There is help out there for officers who are struggling with their mental health, but more needs to be done to prevent them breaking in the first place, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Chair Steve Kent was speaking after the Home Affairs Select Committee discussed suicide prevention in the police. Andy Rhodes from Oscar Kilo told the Select Committee that it did not yet have full data on the number of police suicides.<\/p>\n
PFEW Wellbeing Co-Lead Paul Williams said: \u201cTo be able to say in 2024 that we do not monitor our police officers in terms of the suicide or attempted suicide rate is incredible\u201d and that the police service needed to \u201cup its game\u201d at spotting the early warning signs.<\/p>\n
Steve said: \u201cOur force has invested in services for people to go to when they\u2019re feeling under pressure. It\u2019s still not perfect because cops don\u2019t always necessarily come forward, so we often rely on colleagues, family and friends to flag things, which thankfully people do. The Federation\u2019s \u2018Ask Twice\u2019 campaign is really important on that issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we do have a basic mechanism in place to deal with officers who are starting to break and who are broken. But what I want to see is to stop them from breaking in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cOccupational health in our force is completely snowed under. We are picking up the slack with our counsellors, which we\u2019re proud to do, but it can\u2019t be right that we have so many cops who are broken.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing that would help would be to stop the ludicrous performance culture and bureaucracy we\u2019ve got in policing. We need to invest in our numbers, invest in getting resources back, and take the pressure off policing, because at the minute it is off the scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
The force doesn\u2019t currently flag up officers who have been to multiple traumatic incidents and who might be at risk of PTSD, Steve added.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIt would be a big challenge to do it, but it could be done. But it requires supervisors and managers to have the support to spend a good period of their time looking after officers and checking up on them. At the moment, supervisors and inspectors are so busy chasing targets that they\u2019re missing it when their cops are struggling.\u201d<\/p>\n