THE first national picture of the breadth and complexity of the work undertaken by the police has revealed that “while crime may have fallen, level of demand on police resources has not reduced in the same way.”<\/p>\n
The work – published by the College of Policing – reveals there is currently one police officer per 445 people in England and Wales. That is up more than 50 people per officer than in 2010. Officer numbers are down 11 per cent in that period.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n The College states: “There are two indications of emerging pressure on police resilience \u2013 decreased levels of visibility & increasing requests for mutual aid.”<\/p>\n The analysis shows the incoming and ongoing work of the police and suggests an increasing amount of police time is directed towards public protection work such as managing high-risk offenders and protecting victims who are at risk and often vulnerable.<\/p>\n These cases, the College says, are often extremely challenging and rightly require considerable amounts of police resource.<\/p>\n CEO Alex Marshall adds: \u201cThe evidence shows that while the number of crimes may have fallen, the level of demand on police resources has not reduced in the same way.<\/p>\n “The changing mix of crime means that over the past 10 years, investigating and preventing crime has become more complex, and the costs of crime for the police have not fallen as much as overall numbers of crimes. Complex crimes such as child abuse and domestic violence are also understandably taking up more police time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe College will continue to build on this early evidence base by working with forces to develop consistent approaches to map demand and to help inform policy decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Smith, Chairman of Essex Police Federation, said:\u00a0“We know that demand hasn\u2019t gone down. In fact it\u2019s probably gone up, because they\u2019re quoting, I guess, demand from telephone calls, 999 etc. Demand also\u2026 we\u2019ve also got demand to look at and investigate things online haven\u2019t we? So I think demand is actually increasing, while officer numbers are falling. And we can\u2019t meet that demand.<\/p>\n “It\u2019s not all about crime. There are other things, a lot of other things that we deal with that aren\u2019t crime, that aren\u2019t recorded, and the demand is going up. I think as the population grows demand will get greater. So that divide between demand and what we can actually supply is going to increase, that gap.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" THE first national picture of the breadth and complexity of the work undertaken by the police has revealed that “while crime may have fallen, level of demand on police resources\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1793,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1758"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1792,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758\/revisions\/1792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}