“A Police Officer in England and Wales is assaulted every 15 minutes… these are worrying statistics”

A shocking 27 Hampshire Police officers are attacked every week on duty – amounting to an average of four assaults every single day, new figures have revealed.

There were an average of 110 assaults on Police Officers in England and Wales every single day – a total of 40,330 assaults on police officers were committed last year, according to government statistics.

That’s a police officer assaulted every 15 minutes.

Zoë Wakefield, Federation Chair, said: “These are worrying statistics. Hampshire is a force that’s doing a lot, which is why the [national] police assaults work is referred to as Operation Hampshire by everybody else – apart from us. It started here and we do an incredible amount for officers that are assaulted. We are sometimes shocked when we hear that it’s not been replicated in other forces.

“There’s a lot of support for people that have been assaulted, and officers have the opportunity to have the incident reviewed, so they can go through their body worn video with one of our officer safety trainers and look at whether there’s any learning that could be had to prevent the officer being assaulted in the future.

“Officers are finding that really useful because a lot of times they have lots of questions in their head: ‘Did I do this?’, ‘Should I have done that?’, ‘What did I do wrong?’ Sometimes they didn’t do anything wrong; sometimes these things just happen. But that’s a really good process for the officers, and obviously from the federation we’ll support them, particularly if there’s any ongoing trauma as a result of the assault.”

An increase in numbers would better protect officers from assaults, Zoë added. “My own personal view is that the assaults have gone up when the numbers have gone down. I know society has become more violent and we’ve got more people that are carrying weapons, but just having more officers around so you’re a greater presence then at an incident would help officers stay safe,” she added.

“I’m sure if we had more officers available to go and support each other, then we would have less assaults. We’re always going to have a level of assaults because we’re dealing with people who are not happy about what we’re trying to achieve, and we’re dealing with people that are high on drugs and drunk. We deal with some of the nastiest people in the country, so there always will be some assaults. But I think there’s more things that could happen to reduce that and I think the biggest one is just having more police officers,” she said.