Sergeants Bogged Down By Bureaucracy

“Sergeants are too busy bogged down by bureaucracy and dealing with performance metrics, which have no place in policing.”

That was the reaction of South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent to a recent Police Oracle article in which sergeants across the UK described the pressures and stresses of their role.

Speaking anonymously, they said they were managing large numbers of inexperienced PCs, all while continuing their training and facing the operational stress of the frontline. The number of sergeants in the UK has risen over the past five years, but so has the number of inexperienced PCs – over a third of officers have less than five years’ service.

Steve said: “Speaking as a sergeant myself, I do understand that these are times of change, but the demands have been there for some time.

“It’s quite simple: sergeants are too busy bogged down with bureaucracy and dealing with performance metrics, which have no place in policing. We need to be dealing with incidents on their own merits.

“Sergeants are spending the vast majority of their time dealing with bureaucratic systems, having to check the incident queues and make sure they’re compliant to satisfy bureaucratic standards and performance metrics, rather than what they need to be doing, and that is supervising their officers, looking after the welfare of their officers, and checking the standard of their officers’ work, not just checking spreadsheets and to make sure that numbers stack up.

“It is absolutely shocking. And this isn’t just a South Yorkshire issue, it’s a policing issue across the country that needs urgently addressing. A radical change is required.”