We should treat custody as a real specialism

CUSTODY posts should be treated as a specialism on a par with firearms or roads policing, Essex Police Federation said.

Chairman Steve Taylor believes that custody officers are left with minimal support to “stagnate”, with very few career options open to them.

And he said making simple changes, such as deeming it to be a specialist role or changing shift patterns to reflect the demands of the job, could attract more people into the role.

He said: “We treat custody as a specialism in all but name. The risk that individual custody officers carry is akin to the same risk as a firearms officer or a roads policing officer, in some of the activities there that are deemed to be high risk.

“And yet we still maintain that we can post people into this position, that we can support them in a very minimalist way, with a simple conversion course onto Athena Custody and then leave them to it.

“And we leave them, often, in a command with very few avenues to develop or to move on, and officers run the risk of stagnating.

“All those things combined make a really unhealthy workplace, in my view. We’d like to see the organisation do something quite quickly to turn that around – and we think the first step is to identify custody officers as specialists.

“For it to sit on a CV as something that someone has strived to achieve, is qualified to deliver, and then moves on to another part of the organisation having benefited from being a custody officer, if that’s what they choose to do.

“We think a specialist custody role deserves a different shift pattern, which can be warranted, and that’s what we’d like to see the organisation do. Because it is a specialism in all but name.

“Custody is going to come under the microscope as we move forward, and undoubtedly we’re going to shrink the size of our custody estate. So now’s the perfect time to be investing in the people that we ask to deliver that for us.”