“An Arrest Culture Creates A Perverse Culture Within Policing”

Police forces should bust an arrest culture in policing to free up officers and tackle congested custody cells, South Yorkshire Police Federation said.

Chair Steve Kent said the way officers’ performances were measured had created a “perverse culture” where they felt under pressure to make arrests their default position.

It came as the Policing Productivity review made 61 recommendations that could free up 61 million policing hours over five years.

However, Steve said the key issue would be changing the performance culture of policing to free up more officers.

The Federation Chair said: “Our police officers are independent officials. They shouldn’t be under pressure to arrest, unless it’s absolutely necessary.

“An arrest culture creates a perverse culture within policing where people are measured on it, so people feel the default position is to arrest people.

“What that then does is ties people up for hours and hours on end, ties up the custody suite, ties up the officer’s time.

“When actually in some cases – and I’m not talking about where people need to be arrested – people could be dealt with in a different way.

“Then you’d free those officers up quicker, they wouldn’t have to do hours and hours of paperwork based on it

“We’ve got to stop this culture of going to do all that when we haven’t got the resources to do it, and focus on the risk, focus on the safeguarding issues and focus on the people that actually need to be arrested.”

Steve said shifting performance measurements to focus on how the victims of crime felt would lead to better outcomes in policing.

He added: “It doesn’t matter if it took ten minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter if they were there for two hours, three hours, four hours.

“It doesn’t matter if the person got arrested or didn’t get arrested.  What matters is how they felt and how the police dealt with it.

“We’ve taken that common sense approach out of policing and that clogs up our officers

“We need to fundamentally look at what we’re doing before we look at making any kind of savings.”