A total of 331 South Yorkshire Police officers were signed off work over the past year with stress, anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), official figures have shown.<\/p>\n
Officers are becoming unwell because of understaffing, excessive workloads, unrealistic performance targets and poor pay and conditions, according to South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent.<\/p>\n
He said: “We are being set up to fail by governments and inspectorates that bring performance metrics into policing. For me, performance metrics have very little place in policing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey take away the independence of the constable and apply unnecessary pressure to frontline officers, detectives, response teams and traffic officers. Everyone is having to play whack-a-mole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve called for an extra 400 to 500 officers to be recruited to the force of around 3,000 to ease the pressure.<\/p>\n
He added: “When I talk to officers who are signed off with stress, aside from the inevitably traumatic incidents, what they usually talk to me about is their workload.<\/p>\n
“And the domino effect is that when they go off, somebody else has to pick up their workload.<\/p>\n
“So until we have a fundamental review of how policing operates in this country, this is just going to get worse.<\/p>\n
“We can put all the wellbeing initiatives in place that we want, but until we give officers the time and space to look after their own wellbeing, and that of their colleagues, this is not going to change.”<\/p>\n