POLICE officers acting as a \u2018taxi service\u2019 to bring home youngsters who are regularly reported missing from children\u2019s homes cannot be sustained, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police has said.<\/p>\n
David Crompton said the force had calculated that the work it\u00a0carries out covering for other services that\u00a0do not work 24 hours a day \u201cties up staff for well in excess of 100,000 hours per year\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said this \u201cis the equivalent work of about 50 staff, full time for a year\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis cannot be sustained,\u201d said Mr Compton. \u201cWe need to be clear what is expected of the police by the public and what the core role should be.<\/p>\n
\u201cExamples are police officers acting as a \u2018taxi service\u2019 to bring home youngsters who are regularly reported missing from children\u2019s homes, or alternatively, police officers being asked to go and find patients who leave hospital without completing their treatment at A&E departments.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice officers are also regularly asked to find patients with mental health problems who have wandered off from hospital, despite it being explicitly a job for other agencies to carry out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Compton was entering the debate about what policing\u2019s role is following comments around policing cannabis, burglary and missing people.<\/p>\n
He wrote in the Star<\/em> newspaper: \u201cHave Chief Constables really begun to go soft on drugs and burglary?<\/p>\n \u201cNo, this is simply a response to the budget cuts we face which are liable to mean the police and other public services losing a quarter of their funding over the next few years.<\/p>\n \u201cThis means we have no alternative but to look closely at the sorts of work we become involved in so that scarce resources are sent to the most urgent incidents.<\/p>\n \u201cPersonally, I think a better place to start managing demands on the police is where we are requested to undertake work which isn\u2019t part of police duties.\u201d<\/p>\n The Chief Constable concluded: \u201cI fully accept the police service is the agency of \u2018last resort\u2019, regrettably however, in the future the police service will have to start to say \u2018no\u2019 more often, but I don\u2019t think burglary and drugs offences are the right place to begin to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Neil Bowles, Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation, said that as an operational inspector he used to \u201cget\u00a0frustrated with that demand coming in and it wasting police offices time and their\u00a0efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cThe time of 50 Officers or staff per year is great; but we are talking of losing 1500.\u00a0We need to come with far bigger reductions in demand than that.\u201d<\/p>\n