A recent survey conducted by the Police Federation of England & Wales has revealed that just 1 in 5 officers in the countries biggest force would actually expect a unit to be able to assist them if they had to dial 999 (assuming that they were off duty) and ask for help.
This tends to suggest that response team officers in the capital feel that because of their workload then they do not have the confidence in their ability to be able to respond to all genuine 999 calls.
This is bad news for Londoners because it means that response team officers are so overstretched they now feel that not all genuine 999 calls will probably get the speedy response which they deserve.
Indeed, this situation would often happen during my time as a PC on a 999 response team when I served in the Met.
All it takes is for a serious incident to take up most of a response teams resources and during busy weekend nights you can expect several such serious incidents in the space of a few hours.
So if you have, for example, 3 scenes which need preserving, as well as a victim, several suspects and witness enquiries and then you multiply this work load by maybe two or three, then its easy to see why and how police officers themselves would not feel confident in getting a speedy response during busy periods if they ever had to dial 999.
The survey also revealed that less than a third of Officers have faith in their senior management team.
Only 35 per cent of the officers who responded to the voluntary survey believe that they have the right equipment for the job and only 27 per cent would recommend the London force as “a great place to work”.
This comes at a time when Detectives are leaving the Met in their dozens owing to the fact that they are being told that they have to move from south London to north London when many officers live in the counties which are south of London itself.
In effect, this means that they have no choice but to leave (many are joining Surrey Police) owing to the fact that they simply cannot get to work within a reasonable time and/or they can no longer juggle their childcare needs owing to the fact that they have been forced to move.
It has also been rumoured that many direct entry Detectives, upon finishing their courses, are leaving the Met – although this cannot be corroborated.
This is what happens when you have politics entrenched in policing; senior officers are having to make impossible decisions in order to appease their political masters who in turn just want to keep trying to cover over the real issues in order to score political points and put a spin on reality!
Take politics out of policing and let the police do what they do best.
The police have been used as political pawns now for far too long and they are having to answer to their political masters who know nothing about the reality of life on the streets.
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