ASSAULTS on police officers in Essex are completely unacceptable and risk leaving the force under-resourced as colleagues are kept off duty to recover from their injuries, the Chairman of Essex Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Steve Taylor was speaking after two officers were stabbed on Friday night in Chelmsford.<\/p>\n
Both were taken to hospital and are now recovering at home.<\/p>\n
However, one of the officers required surgery and faces a lengthy rehabilitation before he can return to work.<\/p>\n
Steve was called to support colleagues in the early hours of Saturday morning. He said: \u201cWhat that allowed me to see was the size of the response that this incident took: 22 people is a huge number of people in the early hours of a Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, what it demonstrated was with all the training and the equipment that we have, the risks that our officers face on a daily basis still exist. And despite the training and equipment we still end up on the wrong side of these types of assaults, which is desperately unfortunate for those involved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve is particularly concerned that the rising number of assaults on officers are having the consequence of leaving fewer police on the streets.<\/p>\n
He explained: \u201cIn the early hours of Saturday morning, 22 officers were taken off the streets of Essex to initially start investigating this incident. And while the investigation was managed and resolved, that investigation still resulted in officers spending time in hospital and being off the streets of Essex, in some cases for months.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith officers in such short supply in Essex, with us being so lean as an organisation and being required to do more with less, that\u2019s an impact that we simply can\u2019t sustain.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery assaulted officer, regardless of the type of assault, is required to be off the streets of Essex to complete the necessary statements, to seek medical attention, to help bring the perpetrators of those assaults to justice in the correct way.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery officer that is assaulted in that way is one less officer available to police our communities and keep the people of Essex safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019re ultimately here to do: to keep the people of Essex safe. And officers being assaulted in the manner in which they are, with the frequency in which they are, becomes an increasingly challenging task for us.<\/p>\n
\u201cRegardless of the type of assault, even relatively innocuous assaults are desperately unacceptable because it prevents us policing our county in a way it should be policed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ASSAULTS on police officers in Essex are completely unacceptable and risk leaving the force under-resourced as colleagues are kept off duty to recover from their injuries, the Chairman of Essex\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3674,"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\/3914"}],"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=3914"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3922,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3914\/revisions\/3922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}