Do More For Disheartened, Overworked Officers

DEMAND is outstripping resources in policing and more needs to be done to remedy it, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

PFEW Deputy National Chair, Tiff Lynch, recently wrote an article about how trust in the police was being eroded, pointing to statistics that show the police are solving the lowest proportion of crimes on record.

Tiff said: “I want to stress how disheartening it is for colleagues on the frontline when they cannot help deliver justice, cannot support victims of crime, and cannot do the job they signed up to do, because demand is outstripping resources.”

South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said he was seeing the same problem in his force. He said: “Moving forward, officers have got to stop bouncing from job to job, because they’re then not giving the right service to the people out there. They need to go to the job and deal with it properly first time, and hopefully that will deal with repeat offenders and repeat incidents.

“It also can nip things in the bud. We’ve got to take the pressure off our officers, so that they can deal with incidents properly the first time, because at the minute it’s like fighting fires.

“We also need to better train our officers in risk assessment, because sometimes we may be just arresting our way into a problem, whereas there might be different approaches. We need to actually give our officers the training and the trust to do the job properly.

“We need to keep investing in neighbourhood policing to deal with the problem-solving at the start, to proactively stop these issues taking hold. And we also need to continue to make sure that policing has the right resources to deal with police matters and to push back on stuff that isn’t police-related.”