Neighbourhood policing cannot be the same with fewer officers
NEIGHBOURHOOD policing in South Yorkshire will not look the same as it used to because there are 1,100 fewer officers in the force, Federation Chair Zuleika Payne has warned.
She was speaking after the force said it wanted to go back to a model of neighbourhood policing, which she said would not resemble that which we saw before.
Zuleika said: “While the organisation is keen to reintroduce a neighbourhood policing model, there has to be a realisation that neighbourhood policing won’t look like it did before due to the vastly reduced officer numbers.”
“The force would need a cash injection to facilitate this and help us achieve our ultimate goal. But as we know across the country, that is highly unlikely. So the force will have to work smarter with what it’s got.”
Efficiencies need to be found in the way crime reports coming into the call centre are handled and progressed. Not all calls to the call centre are necessarily a crime, although the force is driven to crime everything, not all reports are crimes per se, Zuleika added.
“The organisation is really keen to work smarter and identify more efficient practices,” she said. “If there isn’t a forthcoming boost to our funding and the officer numbers are not due to increase then we have to find a way of using officer time effectively. Despite the falling officer numbers demand hasn’t diminished, if anything it has increased. Officers are working to the point of exhaustion and this cannot continue.”
Chief Constable Stephen Watson said he had inherited a force which had lost its way along with public confidence – especially after receiving a grade of “needs improvement” in its most recent HMIC inspection report.
The chief blamed the disconnect between the force and the public on an increase in centralised teams and a tendency to react to crime rather than stop it happening in the first place, and said that moving officers from response back into local communities would go some way to repairing the damage.
From September, every resident in South Yorkshire will have a neighbourhood team and they will be able to find out the details of their local PC, sergeant and inspector by putting their postcode into the force website.
Mr Watson said: “The best person to know who is committing crime is neighbourhood people speaking to the local public. Effective neighbourhood policing means we know who registered sex offenders are, who know who people who are susceptible to being radicalised, we know who is vulnerable”, the Yorkshire Post reported last month.