THE recorded number of assaults on police officers in England and Wales is set to rise dramatically after the Home Office demanded more accurate data from forces.<\/p>\n
Figures published by the Home Office have until now been based on data from forces\u2019 Health and Safety records \u2013 but from this year it will also be seeking crime data.<\/p>\n
According to Government figures for the last financial year \u2013 published in July 2015 \u2013 in Essex, there were 353 recorded assaults and 418 assaults without injury on a constable recorded in the past year.<\/p>\n
There were 23,000 assaults on police officers across England and Wales last year.<\/p>\n
The change in recording practices will see a \u201csignificant increase in numbers of those who have been assaulted\u201d, according to John Apter, the Chairman of Hampshire Police Federation, who has been leading the push for more accurate numbers of police assaults.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they\u2019ve got to have the correct data,\u201d said Mark Smith, Essex Police Federation Chairman. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to be open and honest about what is happening out there, the same that we\u2019ve got to be open and honest about cuts to policing, we need to be open and honest about assaults.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice officer assaults aren\u2019t likely to go up, they\u2019re already high, they just weren\u2019t being recorded or reported. So the recording and reporting will go up, the officer assaults are already high, we know they\u2019re high, we need some honesty in reporting that because it\u2019s not right that we\u2019re ignoring officers being assaulted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Apter added: \u201cThe Home Office, up until now, have only ever asked forces to provide data from the Health and Safety or the HR reporting system. Now we know from research we\u2019ve done in force probably only about 20% or 25% of actual assaults gets recorded on the Health and Safety system, so there\u2019s a massive disparity.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor this next set of data requirement, which is for 2015\/16, the Home Office have now requested from forces the Health and Safety data, and that is mandatory as it was last year, but the difference this year is they\u2019ve also requested, on a voluntary basis, they\u2019ve also requested the crime data to go alongside it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Apter said \u201cthe pressure now is on forces across England and Wales\u201d to provide their crime data on officer assaults \u2013 whether it is voluntary or not.<\/p>\n
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THE recorded number of assaults on police officers in England and Wales is set to rise dramatically after the Home Office demanded more accurate data from forces. Figures published by\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2762,"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\/2761"}],"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=2761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2763,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions\/2763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}