Police forces should bust an arrest culture in policing to free up officers and tackle congested custody cells, South Yorkshire Police Federation said.<\/p>\n
Chair Steve Kent said the way officers\u2019 performances were measured had created a \u201cperverse culture\u201d where they felt under pressure to make arrests their default position.<\/p>\n
It came as the Policing Productivity review made 61 recommendations that could free up 61 million policing hours over five years.<\/p>\n
However, Steve said the key issue would be changing the performance culture of policing to free up more officers.<\/p>\n
The Federation Chair said: \u201cOur police officers are independent officials. They shouldn\u2019t be under pressure to arrest, unless it\u2019s absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn arrest culture creates a perverse culture within policing where people are measured on it, so people feel the default position is to arrest people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat that then does is ties people up for hours and hours on end, ties up the custody suite, ties up the officer\u2019s time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen actually in some cases – and I\u2019m not talking about where people need to be arrested – people could be dealt with in a different way.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you\u2019d free those officers up quicker, they wouldn\u2019t have to do hours and hours of paperwork based on it<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to stop this culture of going to do all that when we haven\u2019t got the resources to do it, and focus on the risk, focus on the safeguarding issues and focus on the people that actually need to be arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve said shifting performance measurements to focus on how the victims of crime felt would lead to better outcomes in policing.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if it took ten minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. It doesn\u2019t matter if they were there for two hours, three hours, four hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if the person got arrested or didn\u2019t get arrested. \u00a0What matters is how they felt and how the police dealt with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve taken that common sense approach out of policing and that clogs up our officers<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to fundamentally look at what we\u2019re doing before we look at making any kind of savings.\u201d<\/p>\n