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Analysis The UK's top e-copper has been put under the microscope over his force's heavily criticised response to Derrick Bird's fatal shooting spree.

Deputy Chief Constable (DCC) Stuart Hyde was the public face of the Cumbrian Constabulary in the days following Bird's murderous Lake District rampage. His boss, Chief Constable Craig Mackey, has made the highly unusual request for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to “peer review” his force's actions.

DCC Hyde is responsible for the Cumbrian forces' personnel and development, strategic development and professional standards.

ACPO says it expects these peer reviews will be concluded by the autumn and will be made public when available.

As well as his role with the Cumbrian police, DCC Hyde is also ACPO's spokesman on e-Crime prevention and president of the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace.

As well as patrolling Wordsworth Country, Hyde's cyberspace role makes him sound as though he's leading the Turing Police in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. But before leaping Judge Dredd style into protecting the citizens of cyberspace he's keen on getting a straightforward computer crime safety message out into physical neighbourhoods, via officers on the beat.

As ACPO's e-crime prevention guy Hyde has said, in an interview in 2009, that he doesn't see why e-crime safety shouldn't be delivered the same way as other policing initiatives – through the neighbourhood. “That’s the way we do our business,” he says.

“I want to enable neighbourhood officers to have a very basic understanding of cybercrime, e-crime, and computer crime issues – so if they’re asked when out on patrol in speaking to their communities, they can provide the right advice, guidance where people can turn to if they need help.”

He recognises the problem with educating officers in computer-related crime issues is keeping their knowledge up-to-date. It's only simple if the officers have a personal interest in technology.

Hyde himself got the tech bug while involved in an operation with Avon and Somerset Constabulary early on in his career. A computer shop was taking stolen computers and selling them out as second hand, and making a pretty bad job of it. “I learnt how to identify stolen computers, and not just because they had 'property of University of Bristol' on them. But by going into the disk editor and looking at what was left on the hard drive, and getting into some sexy technical stuff.”

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