ESSEX Police is riding a slippery slope towards privatisation, the force\u2019s Police Federation has warned.<\/p>\n
An unspecified number of police officers are to be replaced with civilian investigators, it has recently been announced, in a bid to save money. But Mark Smith, Federation chairman, has warned that this may be a false economy.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cThere are roles that I believe civilians could do, but this slippery slope. How far with the force go? If they start replacing all investigating and interviewing officers with civilians, for example, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s going to save much money in the long run.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause these people have to be trained up to the highest level of interviewing, and then the problem there is that they become a very big asset to Essex Police but they are also very poachable by other organisations.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo they could be then offering these people more money to move away and it may be the position that Essex Police then need to up their wages just to hold on to these people.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cLet\u2019s say the force goes all the way [with civilianisation], because the amount of cuts we\u2019re going to face. What happens if it isn\u2019t cheaper and it doesn\u2019t work? Who do they then replace them with?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not going to be officers again because the officers have gone and that\u2019s where I fear that it could then slip towards privatisation. Private companies taking over certain roles because it\u2019s too expensive for the force.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Essex Police said it was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d there would be as few as 2,000 officers, as the Essex Police Federation believes, but admitted hundreds more officers could go.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWe will have to look very closely at whether police officers continue to deal with everything they do, or whether there are alternative ways to handle some matters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe force is planning for the future as far as possible and that will include fewer officers, but more flexible use of non-warranted roles.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe change in budgets means Essex Police will be smaller in 2020, but we cannot say at this time how many officers it will definitely have. More than 80 per cent of the money spent by Essex Police is used to employ people and if austerity measures continue the total numbers will unfortunately fall further.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to make sure police officers are in the roles where they can have greatest impact and are considering putting more civilian investigators into positions where warranted powers are not required.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will lead to a rebalancing between police and civilian numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESSEX Police is riding a slippery slope towards privatisation, the force\u2019s Police Federation has warned. An unspecified number of police officers are to be replaced with civilian investigators, it has\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1190,"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\/1826"}],"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=1826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1827,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1826\/revisions\/1827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}