CUSTODY posts should be treated as a specialism on a par with firearms or roads policing, Essex Police Federation said.<\/p>\n
Chairman Steve Taylor believes that custody officers are left with minimal support to \u201cstagnate\u201d, with very few career options open to them.<\/p>\n
And he said making simple changes, such as deeming it to be a specialist role or changing shift patterns to reflect the demands of the job, could attract more people into the role.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWe treat custody as a specialism in all but name. The risk that individual custody officers carry is akin to the same risk as a firearms officer or a roads policing officer, in some of the activities there that are deemed to be high risk.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd yet we still maintain that we can post people into this position, that we can support them in a very minimalist way, with a simple conversion course onto Athena Custody and then leave them to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we leave them, often, in a command with very few avenues to develop or to move on, and officers run the risk of stagnating.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll those things combined make a really unhealthy workplace, in my view. We\u2019d like to see the organisation do something quite quickly to turn that around \u2013 and we think the first step is to identify custody officers as specialists.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor it to sit on a CV as something that someone has strived to achieve, is qualified to deliver, and then moves on to another part of the organisation having benefited from being a custody officer, if that\u2019s what they choose to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think a specialist custody role deserves a different shift pattern, which can be warranted, and that\u2019s what we\u2019d like to see the organisation do. Because it is a specialism in all but name.<\/p>\n
\u201cCustody is going to come under the microscope as we move forward, and undoubtedly we\u2019re going to shrink the size of our custody estate. So now\u2019s the perfect time to be investing in the people that we ask to deliver that for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
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CUSTODY posts should be treated as a specialism on a par with firearms or roads policing, Essex Police Federation said. Chairman Steve Taylor believes that custody officers are left with\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":950,"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\/3771"}],"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=3771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3773,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions\/3773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}