officer wellbeing. Immediately prior to leaving Northern Ireland he was the Commander for Belfast City Policing District, leading more than 1000 officers and staff, with responsibility for public order policing, overt counter-terrorism policing, response and neighbourhood policing, and civil contingency planning and response.
In 2017 Chris moved to Humberside Police in England as an Assistant Chief Constable, responsible for public safeguarding, tackling serious and organised crime, the public contact centre and specialist operations. He had specific improvement responsibilities for improving investigations, securing an effective response to the most vulnerable and building a best-in-class Force Contact Centre. Failings in these areas had previously seen the Force placed into "special measures" by the national police inspection body and Chris was a key member of a chief officer group which saw Humberside police address these challenges with the Force now identified by the British police inspection body as the best performing in the UK.
In December 2021 Chris was appointed as Chief Constable for Staffordshire Police. He has taken the Force out of the same "special measures" regime and achieved strong performance improvements in a recently published inspection report. Nationally, Chris is the UK Police Chiefs' lead for the policing of protest with a responsibility to work with all police forces and key stakeholders across government, justice agencies, academia and beyond, to enable a consistent, proportionate and effective response to protest activity. He is also the UK lead for coordinating the local law enforcement response to the Israel - Hamas conflict, with a specific role in ensuring the response to associated hate crime, community tensions and protest activity is joined-up across the country. Chris is an experienced Gold and Silver Public Order Commander, a Strategic Firearms Commander, a CT Security Coordinator and a CBRN Gold Commander. He currently chairs the Staffordshire Local Resilience Forum with responsibility for anticipatory planning, multi-agency response and leading long-term recovery plans post major incidents, emergencies and/or disasters. He attended the Leadership in Counter Terrorism course (LinCT) in 2017/18, working with agencies across the Five-Eyes including US Secret Service, FBI and local and city law enforcement colleagues.