A national force to arrest crisis in police service

THE POLICE forces of England and Wales have no voice. They have a federation which is a toothless union – toothless because ultimately the service cannot strike.

The men and women who each day don the blue uniform and serve and protect us are in the wilderness. They feel undervalued, scorned, and although we traditionally are policed by consent, that consent, the police officers believe, is very weak.

Respect for the rule of law has diminished over the last three decades to a new unprecedented low, best highlighted when a gang of schoolchildren, acting as a mob, recently attacked two police officers. Assaults on police officers are at an all-time high, together with sickness and stress.

The service itself is not in the best of shape. Particularly amongst the senior ranks. The investigations into historical child sex abuse in Rotherham, as well as the actions of the South Yorkshire force with regards to Hillsborough and the Sir Cliff Richard inquiry, have cast a very large cloud over the service as a whole.

However, the rank and file officers dealing everyday with burglary, domestic violence, social bad behaviour, thefts and assaults keep turning out onto the streets 24 hours a day to serve, and protect, the communities they proudly serve and, in many cases, live in.

Support from the Government is, to a large extent, non-existent. Numbers of serving officers has fallen in the last year by 3.3 per cent to 200,922. This overall number of officers within the service is paltry set against a population of some 60 million. The number of frontline officers out on the streets is very low at 57,415, falling in the same period by six per cent.

In contrast, 35,000 officers patrol New York, serving a population of six million people. It is not a stretch to conclude that the police force of England and Wales is vastly understaffed.

The introduction of PCSOs (police community service officers) is a cheaper way of policing the streets as their terms and conditions cost much less, but even their numbers have fallen. In the same period, the numbers of PCSOs fell by 10.7 per cent.

Morale within the service has never been lower – 93.5 per cent of officers surveyed by the Police Federation in 2016 said that morale was low, 68 per cent did not feel valued and only 17 per cent felt respected by the public they serve.

More than 80 per cent said they had injuries or mental health issues as a result of their duty – there is an assault on a police officer in England and Wales every 12 minutes, that’s 23,000 assaults a year on average.

These are startling figures. The police have been abandoned by their traditional friends in the Conservative Party. Theresa May, the then Home Secretary, was greeted with silence by the Police Federation last year.

There is nothing wrong with new ideas – an open minded view has to be taken. Clearly the challenges of the modern day police force have changed enormously since the days of A new approach to all levels of crimefighting has to be adopted. Rank and file officers have proven their adaptability time and time again.

Is it time for a national force dedicated to online crime, terrorism, serious fraud and historical child abuse? This force would probably benefit from a discriminatory recruitment process to make it fit for purpose. Local policing could then be left to bobbies from the community in which they were brought up and live in.

These officers would not need a degree to protect and serve the people that pay their salaries – their local knowledge and understanding of the people they work for is all they need, together with a degree of common sense. Certainly not a pre-entry degree requirement, as proposed by the National Police College.

The police force in England and Wales need a voice, they need a champion, they need a political party on who they can trust and rely on. A party who will not let them down in the future. A party who believes in law and order. A party who puts the victims of crime first and not the perpetrators of crime. Much more importantly they need support from the communities they serve.

Consent is just not as freely given as it was, it has to be earned, of course, but it is a twoway street.