Top officer: Bosses hindered by a ‘woke mindset’

THE ‘woke mindset’ of top officers is hindering the fight against crime, a rankand-file police chief has blasted.

Richard Cooke, Police Federation chairman at the country’s second biggest force, said too much time was being wasted instead debating issues such as ‘white privilege’.

His comments came after Home Secretary Suella Braverman called for a return to ‘common sense policing’ and told bosses she wants officers fighting crime, not ‘debating gender on Twitter’.

Sergeant Cooke, who represents around 7,500 West Midlands Police officers, said: ‘I agree with the Home Secretary; there is a “woke” mindset at the top that leads to much time wasted discussing... ‘critical race theory’ or ‘white privilege’ or whether there should be extra categories of hate crimes.

‘I say leave all that to the academics and politicians. Police officers should focus on stopping the crime and violence which disproportionately affects our young, diverse communities.’ He said the majority of officers signed up to ‘help others... and catch the bad guys.’

‘But that role has become something quite different in recent years with more and more of our time taken up with what I would describe as social work – eight out of ten calls for service are non-crime related,’ he said. ‘It begs the question if we don’t go, who will? There is a current crisis in our ambulance services – this has a massive knock- on to police work. We can’t just leave people who are in need to go fight crime...’

Chief Constable Olivia Pinkney, the UK lead for neighbourhood policing, said officers can spend half their shifts working on behalf of other services, leading to crime victims being ‘failed’ and the criminal justice system is now in ‘crisis’ she said.

Miss Pinkney, head of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight force, said officers across the country attend on average 54 mental health incidents every hour and spend three hours waiting with individuals before health professionals can take over.

She said she wanted them to be freed from attending incidents that ‘are not for the police service to lead upon’. Miss Pinkney said: ‘Come and sit in a police control room at half past three on a Friday afternoon, and the number of calls that come in and say “we haven’t been able to resolve this in health, in children’s social care, so we’d like the police to own this risk until Monday”.

‘It all lands on your desk because we’re here 24/7, we answer the phone.’ A source close to Mrs Braverman said ‘she has been crystal clear she wants to see a return to back to basics, common sense policing’.