Police Criticised For Inaction While Struggling With Resource

The reason police reaction times are going up is due to a lack of resource and too many competing priorities, Hampshire Police Federation has said.

A report in The Sun, based on a Freedom of Information request, showed that police reaction times to anti-social behaviour had gone up 37% since 2021. In some parts of the country, it was taking officers 17 hours to respond to reports.

Hampshire Police Federation Chair Zoë Wakefield said: “There’s a simple answer to why this is happening: there just aren’t enough police officers. Every time calls come in, the poor people in the control room have to try to prioritise whose calls are more important than whose,

“It’s not that the police don’t want to come, it’s not that they don’t want to deal with yobs. We’re just busy doing other stuff that is deemed more important. We can’t be everywhere.

“The answer is not to criticise the police, but to start talking to their local MPs and the Government about why there wasn’t a police officer available to come to this job.”