'Public Order Duties Are Rarely Pleasant And Come With More Risks'

5 August 2024

Gloucestershire Police Federation Chair Steve James was one of the public order officers deployed from the force on mutual aid to neighbouring Dorset yesterday, to deal with protests in Weymouth.

Steve has been public order trained for over 20 years as both a PC and a sergeant.

He said: “After our briefing when we got to the seafront there were maybe 300-400 people in the far right protest and the counter protest already on the beach. The policing operation was to ensure that both protests went off as peacefully as possible to ensure that the public could go about their day safely.

“There was a lot of aggression and abuse directed at the officers, describing officers as traitors to their country and traitors to their race and we should all be ashamed of ourselves. We managed to prevent any property damage so we didn’t see the disorder escalate to what we’ve seen in other places around the country.

“For officers it’s a long day – we were deployed out on foot for the best part of seven or eight hours in full public order kit, which weighs around 2.5 stone.

“We know public order duties are rarely pleasant and certainly come with more risks than other duties – that obviously doesn’t make it acceptable that officers are bearing the brunt of that hate and anger. It’s odd that these groups choose to target the police for abuse, anger and violence.

“There are no extra officers doing this. The officers like myself and colleagues are officers on rest days, or officers doing other duties that they’re taken away from, or officers taking time away from their families in the summer to go and deal with this unnecessary disruption to people’s lives.”

Steve said it was important as a Federation official to be able to have first-hand experience of what officers deployed in these situations have to go through.

He explained: “As a Federation Chair it’s really important for me to be able to maintain and demonstrate my own operational competency and to go and share the risks and the difficulties and the arduous work that my members and my colleagues are facing on a daily basis.

“My experience of being deployed for 15 hours in this situation was really useful to be able to inform me on the conditions and the issues that my members are facing in these deployments, and to be able to feed that directly back to chief officers – the people who are able to respond to those concerns around kit, the hours worked, the welfare provision, and all those sorts of issues that arise in these complex deployments.

“While we know it’s a fast changing and fast moving environment, that doesn’t negate the responsibility of forces to look after officers on these deployments – if anything given the arduous nature of these deployments that responsibility is even more so.

“Both the host forces that we deployed to over the weekend (Avon and Somerset, and Dorset) looked after our officers well. They were conscious of their welfare and making sure they were fed and where the operational situation allowed were able to take breaks.

“But the concern is if this disorder carries on in multiple places around the country for multiple weeks, there are only so many officers who are trained, willing and able to do this work. As we saw way back in 2011 there is a real danger of exhausting those officers.

“Even this weekend we had officers who were deployed to Bristol and didn’t finish until 4am and were coming in at midday to deploy again down to Weymouth. The goodwill is there but that has to be matched by the duty of care from forces.”