Crossing the line – the worrying rise of the volunteer police force

Cash-strapped police forces are filling some key job vacancies with unpaid volunteers amid ongoing cutbacks, says a report published by UNISON highlighting the fact that an increasing reliance on unpaid volunteers demonstrates the financial pressures the service is under. The report, Crossing the Line – Police support volunteers: rising numbers and mission creep – is based on responses to Freedom of Information requests in 2017 from 34 forces across England and Wales. These showed that the number of volunteers helping police has grown by 15% since UNISON last undertook a similar survey in 2014. How many and what do they do? There are now more than 6,000 such volunteers. The map gives a force-by-force breakdown of the use of police support volunteers, and the change in numbers since 2014.  Over the same period, government figures show that the number of employed police staff dropped by 4,177  – or 5% – from 80,749 to 76,572. But let’s take a look at those figures in a bit more detail. As well as police forces across the two countries using more and more volunteers, they are often asking those volunteers to take on more and more roles. The chart below above shows how many police support volunteers there are, and the number of different roles filled by them, in each force that answered our FoI request. There is a wide variety in the number of roles reported by each force, or each UNISON branch – from three in the West Midlands to 82 in West Yorkshire. This is beca...
Source: UNISON Health care news - Category: UK Health Authors: Tags: P.S data police police and justice police staff Source Type: news