Frontline policing 'will be damaged'
About two-thirds of police have contact with the public but will be difficult to retain in the face of 20% cuts, says HMIC
About two-thirds of the police workforce in England and Wales should be classed as involved in the "frontline" and will be very hard to retain in the face of 20% cuts, Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) warns.
In the first official attempt to define what constitutes the frontline in policing, the HMIC study says that 68% of police officers and civilian staff are involved either in everyday "visible" contact with the public or in specialist roles intervening directly to keep people safe and enforce the law.
The study suggests that CID, confiscating criminal assets, fingerprint and scenes of crime jobs are all frontline functions while handling intelligence, processing offenders, training, IT and communications could all be regarded as middle-office and back-office roles.
Sir Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, stressed that staff in middle or back office jobs were also key and ensured frontline duties were properly carried out. "Quite a lot of functions in there. We can't see that any of them are particularly redundant. You need them all in some form," he said.
O'Connor said that while back-office staff were not just disposable assets and some roles did not have to be done by officers, there were areas that were off-limits: "I would want police officers involved in training detectives and people driving cars. There is an element of expertise. Learning how to interrogate people well is not something you can learn from a book," he said.
HMIC says in its report, Demanding Times, that it will be a big challenge to make cuts without damaging the frontline.
"Even if you imagine that the back office and middle office are ripe for reform, you have only got one third of them to do it with," said O'Connor, implying the rest were off-limits as frontline roles. "The cuts across England and Wales do not c! ut the s ame way for every force. For some it is a much bigger challenge. It remains difficult for the frontline to remain in its current form for a number of forces. In its present form it looks very hard to retain."
The study was undertaken after ministers and MPs failed to find any consensus within the police over what constitutes the frontline.
Peter Fahy of the Association of Chief Police Officers said the HMIC report highlighted the close link between what was seen as frontline and those working out of sight: "Whether it be handling intelligence, delivering training, processing offenders through the criminal justice system or any other task, roles in support of the frontline are as critical to policing as they are in any other large organisation. Simplistic judgments about the value of the work our officers and staff do are not helpful."
The report is published after a Labour survey showed that 2,200 of the most experienced officers are to be forcibly retired over the next four years and it was disclosed that Warwickshire police have become the first in the country to tell uniformed officers they will be drafted into back-office roles to cover civilian staff who have taken redundancy.
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