South Yorkshire Needs More Bobbies On The Beat

The Labour Party’s Election pledge for 13,000 more bobbies on the beat is welcome, the Chair of South Yorkshire Police Federation has said, but added that they must go to the forces that need them most.

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced that if Labour got into power, they planned to recruit 13,000 more neighbourhood police and PCSOs to “take Britain’s town centres back from thugs and thieves”. She also blamed the Conservatives for a “decade of dereliction” on law and order.

South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said this would be a good plan, adding: “If they say 13,000 officers, then of course we’re going to welcome that.”

But he pointed out that some forces were worse-resourced than others, so new officers needed to be distributed accordingly. He continued: “As I’ve mentioned before, in South Yorkshire we are still 300 officers down from where we were at our peak, prior to 2010, so we need to go above and beyond that.

“We welcome these numbers as long as the proportion of those 13,000 officers would be going to go to the forces that need them most, because for the size of our population and our crime levels, South Yorkshire Police is one of the poorest-resourced and poorest-funded police forces in the country.

“There has to be a redress of the balance, and that’s going to mean getting more cops into forces that have suffered the biggest decline in numbers, as a priority.”