Officers having to ‘abandon’ traditional policing

ESSEX Police officers are having to abandon traditional policing duties due to unprecedented cuts to the service, the local Federation has warned.

Road safety is falling victim as fewer officers are left to deal with an ever-increasing crime demand, according to Chairman Steve Taylor.

He said: “The sight of a uniformed police officer stood at the side of the road with a speed gun provides a really important road safety function for our communities. Those police officers are seen and so people slow down.

“So a proactive opportunity has gone missing because that officer isn’t allowed to do those important pieces of work because they’re out responding to demand that’s been passed to us from other agencies.”

He was speaking after chiefs announced they would start logging how much time officers are spent doing non-police work, such as waiting for paramedics with sick and injured people, or taking them to hospital.

Chiefs have agreed to introduce new codes to their command-and-control systems to log whether an ambulance was called to an incident, if it attended, or if no ambulance was called but police transported a patient to hospital anyway.

Steve added: “Unless the organisation is prepared to say no, and to wrap a degree of protection around officers to say, ‘No, we have deemed that this is not appropriate that we are going to do this extra work’, we’re always going to be considered that emergency service of last resort.

“We can’t be seen not to be doing the very best for those vulnerable people, those people at risk, even if it’s not traditionally a role that the police should be doing. What I’d expect in those cases is for more funding to be allocated to the ambulance service, to the social services and social care budgets, to allow us to do our job and to enable them to do theirs, without that bleed over which can be quite damaging to policing.”