Greater Manchester police officers 'exhausted' claims federation chief
Officers struggling to keep up with demand in wake of terror attack
Police are being overworked to the point of exhaustion in the wake of the terror attacks and reduced funding, the head of Greater Manchester Police Federation Ian Hanson has warned.
Officers from other regions were deployed to Manchester following the attack to support the city’s police force, but Ian Hanson does not believe this will always be possible.
He told Key 103:
“Greater Manchester police had 1,000 police officers from all around the UK to support the communities of Greater Manchester.
“What happens if things happen in those other force areas? You can’t take from an empty pocket.”
“The reality is that in Greater Manchester, since 2010, we’ve lost in the region of 2,000 police officers.
“In 2010 we were a force that had just over 8,000 police officers policing Greater Manchester and the government cuts have reduced us now to little over 6,200.”
Rejecting what he says are comments from politicians to “do more with less funding and staff,” Ian Hanson believes funding is urgently required to lessen the strain on police forces across the UK.
“We’ve policed on the cheap … we have lost thousands upon thousands of colleagues and it can’t be sustained,” he says.
Ian Hanson’s comments come only weeks after Manchester’s Chief of Police Ian Hopkins told Key 103:
“We’re having to make really difficult decisions about what we will investigate, how long we’ll investigate things for and what resources we can commit to things based on threat, harm and risk.