Proactive policing suffers as there are simply not enough cops to do the job

Police Federation of England and Wales

5 min read15 May 2016 Partner content

Officers say they aren’t able to do their jobs properly, nor to the standards they wish and communities don’t get proactive patrols, new research suggests.

The study – in which nearly 17,000 officers responded – found that of those surveyed:

84% said there were not enough officers to go around to manage the demands placed upon them
80% of officers agree that at least sometimes they are not able to perform tasks because they have too much work to do
78% said there were not enough officers in their team/unit for them to do their jobs properly and 58% said they did not have enough time to do their job to a standard they could be proud of
Only 11% felt there were enough officers in their team to enable them to do their job properly
Just 13% said they had the time to engage in proactive policing, with the majority just reacting to jobs coming in

The results come from research into job demands and capacity, carried out by the Police Federation of England and Wales in conjunction with the University of Nottingham earlier this year.

Just over a fifth of officers whose teams had minimum staffing levels said these were rarely or never met in the last year.

And if one team is short, there is nowhere else to go for help, with nearly 64% saying they could not get help from elsewhere if they were struggling on shift.

Steve White, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said the results were alarming and provided the continued evidence that the past cuts to policing were having a detrimental effect on the bedrock of the service, such as neighbourhood policing.

“This is not about us crying wolf; this echoes what we have been saying all along and we must ensure the public do not suffer as a result,” he said. “I know officers sign up to this job because they have a sense of duty and they passionately believe in what they do – they want to make a difference and want to support communities and help people. What they don’t want is to have to miss tasks, or not do things because of the sheer volume of work they are having to deal with. That work included ever-increasing crime and non-crime incidents and it is all set against a backdrop of 17,000 fewer officers since 2010.”

The research also found

Only 4% of respondents said they always get their rest breaks during work, while more than half (53%) said they “never” or “rarely” did.
27% of those who responded said they “often” or “always” had their annual leave requests refused and 13% said their allocated days off were “often” or “always” cancelled.

Mr White continued: “For our officers, the sense of duty they have is just the beginning. They want to be able to deliver a consistently high standard of service to the public, but are simply not always able to. This is not about them moaning because of the high volume of work, but there are some worrying statistics in the report which are of concern to us and cannot just be dismissed as scaremongering.

“Collaboration across forces needs to more effective in order to respond to these challenges and the whole structure of policing in England and Wales needs to be properly debated so that we can make the best of the limited resources we have.”

The results are also due to be examined to see the impact that demand is having on officers’ welfare in light of reduced officer numbers and it is expected there will be a relationship, given the preliminary findings from qualitative research.

“The information we have around the impact of these high demands on officer welfare is worrying. More and more emergency service personnel are suffering from mental health problems caused by the stresses of work and it is like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off,” added Mr White.

Notes:

The research was carried out by Jonathan Houdmont, Assistant Professor of Occupational Health Psychology, University of Nottingham in conjunction with the Police Federation of England and Wales.

The results are based on 16,841 responses and the survey ran for the whole of February 2016. Officers from all 43 forces took part, with 28% women and 72% men participating.

The full results of the survey will be published in September 2016 and the final report, including modelling of the relationship between reduced numbers and welfare, will be published in May 2017.

The latest figures from the Crime Survey for England Wales published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in April showed a decrease of 7% in overall crime, but an increase in specific crimes such as a 27% increase in ‘violence against the person’ offences, 11% increase in homicide, and a 9% rise in offences involving knives or sharp instruments.

Crime statistics also do not cover the wide range of non-crime incidents that officers deal with, such as counter-terrorism, looking for missing persons, roads policing, preventing child sexual exploitation and monitoring sex offenders.

In May 2015, the PFEW Chairman warned of neighbourhood policing becoming an endangered species as a result of the ‘new stream-lined barren policing landscape’. A study then found that 30 out of 43 forces were downgrading or reviewing their neighbourhood policing teams.

And earlier this year the HMIC warned that neighbourhood policing – ‘the cornerstone of the British policing model’ – should be preserved for future generations and that Forces’ good performance in preventing crimes was at risk if neighbourhood policing is further eroded. “Frontline neighbourhood police officers have told us repeatedly that they are being pulled from their vitally important preventative work in communities to fulfil other duties, like guarding crime scenes, spending time in stations investigating crimes or staffing police station front counters. Losing our eyes and ears in the community is only likely to hamper good performance in preventing crime,” said HMIC Zoe Billingham.