Assaults on officers increase to 72 every day

ATTACKS on police have risen dramatically, figures show, as a Scotland Yard officer said that members of the force were being sent alone to respond to crimes.

About 72 police officers are assaulted every day in England and Wales, official statistics have revealed.

Home Office data from all 44 police forces found that 26,295 staff were assaulted on duty between April 2017 to April this year. That equates to a 34 per cent increase from figures taken in 2013, when 19,670 police officers were attacked while in uniform, and a rise of 10 per cent on last year, when just under 24,000 were assaulted. The Metropolitan Police recorded the highest number of assaults, with 3,975 in the past year. West Yorkshire suffered 1,366 assaults, Hampshire 1,159, Kent 1,112 and Greater Manchester 1,031.

The number of attacks was likely to be higher, as many officers did not officially report attacks.

One Met officer said assaults were going up at the same time as officer numbers were decreasing.

He said: “Most of us don’t report minor assaults, so the figures will be far higher. The problem is that there are fewer officers, so when we turn up to an incident we are more often than not by ourselves.” He added: “The statistics show that one officer is assaulted every 20 minutes. That’s just not acceptable.”

In an interview with the Police Federation magazine Police, John Apter, the new chairman of the federation, said he planned to tackle “the inadequacies that exist in law and sentencing, which mean that there is not a strong enough deterrent to prevent assaults on police officers”.

Nick Smart, chairman of West Yorkshire Police Federation, said a two-year prison term was “not unreasonable” for anyone who assaults a police officer.