Last updated on September 20th, 2023 at 12:23 pm
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI am thankful to my friend @ConstableChaos for bringing this to my attention
I don’t mean to be condescending to anybody, we can all do the maths, but this is absolutely disgusting.
Hidden within an article about Performance Related Pay within Policing is the little gem that Staffordshire Constabulary have, over a period of years, been reduced from 2,400 officers to 1,600.
Please forgive me for “stating the bleeding obvious” but that is a reduction of 800 officers, or exactly ONE THIRD of their previous establishment.
How on earth are they expected to achieve anything with a whole third of their officers culled?
Figures like these above make it abundantly clear that this is NOT about efficiency, or professionalism. This is setting the Police Service up to fail, nothing less.
There can be no possible justification for cuts of this magnitude and it is time for Theresa May, Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid to finally be honest, threat the British Public with some respect and be honest about what they have done, instead of insisting that “Crime is Down, Police Reform is Working”. This is not Reform, it is Annihilation.
Cutting a third of police forces at a time of increasing demand for police is pure folly. And remember that demand is more than just about crime – the police are often the agency of last resort when other services, such as social services and crisis mental health services are not available. The police, as we know, are always available. But how long will that proud epithet apply when policing itself is in a state of absolute breakdown and crisis. Not a result of any accident or set of unforeseen circumstances, but due to a deliberate and systematic policy perpetrated by this government, with the Prime Minister herself being the chief culpit who, when as Home Secretary, attacked both policing and the boys and girls who desperately trying to protect the public as part of a an increasingly parlous thin blue line. The elephant in the room is that performance related pay is just a sham born out of the latest iteration of Tory attempts to attack policing by laying the blame for the state of policing and the police on the victims of their mess, the police, rather than the real perpetrators of the crime: this Conservative Government.