Assaults On Officers Linked With Poor Media Portrayal of Policing

Poor media portrayal of policing is driving the increase in police assaults, South Yorkshire Police Federation has warned.

At least 296 assaults on police officers in South Yorkshire have been recorded in 2024, which is more than one a day.

Assaults have almost doubled over two years at the force, with 60 officers injured in Manvers earlier this year when mass disorder outside the Holiday Inn Express Hotel in Rotherham erupted. Three police dogs and a police horse were also injured.

Steve Kent, Federation Chair, has blamed insufficient deterrents and negative portrayals of officers among government and in the news.

Research from MartisMedia found that of the seven national newspapers, only 14% of stories about police officers were positive. During one calendar month, researchers found 226 negative articles.

‘There’s a whole atmosphere and a rhetoric that policing is bad, which is absolutely unfair. Almost the tiniest minority dictates the way that the public looks at policing as a whole. It almost gives people a subconscious justification to think they can lash out.’

Steve also called for stronger sentences for those who are found guilty of attacking officers.

‘I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again; any assault involving injury, involving a police officer or staff, should be an automatic custodial sentence’, he said.

‘We’ve seen some really good sentences following Manvers in the last couple of months. For me, those sentences should be echoed in people who are assaulting our officers. Once that happens, I guarantee you will start to see that these figures will start to drop’, he added.

125 officers are assaulted every day nationally, a figure that the Home Secretary has called ‘a stain on our society’.