Chief Constable: Cops acting as cabbies has to stop 

POLICE officers acting as a ‘taxi service’ to bring home youngsters who are regularly reported missing from children’s homes cannot be sustained, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police has said.

David Crompton said the force had calculated that the work it carries out covering for other services that do not work 24 hours a day “ties up staff for well in excess of 100,000 hours per year”.

He said this “is the equivalent work of about 50 staff, full time for a year”.

“This cannot be sustained,” said Mr Compton. “We need to be clear what is expected of the police by the public and what the core role should be.

“Examples are police officers acting as a ‘taxi service’ to bring home youngsters who are regularly reported missing from children’s homes, or alternatively, police officers being asked to go and find patients who leave hospital without completing their treatment at A&E departments.

“Police officers are also regularly asked to find patients with mental health problems who have wandered off from hospital, despite it being explicitly a job for other agencies to carry out.”

Mr Compton was entering the debate about what policing’s role is following comments around policing cannabis, burglary and missing people.

He wrote in the Star newspaper: “Have Chief Constables really begun to go soft on drugs and burglary?

“No, this is simply a response to the budget cuts we face which are liable to mean the police and other public services losing a quarter of their funding over the next few years.

“This means we have no alternative but to look closely at the sorts of work we become involved in so that scarce resources are sent to the most urgent incidents.

“Personally, I think a better place to start managing demands on the police is where we are requested to undertake work which isn’t part of police duties.”

The Chief Constable concluded: “I fully accept the police service is the agency of ‘last resort’, regrettably however, in the future the police service will have to start to say ‘no’ more often, but I don’t think burglary and drugs offences are the right place to begin to do it.”

Neil Bowles, Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation, said that as an operational inspector he used to “get frustrated with that demand coming in and it wasting police offices time and their efforts.”

He added: “The time of 50 Officers or staff per year is great; but we are talking of losing 1500. We need to come with far bigger reductions in demand than that.”