THE expectations the public have on the police are going to have to reduce if crippling cuts to Essex Police continue, the Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Despite saving \u00a372.5 million since 2010, the force is expected to need to find a further \u00a360 million over the next five years. Mark Smith, Chairman of Essex Police Federation, said this means \u201cit\u2019s going to be harder to attend all the incidents the public would like us to attend, or expect us to attend.\u201d
\nMr Smith said: \u201cIt means that the service that\u2019s being given to the public at the moment is going to go down, it\u2019s going to get worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think expectations are going to have to change again. People are already noticing the lack of police around, and we\u2019re already, at this time, having to change what we attend.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not attending as much anti-social behaviour, and other incidents. And that\u2019s now. In five years\u2019 time, come 2020, at the end of the next Comprehensive Spending Review Essex alone could be down, worst case scenario, to about 2,300 officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s another 600 officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo from where we are now to there, with a drop of 600, things are going to have to change yet again. And I think that people are going to have to change their expectations yet again. And the public are going to see we can\u2019t do everything, we can\u2019t attend everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Smith added: \u201cI don\u2019t know exactly what it\u2019s going to look like but, God forbid come the day that we just haven\u2019t got enough resources to attend the amount of emergency calls that are coming in, let alone other jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Smith said he was pleased that more Chief Constables \u2013 including Essex Police\u2019s Steve Kavanagh \u2013 have been more vocal on the dangers of cuts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen and heard the Home Secretary accuse us of scaremongering; the Federation have been saying since 2010\/11, \u2018What are we going to stop doing? We will need to stop doing certain things\u2019, and we\u2019ve been saying that from the start.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re five years into it and the forces, and Chief Constables, are now starting to say that we are going to have to stop doing things. So they\u2019re playing catch up really. If they\u2019d made this decision five years ago when we first said about it, then I think we would be in a better position than we are now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat said, they have now identified that we need to stop doing certain things, and in Essex we have made decisions and are acting on those decisions, and things are starting maybe to get a little bit easier here and there. But more needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE expectations the public have on the police are going to have to reduce if crippling cuts to Essex Police continue, the Police Federation has said. Despite saving \u00a372.5 million\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2292,"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\/2291"}],"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=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2296,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions\/2296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}