NEW figures suggesting that police forces in England are taking on average five and a half hours to respond to priority calls show that policing has been \u201cdecimated\u201d by cuts, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Most police forces aim to respond to priority calls \u2013 incidents where there is a degree of urgency but no immediate risk to life \u2013 in one hour, but a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Liberal Democrats showed that the average over the 19 forces that responded was five and a half hours.<\/p>\n
South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said: \u201cThe media and the Government need to ask themselves why this is happening, and it\u2019s because our infrastructure, as well as our numbers, has been decimated to such an extent that we\u2019re only just starting to properly repair it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese figures concern me, but it is the nature of where we are. We don\u2019t have the resources. We are still the service of last resort.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve gave the caveat that within South Yorkshire Police, \u201cimmediate incidents get answered very quickly\u201d. He added: \u201cTo some extent, when there are non-urgent incidents, if it takes officers a bit longer to get there, but when they get there they\u2019ve got the time to do the job properly, then that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
But police forces needed to continue to push back against attending a huge amount of mental health call-outs that other organisations were better trained to deal with, said Steve.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cOur force is applying the \u2018Right Care, Right Person\u2019 model, which will push back some of the demand to the people who are most appropriate to deal with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s frustrating. We see demand put on us by other organisations all the time, and I want to make it absolutely clear, I\u2019ve got sympathy for those organisations, such as social services and the NHS. But we are not here to deal with things that they should be dealing with.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo other organisation has endured the cuts that policing has, and yet there is still an expectation sometimes that the police should be here as a backstop when other services don\u2019t have the resources to deal with things. That\u2019s simply unfair.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re dealing with crime, we\u2019re dealing with complex welfare, we\u2019re still dealing with large amounts of mental health issues, we\u2019re dealing with all sorts of incidents that, quite frankly, the public and our officers wouldn\u2019t expect us to be dealing with, in an ideal world.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there needs to be a seismic shift of what our police officers are actually out there dealing with every day, of which Right Care, Right Person is a great start.\u201d<\/p>\n