Policing social media rows shouldn’t be a police priority

POLICE priorities need to move away from tacking social media rows and low-level shoplifting in large retail stores in the light of cuts in budgets and officer numbers.

South Yorkshire Police Federation says dealing with rows between people on social media is drawing officers away from investigating crimes and that sites like Facebook and large retail outlets have the resources to tackle the issues themselves.

“Something needs to change,” said Federation Chairman Steve Kent.

“Low level, petty Facebook issues, that’s not domestic matters because we have to treat those seriously, but I’m talking about the tit-for-tat silliness where people should take a bit of their own responsibility, and also low-level shoplifting in larger retail organisations.

“Both Facebook and these High Street stores are multi-million- and billion-pound organisations. They’ve got the resources and they should have a duty to protect and police themselves better.

“At the moment, with these unmanageable funding cuts and increases in demand we can’t go on as we are so difficult decisions need to be made,” he said.

Steve wants to see the National Police Chiefs Council unite to address the issue.

“With the cuts it’s like letting the tyres down on a Formula One racing car and seeing if it will go any faster,” he said.

“In fairness, senior officers in Sheffield and South Yorkshire do understand this and are trying to address it, but what I want to see is for us as a Federation to put pressure on the need for there to be a joint approach by the NPCC to make some brave decisions, because I don’t think chiefs are going to, quite understandably, stand out on their own.

“We’ve seen some examples of it where they’ve said, ‘We’re not going to investigate low level thefts’. They’ve then been slaughtered by the media.

“If they came out as a Council and said that they are not going to deal with low level rows on social media then Facebook can deal with it or the individual can take themselves off Facebook’, then that’s more likely to happen isn’t it?”

Prevention is better than cure too says Steve.

“Facebook has the ability to and should have the resources to employ more staff who can then, if somebody’s got a complaint the default position is to go to Facebook and Facebook will either take action and ban one individual or the other, rather than it coming straight to the police.

“For me, Facebook can police it and stop these offenses happening in the first place and escalating it,” he said.

“When it comes to shop lifting, and while we would help the corner shop or the grocers on the village green, big national retailers like Asda or Tesco they have the resources to employ the staff, so they could actually have preventative measures to stop shop lifting happening in the first place.”