Port of Dover Police - Organisation & Role

Organisation & Role

The PoDP is established, funded and maintained by the owners of the Port of Dover, the Dover Harbour Board, the statutory undertakers, under section 79 of the Harbours, Docks, and Piers Clauses Act 1847. As a result, police officers of the PoDP have full powers of a constable within the limits of the harbour, dock, pier, and premises of the Dover Harbour Board (DHB), and within one mile (1.6 km) of the same.

In purely legal terms, as the DHB own significant areas of land on the sea front of Dover together with the one mile (1.6 km) extension of their jurisdiction, PoDP officers retain full constabulary powers throughout most of the Dover area. The DHB also own land in an area known as ‘Port Zone’ in the village of Whitfield outside Dover itself. As a result PoDP have jurisdiction in an area to the north of Dover that does not fall within the 1-mile (1.6 km) radius of land owned by DHB that borders the sea.

However, in practical terms the policing activities of the PoDP are directed at the Eastern and Western Dock Terminals and the public promenade located between the two terminals. The PoDP do not police the ‘Port Zone’ outlined above and do not, as a matter of routine, exercise police powers outside of DHB owned land (apart from in cases of urgent assistance to Kent Police and in relation to traffic management to the extent that PoDP jurisdiction allows).

The area policed by the PoDP is not a separate police area as defined by the Police Act 1996 and as a result primary responsibility for the maintenance and enforcement of criminal law throughout the County of Kent including the Port of Dover rests with the Chief Constable of Kent Police. Kent Police and PoDP do have a long history of working together in relation to the port and its immediate surroundings.

As the PoDP do not have their own custody facilities, the practice has been that people who have been arrested have been taken to Kent Police's Dover police station. When the custody suite at Dover police station closed in November 2011, PoDP officers would have instead been required to take arrestees to Canterbury, Folkestone or Margate police stations, but the force received a legal opinion stating that it would be unlawful as this would put them outside the one mile limit of their jurisdiction. Suspects are currently arrested by officers from Kent Police's Special Branch and transported by them to a suitable police station. The Marine Navigation Act 2013 enables this problem to be resolved by allowing the jurisdiction of port police officers to extend to the police area in which they are located where the chief officer of the local police force consents.