Policing Is Being ‘Set Up To Fail’

The Government have “stabbed police officers in the back” by blaming them for increases in crime following years of under-resourcing, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

Chair Steve Kent spoke out after the Home Secretary put pressure on underfunded and overstretched officers to take on every single crime.

Officers must investigate every theft and follow all reasonable leads to catch offenders, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said last week, adding that it was “completely unacceptable” that criminals are often “effectively free to break certain laws”.

But Steve said: “This is simply impossible. Yet again, we see the Government essentially stabbing police in the back. They are blaming the police for crime figures that they have created by the constant lack of funding we’ve seen over the past 13 years.

“In South Yorkshire, we still have too few officers. We now have around 3,100 officers, where our peak was 3,500 – so we don’t have anywhere near enough compared to where we were. These are simply impossible expectations and little more than political posturing.

“The public aren’t daft. They know that the police have been decimated. If the Government wants us to prioritise everything, something has to be sacrificed.

“We just do not have the resources or the time to deal with this, when we’re dealing with so much bureaucracy and so much work from our partner agencies – who are also struggling.

“The Government is just setting us up to fail and it’s just political hot air, in my view.”

Police officers are struggling with lost experience and backroom staff, and with a completely new landscape that prioritises savings and efficiencies, Steve said.

He added: “The knock-on effect is that we have to prioritise things. The police obviously have to, quite rightly, prioritise public protection and more serious crime. I don’t know where they’re going to magic these officers from to go out and deal with every theft.

“The thing that is most frustrating, is that if you ask any officer, they would want to deal with every crime, to be able to go and lock somebody up. Of course they would. It’s their job.

“But there’s absolutely no way an officer is going to spend time on a minor theft when there’s no colleagues free and an immediate call comes in for a domestic violence case or a serious assault.

“So it’s just completely unrealistic hot air and they need to be called out on it because it just doesn’t fit.

“The hypocrisy of the Government, when they’re the actual cause for the decimation of policing, is unbelievable.”