Delay In Responding To Priority Calls Due To Police Cuts
NEW figures suggesting that police forces in England are taking on average five and a half hours to respond to priority calls show that policing has been “decimated” by cuts, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.
Most police forces aim to respond to priority calls – incidents where there is a degree of urgency but no immediate risk to life – in one hour, but a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Liberal Democrats showed that the average over the 19 forces that responded was five and a half hours.
South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said: “The media and the Government need to ask themselves why this is happening, and it’s because our infrastructure, as well as our numbers, has been decimated to such an extent that we’re only just starting to properly repair it.
“These figures concern me, but it is the nature of where we are. We don’t have the resources. We are still the service of last resort.”
Steve gave the caveat that within South Yorkshire Police, “immediate incidents get answered very quickly”. He added: “To some extent, when there are non-urgent incidents, if it takes officers a bit longer to get there, but when they get there they’ve got the time to do the job properly, then that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
But police forces needed to continue to push back against attending a huge amount of mental health call-outs that other organisations were better trained to deal with, said Steve.
He said: “Our force is applying the ‘Right Care, Right Person’ model, which will push back some of the demand to the people who are most appropriate to deal with it.
“It’s frustrating. We see demand put on us by other organisations all the time, and I want to make it absolutely clear, I’ve got sympathy for those organisations, such as social services and the NHS. But we are not here to deal with things that they should be dealing with.
“No other organisation has endured the cuts that policing has, and yet there is still an expectation sometimes that the police should be here as a backstop when other services don’t have the resources to deal with things. That’s simply unfair.
“We’re dealing with crime, we’re dealing with complex welfare, we’re still dealing with large amounts of mental health issues, we’re dealing with all sorts of incidents that, quite frankly, the public and our officers wouldn’t expect us to be dealing with, in an ideal world.
“So there needs to be a seismic shift of what our police officers are actually out there dealing with every day, of which Right Care, Right Person is a great start.”