South Yorkshire Police teams are understaffed and overworked, the Federation has said, adding that \u201cthe strain is felt across the board\u201d.<\/p>\n
South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent was speaking after the Police Federation of England and Wales carried out a survey of nearly 2,000 emergency response officers and 91% said they were working in unsafe and understaffed teams.<\/p>\n
The survey also found that more than half (52%) of officers believe response policing is not working well, with just 6% saying it is working \u201cvery well\u201d.<\/p>\n
More than a third of officers said travel distances and the size of the areas understaffed teams cover are affecting their ability to respond, while almost one in five cited equipment failures. Officers described \u201cconstant pressure to move onto the next incident\u201d, \u201cbeing single crewed\u201d, and \u201cfull shifts wiped out by the first job of the day\u201d.<\/p>\n
Steve Kent said he recognised the picture the survey presented, and that understaffing hit his force harder than most. He explained: \u201cWe are one of the poorest-funded forces for the size and demand that we have, and we have more officers abstracted to football matches \u2013 we have an enormous football footprint that other forces our size just don’t have. That means that our response teams are depleted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur officer numbers are nowhere near where they need to be. Our Chief Constable is looking at ways to try to bolster those numbers, but we need to have funding to do that. We have fewer than 3,100 officers and we need to be at a minimum of 3,400 to deal with the demand that we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve continued: \u201cThe strain has been felt across the board. I’m seeing road traffic teams running at ridiculously low numbers. I’m seeing detective teams, response teams, neighbourhood teams, all depleted. So unless there is serious investment into policing, this decline is going to continue and we are going to continue to wear out our officers, and they\u2019re going to continue to break.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere needs to be centralised funding. People say that crime rates are lower than they were 10 years ago. But what they don’t appreciate is that an incident takes much longer to deal with because of the bureaucracy. Officers have to spend half an hour recording an incident, whereas 10 years ago it would have taken five minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the force was trying to deal with this time-sapping bureaucracy, but that the College of Policing and HMIC needed to look at the issue \u201cas a matter of urgency\u201d. He added: \u201cThere needs to be a fundamental change in their approach to how policing works.\u201d<\/p>\n