The incoming head of the Police Federation has warned Britain’s forces are increasingly unable to investigate some crimes, are “broken” in some areas, and the public is being failed.
In comments made to former newspaper The Independent, new chief of the association representing rank and file officers up to Chief Inspector, John Apter, said police were increasingly unable to deliver a service the public expected and that some forces were in “crisis”.
Apter told the website: “We are moving into an area where some crimes will not be investigated, whereas two to five years ago they were… We can’t do everything – there are going to be situations where we simply can’t deliver the policing we want to deliver.
“In those cases we are failing the public but that’s not the fault of police officers on the ground, and in some cases it’s not the chief constable’s fault. You can only slice the financial cake so many ways and you have to prioritise … the public are already suffering and they are going to suffer more and more.”
The Prime Minister, former Home Secretary Theresa May, has consistently cut police budgets in an austerity drive to tackle wasteful spending — waste that Apter admits existed at the time, although he blames continued pressure on police budgets for the issues facing forces.
Speaking on those cuts, Apter explained: “The reality is that policing in some places is broken, we are most certainly in crisis and that is a direct result of the pressure the government has put on by a reduction in funding.”
He said: “I’m not saying that in the early days of austerity there were not efficiencies to be made, but what we are finding now is that we’ve been cut so much we start to become inefficient.
“We’re not giving the service we want to the public and we’re certainly not looking after our officers as much as we should be.”
Figures suggest central government allocates more money to foreign aid than to police forces in England and Wales.
While complaints over funding are common among senior officers, less frequently discussed are some of the more recent spending and police time priorities pursued by individual force either by choice or under direction from the politicians.
One such example is the large sums of money and numbers of officers dedicated to fighting so-called hate crime in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London, even as serious violent crime in the city surges.
Breitbart London reported in 2016 on Mayor Khan’s initiative to divert millions of pounds to fund a ‘hate crime hub’ for the Metropolitan Police, and over 900 officers are deployed policing speech and thought.