Courts Must Take Tough Line On Officer Assaults

16 September 2020

“We need the courts to take a tough line” on people convicted of assaulting police officers, the Chairman of Kent Police Federation has said.

Neil Mennie was speaking after the Government announced it would double the maximum sentence for those who assault police officers and other emergency workers.

Ministers plan to bring forward legislation so that offenders convicted of assaulting frontline workers face a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

Neil told BBC Radio Kent this morning that the change was “fantastic progress”.

He said: “The Federation has been talking about this for a long time and it represents another step forward, which we are very pleased about indeed.

“Every single day, Kent Police officers are being assaulted, and the figures right across the country are quite staggering.

“We still don’t fully understand the reasons for that, but what we need to see now is this legislation and sentencing translated into action.

“By that I mean consistent sentencing, because we still have officers being assaulted where the sentencing, quite frankly, has been disappointing.

“In order for this to have a deterrent effect, we need the courts to take a tough line on these individuals.”

Neil said that coronavirus had been a factor in some recent attacks, but added that assaults on officers are an ongoing problem and the pandemic had helped bring it to people’s attention.

He said: “We did have individuals who were seeking to weaponise the virus by coughing and spitting and indicating to us that they were going to give us COVID. We were used to experiencing a high level of assaults in any case.

“If there’s a good thing that’s come out of COVID for us, it is the highlighting of the assaults that officers face on a fairly regular basis and far too often.”

He said that the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act, which was brought in in 2018, was “starting to have an impact”, pointing to the fact that more than 11,000 people were prosecuted for assaulting an emergency worker in 2019.

He added: “We’ve seen it quite quickly go from a six-month maximum sentence to a year maximum sentence, to a two-year maximum sentence.

“That shows there’s a direction of travel going the right way. We want to get to the point when if you go hands-on with any emergency service worker you can expect a custodial sentence – that’s really what we want.”