Silent Crime: Police spend fraction of their time tackling crime due to other demands

But, as The Star and National World launch its Silent Crime campaign, to shed light on unreported crime and offences where no one gets prosecuted, we can reveal that only a fraction of police time gets spent on dealing with crime.

The organisation which represents the city’s rank and file police officers, South Yorkshire Police Federation, has explained why offences are not always investigated, and what they believe needs to change to get more crimes dealt with.

As chairman of the SYPF, Steve Kent represents some 3,000 officers who are tasked with keeping the streets of Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham safe and free of crime.

But he says South Yorkshire still has fewer officers now, around 3,100, than it had in 2010, when there were 3,500.

And he describes South Yorkshire, which he says has been highly rated in reviews, as one of the forces with the least money coming in, receiving less cash for its budget than areas such as Surrey.

He said there was is a perception that all police deal with is crime - but that was not the case.

“We’ve only got a finite number of resources in South Yorkshire,” he said. “We are, sadly, one of the poorer funded forces in the country. We‘re still 400 officers down on where we were prior to 2010, so we have to prioritise incidents that we attend. We have to priorities threats to life incidents, or incidents involving vulnerability, or serious crime. So it’s not to say that we don’t value, or our officers are not concerned about low level crime.”

He said officers are concerned about cases that do result in offenders being brought to justice, but said that some times the block is within the criminal justice system.

He said there are also cases involving assaults on police officers themselves which go to court but ‘very little’ gets done with the culprits.

He said sometimes police had ‘done their bit, but there were then delays within the criminal justice system.

He feels policing is not properly funded in the UK, and believes there needs to be serious conversations taking place to redress the shortfall in officer numbers and budgets.

“Cops in South Yorkshire are working absolutely tirelessly, non stop,” he said. “They go days on end without even getting a meal break, I hear this all the time, to do their very best, but we need public backing, public funding increases, drastically, from Government for ourselves and other avenues of the criminal justice system so we can actually do what the public expect us to do, which is to focus on preventing, and dealing with crime.”

He said sadly, very little of the work of a police officer involves dealing with crime.

“We are the agency of last resort,” he said. “We deal with a hell of a lot of mental health cases, a lot of matters referred to us by our colleagues in social services. They are stretched themselves, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a policing role to be doing that.

“We spend a lot of time on missing persons. The traditional perception of bobbies on the beat and bobbies out there dealing with crime, sadly, that is a minority of the things that we actually deal with because we are having to pick up the workloads of other agencies as well, which isn’t right.

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“We need to have public consultation, nationally, I would say, not just in South Yorkshire, to ask the public what they expect our cops to be doing. And I think the answers would be very surprising. And I think if they were told what we were actually spending our time doing I don’t think the public would be very happy either.”

He said there are types of crime which are sometimes challenging to secure convictions in, such as domestic violence cases, or cases involving gangs, where people may not want to give evidence, but said the problem with that in South Yorkshire is less than many other parts of the country, and detectives are doing a “fantastic job.”

He added: “It’s very rare, for example, that murders go undetected in this force.”