South Yorkshire Police Federation chairman Steve Kent explains why police cannot investigate every crime that is reported, and what needs to be done to change things
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00:00I'm with Steve Kent who's the chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation.
00:05Steve could you tell me please why officers can't always respond to every
00:12inquiry that they receive. Well we've only got a finite number of resources in
00:16South Yorkshire you know we are one of the sadly the poor funded forces in the
00:20country. We're still 400 deaf officers down where we were prior to 2010 so we
00:26have to prioritise incidents that we attend. We have to prioritise threat to
00:31life incidents or incidents involving vulnerability or serious crime so it's
00:36not to say that we don't you know our officers don't value or you know
00:40concerned about people's crime at low-level crime in their home address or
00:45you know let's say hypothetically someone gets the car damaged it's just
00:48that we have to prioritise those officers because we've only got a finite
00:51number available at any given time sadly. Are officers concerned about the
00:57number of cases which don't get brought to justice? Yeah absolutely they
01:04find the blockers within the criminal justice system to be frank you know
01:07there's concerns even over a lot of incidents involving assaults on our
01:11officers themselves they seem to be going to court and then very little
01:14seems to be getting done with them you know so we understand the pressures
01:18under the criminal justice system but what we're finding is that there are
01:22significant blockers sometimes to getting people to justice in terms of
01:26within it within a decent time frame as well it has to be said sometimes
01:30victims are sadly waiting a very long time for justice to be delivered they
01:34might then point the finger at the police when actually the police have
01:37done their bit it's over to the criminal justice system and that's where we see a
01:41little bit of slowing down sadly on occasions. What needs to be done to
01:47reverse all these issues? Well for starters we need to stop the nonsense
01:52that policing is properly funded in this country it's not. No public sector
01:57service has had and I'm speaking in general terms here anything like the
02:00cuts to the budget so across the board is what policing has had. I've already
02:03talked about the numbers we're still 400 down where we need to be so there needs
02:07to be serious conversations being taken place to redress the shortfall in
02:14numbers and budgets for police officers. Our cops in South Yorkshire are working
02:17absolutely tirelessly they are non-stop they go days on end without even getting
02:23a meal break and I hear this all the time to try and do their very best but
02:27we need public backing public funding increase drastically from government for
02:34ourselves and the other avenues of the criminal justice system so we can
02:37actually do what the public expect us to do which is to focus on preventing and
02:42dealing with crime. How much of the work of a police officer is actually
02:46dealing with crime? Sadly very little we are the agency of last resort we deal
02:52with a hell of a lot of mental health cases we deal with a lot of matters
02:56referred to by our colleagues in social services they are stretched themselves
03:00don't get me wrong but it's not a policing role to be doing that we spend
03:03a lot of time on missing persons when the traditional perception of Bobby's on
03:09the beat and Bobby's out there dealing with crime sadly that is a minority of
03:13the things that we actually deal with because we're having to pick up still
03:15the workloads of other agencies as well which isn't right so we need to have
03:20public consultation nationally I would say not just in South Yorkshire to
03:25actually ask the public what they expect our cops to be doing and I think the
03:29answers would be very surprising and I think if they were told what we were
03:33actually spending our time doing I don't think the public would be very happy
03:36either. Are there any areas of crime that are particularly difficult to get
03:41through to prosecutions? Obviously sometimes we have cases involving
03:46sadly domestic violence or gang related violence where people don't want to
03:50necessarily give provide evidence they can be a challenge to get people to
03:54court when people are reluctant to talk to us and we talk to our detective
03:57colleagues we don't have anything like the same problem in South Yorkshire as
04:00we do in other parts of the country our detectives do an absolute fantastic job
04:04and you know it's very rare that murders for example go undetected in this force
04:08I mean all of what our detective colleagues do they bring people to
04:11justice on that so we don't thankfully have the walls of silence in South
04:15Yorkshire that we have elsewhere that being said we still sometimes have real
04:19challenges especially with domestic violence where people may not want to
04:22give a complaint or they may not want to pursue it and we have to obviously
04:26proactively take that investigation on on their behalf but that can be
04:29challenging in terms of getting past evidential thresholds.