Increasing firearms officers must not leave other areas short

ANY increase in the number of firearms officers in Essex must not be at the expense of policing in other areas.

Essex Police Federation Secretary Phil Suarez said budget cuts mean forces are having to “rob Peter to pay Paul” to increase the number of officers trained to carry firearms.

He also said an increase in armed officers would only be sustainable if there was more money to raise the number of frontline officers as well.

He said: “If we uplift armed officers in Essex, those armed officers are going to come from other strands of policing. And I suspect, when that happens, it is very often the frontline, your standard response officers, that are working all our busy town centres and villages, they’re probably the pool of people that a lot of these people come from. That then just passes on pressure down the line.

“I think the overall plan, I certainly suspect the Chief will want this, is funding to uplift overall police numbers, so then when we do any further uplift to armed policing we’ve got the resilience and the resource to be able to do that without it impacting too much elsewhere.”