Voice of 140,000 police officers

Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, tells the Home Secretary what the police and public want and need

Home Secretary, congratulations on your appointment and the success of your government. We are very much looking forward to working with you and assisting you in one of the most prestigious, yet difficult, jobs anyone could undertake.

Your job is going to be made so much more difficult by the
economic tsunami that you have inherited from the previous
administration.

We will do whatever we can to help and support you at this most difficult time. What we do ask for is fairness and recognition of the dangerous, difficult and complex job that police officers do.

Home Secretary, you will be surrounded by advisors, many of
whom have little knowledge of policing and whose errors have got past home secretaries into trouble. The best advice that we can give you is – don’t always believe what you’re told by your advisors.

Over the coming weeks I know you will be further familiarising
yourself with the complexities of policing. Home Secretary, we are here for you. We are the voice of 140,000 police officers across 43 forces and we are ready and willing to assist you with information, advice and guidance.

We know public safety is a priority for you; it is for us too. We
know you want to put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system; we do too.

And we know that you appreciate the difficult and often dangerous circumstances in which we conduct our duty. Regrettably, some pay the ultimate price tackling this danger, but many police officers are also injured in the line of duty.

Home Secretary, during the past few years we have been
subject to a constantly changing landscape of police ministers and home secretaries that we have had to deal with.

As home secretaries we have had Jack Straw, David Blunkett,
Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson – he was a postman and even he couldn’t deliver.

For the last 20 years we have had nothing but change; we have reached initiative fatigue.

We want to be left as professionals to get on with the job that
we do.

We want to see preservation in the number of police officers in
the service rather than seeing an increase in the numbers of those that produce little but earn a living by criticising, double-checking and analysing what our members do.

We are in the ridiculous situation where we have people checking people, checking people. What I want to know Home Secretary is – who are the people checking the people checking the people, checking the people?

As the ex-Essex chief and now HMI Roger Baker said: ‘We’re becoming an army that increasingly has no soldiers’.

We are now at the stage with some forces where there are
more civilians than police officers. What are they doing? Are they the people checking people, checking… Don’t get me started on that one again!

What we have to remember is that we are an emergency service. There are times when we need all hands on deck. We need flexibility and resilience and we are fast losing it. With the Olympic Games coming up, this is a very dangerous path to go down.

Home Secretary, give the public the police service that they
want and deserve. The previous government, aided and abetted by some in ACPO and the police authorities, are creating an ethos that appears to value and prioritise support-staff roles above what the public want – which is warranted police officers.

In some forces for every police officer recruited, up to eight support staff have been employed. We are not against civilisation but it should not be at the expense of warranted police officers.

If we continue like this, we risk the Police Service becoming as
surreal an environment as the Alice in Wonderland world. You
can stop these Mad Hatters who seek to turn the service upside down Home Secretary. Further civilianisation must be in addition to warranted officers – not instead of.

We are pleased you understand the value and benefit of fully warranted officers and that you will maintain their numbers centrally rather than allowing them to float ever downwards, and by as much as 28,000 if certain members of ACPO and the NPIA have their way.

I know from many of the comments that you have made already that you actually care about us – police officers, policing and the public we serve. The 140,000 men and women of the Police Service of England and Wales are some of the finest people in the country.

I am extremely proud to represent them and you should be
extremely proud to be their Home Secretary.

Other topics Paul McKeever spoke about included the criminal
justice system, sentencing and public order.

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