Stopping Recruitment Would Send Policing To ‘Dark Ages’

ANY pause in police officer recruitment could send the service “back to the Dark Ages”.

Police Minister Kit Malthouse has admitted that the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers over three years could be threatened by the Covid-19 crisis.

South Yorkshire Police was hit hard by austerity measures and Federation Chairman Steve Kent is critical of any delay to recruitment.

The force is aiming to get to over 3,000 officers, which Steve said: “will give us a fighting chance of carrying on to serve the public as best as we can”.

He added: “We absolutely need to get that uplift of officers. We are well on track in terms of recruiting officers in South Yorkshire, which is a good thing, and that machine keeps rumbling.

“With remote technology we’re still trying to get recruits through the door even through these difficult times. But it can’t stop.

“That 20,000 cops is the absolute bare minimum to get onto a decent footing. So we just need to keep it coming. There can’t be any sort of halt in that because that will put us back into the Dark Ages, like we were a couple of years ago.

“We’re tipping up to 2,700-2,800 in South Yorkshire now. We’ve still got a fair way to go. We’re getting those people through the door but they’re not trained yet. So we’re still awaiting those boots on the ground.

“We’re going to start to see the benefits soon, but we need to carry on for the next year or two. We can’t just allow it to stop because otherwise with retirement and people leaving the force over the next 18 months we’ll just end up treading water, and that’s not acceptable.”

Steve said it was better for the public to see more officers on the streets, and it was also better for the police to have more colleagues.

He said: “We’ve seen duty groups and detective departments stripped to the bone. We need to get those numbers back up so there’s an acceptable number of officers out there to manage the workload.”

The Police Minister said that just over 3,000 new officers have been recruited so far across the country. The drive to hire an additional 20,000 officers was intended to reverse the 20,000 fall between 2010 and 2019.