POLICE are taking longer to investigate cases and bring charges despite a significant fall in recorded crime.<\/p>\n
Investigations are taking nearly 10% longer compared with four years ago, while figures show a 28% drop in crime.<\/p>\n
The Police Federation said the rise in charging times is the result of cuts to police resources.<\/p>\n
Because charging is an “operational matter”, the Home Office deferred to the National Police Chiefs Council which is yet to comment.<\/p>\n
Across England and Wales the investigation time which led to somebody being charged was 94 days during the first quarter of 2015.<\/p>\n
That figure is 10% higher than it was four years ago, the Ministry of Justice data shows.<\/p>\n
Of all the counties in England and Wales, Essex is currently taking the longest to reach charge at 121 days on average – nearly twice the average length of time taken in Cleveland.<\/p>\n
Mark Smith, chairman of Essex Police Federation, said the increase was a result of growing pressures on officers, a new police computing system and delays in waiting for forensic evidence to be returned from Kent.<\/p>\n
He said: “We’ve got fewer resources on the street now, so the officers that are on the streets are also the officers investigating the crimes that they’ve been given.<\/p>\n
“So if they are picking up more and more jobs each day they may not be getting the time to go and investigate those that are waiting for them in their tray.<\/p>\n
“And officers are being asked for a lot more paperwork before a decision is made on somebody being charged.<\/p>\n
“We want to get the work done, we want to get the evidence and get criminals in court as quickly as possible. It is frustrating,” he said.<\/p>\n
See the full report from the BBC http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-england-34218982<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" POLICE are taking longer to investigate cases and bring charges despite a significant fall in recorded crime. Investigations are taking nearly 10% longer compared with four years ago, while figures\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1461,"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\/2328"}],"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=2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2335,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions\/2335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}