Force detectives bucking national trend

27 March 2018

Matt Robinson, secretary of Leicestershire Police Federation, has spoken live on BBC Radio Leicester this morning about the crisis facing detectives nationally.

The interview came after the Police Federation of England and Wales launched a campaign called ‘Detectives in Crisis’ – highlighting depleting morale, over-stretched officers and increasing workloads.

Speaking on the breakfast show, Matt said: “Locally, we don’t have the problem other forces are seeing with numbers in terms of recruitment. Our vacancies are made up of trainee detectives who are just working towards their exam and we want to work with the senior management team to ensure the correct supervision is there, the correct support is there so that these young inexperienced officers can go through the exam and course and become our experienced detectives of the future.”

He continued: “When I speak to detectives locally, they are pushed to the limit at the moment. We’ve had several very high-profile cases recently which have resulted in our detectives returning extraordinary results but this does have an effect on the work life balance, it has an effect on their wellbeing, and we found it has an effect on their morale.

“What they do is they work on these cases but then have to return to their day to day case load which nobody works for them while they are away working a major incident and that’s when it becomes a little bit tough.”

‘Detectives in Crisis’ aims to raise awareness of the current state of detective policing in England and Wales and is asking senior officers and PCCs to look at the role within their force area to better support officers and to try to redress the balance.

More details of the campaign will appear in the spring edition of the Leicestershire Police Federation Upbeat magazine which will be available in April.