“Reversing cuts to frontline officers will help relieve shortages in CID”

GETTING new recruits into CID will help make the job more ‘tolerable’, says South Yorkshire Police Federation.

A recent HMICFRS report into the sector nationally has revealed that inexperienced uniformed officers are having to step in and investigate crimes, simply because there are not enough detectives. Nevertheless, it found a ‘good’ detection service was still being delivered.

It’s a situation mirrored in South Yorkshire, Federation Chairman Steve Kent said, and he’s upbeat about the performance of the detective service in the region too.

“HMICRFRS is correct, we are doing a good job with the dwindling resources we’ve got,” he said.

“We [South Yorkshire] reflect the national issue in that there is a dwindling number of people that want to go into CID.

“I think part of that reason is that there are not enough cops already in there so they seem to have massive workloads – it’s putting people off going in the first place, when what they really need to do is grow the amount of CID officers they’ve got in the force. That will obviously make it a little bit more tolerable for people to do the job in there and to give more focus to their cases. The knock-on effect to that is it will become more attractive again to staff to join.”

Uniformed officers are having to pick up some of the slack and investigating more serious cases, Steve added.

“Uniformed officers are starting to deal with more serious assaults, and it goes without saying that any kind of assault or serious crime, financial fraud or anything should be dealt with by specialist officers.

“That is, ideally, where we want to get back to. That’s only going to be seen by reversing the cuts and with police forces growing which will then enable more people to leave the frontline and go into these specialised roles.

“Uniformed officers are predominantly there to respond to emergencies and crimes that they come across. If we returned back to the numbers that we had before in CID then the ability to deal with the more serious crimes becomes the norm, rather than a lot of the more serious crimes being left to frontline because of the relatively few number of detectives we have dealing with the extremely serious crimes.”