ESSEX Police is juggling its resources to try to fulfil the Government\u2019s pledge to increase the number of firearms officers in England and Wales.<\/p>\n
The force has already lost a number of firearms officers to the neighbouring Metropolitan Police \u2013 which itself is under pressure to increase its firearms numbers.<\/p>\n
And Essex Police Federation Chairman Mark Smith says moving officers from other areas of work into firearms will ultimately reduce the amount of officers who can go out on patrol.<\/p>\n
Criticising the Government\u2019s \u201cempty promises\u201d on firearms, he said: \u201cThey make all these promises but don\u2019t put any extra money into it, so really they\u2019re making promises that some forces just can\u2019t meet because they don\u2019t have any funds for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Essex we are struggling at the moment because we\u2019re desperately having to train up more officers and offer incentives to try and get them to stay in Essex, which in turn costs the force more money.<\/p>\n
\u201cEssex is having to increase, we\u2019re losing officers, we\u2019re having to increase firearms \u2013 where do they come from? Officers who are on frontline duties, answering 999 calls? They\u2019ve got to come from somewhere, child protection, wherever.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are people who, rightly so, want to maybe change the way their career is going, maybe do firearms, but they\u2019re not new people coming in so they\u2019ve got to come from somewhere else in the organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Smith added that replacing experienced officers with newly trained PCs was also starting to cause problems and warned that the force may not be able to respond to incidents because they are so thin on the ground.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe\u2019re okay firearms wise, as in being able to respond to incident, we\u2019re okay \u2013 it\u2019s just it\u2019s now been identified and it\u2019s costing more money to try and rectify.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as the resources go, the resources, as we know in Essex, are shrinking. We\u2019re now on about 2,800 officers, we hope not to go below that.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if they are taking them from elsewhere into the firearms area, yes we\u2019ve got probationers coming in to keep us at the 2,800 level, but we haven\u2019t got the experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe probationers who come in are not ready to go out and respond to jobs for a good number of months, so there are dips where maybe there aren\u2019t quite so many people out answering 999 calls.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course there is always an issue where we may not be able to respond to jobs because of lack of numbers but I think that\u2019s across the board anyway, with the cuts. I think this is just another consequence of those cuts.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESSEX Police is juggling its resources to try to fulfil the Government\u2019s pledge to increase the number of firearms officers in England and Wales. The force has already lost a\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2276,"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\/2971"}],"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=2971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2972,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971\/revisions\/2972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}