- Conference
- 2015 Police & Justice Service Group Conference
- Date
- 18 June 2015
- Decision
- Carried
Conference recognises the desperate cost saving initiatives forces are considering to meet the brutal funding gap imposed through the Governments comprehensive spending reviews.
The service cuts being imposed on an already decimated police service are putting our members and the wider public’s lives at risk.
The recent attempt to collaborate the Norfolk and Suffolk control rooms highlight the desperate steps police forces are willing to take to make ‘quick wins’ in making the savings necessary to meet the funding gap. The ‘quick wins’ as they call them, protect police officer jobs, sacrifice police staff jobs and fail to consider the will and safety of the wider public.
The creation of the Officer of the Police and Crime Commissioner was supposed to put localism at the top of the agenda, yet decisions like the closure of force control rooms, where localism is at the heart of the functionality, where despite formal mechanisms are being made behind closed doors without public consultation or scrutiny.
Simply put, force control rooms are the front line of policing and their voice is the first response. Force control rooms answer the frantic calls from victims of crime and use local knowledge to ensure the expeditious deployment of a response, they listen to and assist callers as part of the police response until deployed officers arrive and are integral to the emergency response.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to:
1)Highlight the advantage of localism in force control rooms;
2)Lobby the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) and Police and Crime Commissioner’s (PCC) to more effectively consult with communities prior to such moves;
3)Develop an off the shelf campaign plan to combat future collaboration attempts;
4)Publicise the successful Suffolk campaign that save more than 120 police staff jobs and kept localism at the heart of policing;
5)Work with Labour Link to develop future Labour policies that recognise and protect force control rooms and think twice about reducing the number of police forces.