Morale of Cleveland Police officers 'could take a further dip' if disorders continue
Many officers have been injured in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough
We are hearing how the morale of Cleveland Police officers could take a 'further dip' if violent disorders continue.
Many were seriously injured in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough over the last week, after they were subjected to items like bricks being thrown at them.
Paul Crowley, Chair of Cleveland Police Federation, said: "Police officers don't deserve to come to work and be assaulted. They certainly don't deserve to come to work and have to put up with such a level of mindless violence and destruction that we've seen over the last few days.
"We have a welfare van and we took that to every element of disorder there's been so far and every bit of intelligence that have come in regards to disorder. We've been there and we will be there to support officers. We provided food, drinks etc just to make sure that wheel keeps turning and we can keep those communities safe.
"We need to make sure that those officers are safe. At the moment it's warm weather but I can tell you now from personal experience, wearing public order equipment is heavy, it's cumbersome, uncomfortable and it's absolutely roasting inside those and that's before we've even started to deal with the disorder itself.
"Morale is on general terms low because of the amount of work, workload and obviously the danger of the job in itself. Now morale when it comes to the disorder, obviously has a knock-on effect on that as well, so the disorder that we've seen over the last few days, it also impacts that business as usual.
"We've seen repeated days of disorder and we're trying our best to keep the morale as high as we can, because we need to keep that wheel turning, we want to keep communities safe and we want to bring a state of normality back again, so we'll always do everything we can by bringing that morale back up again. For example, during the recent disorder in Middlesbrough, we purchased well over 150 pizzas.
"We need to keep that morale high but if this is to continue, or should this continue, I can see morale taking a further dip when it comes to the disorder and we don't want to see that, because then we'd start looking at other issues that we need to deal with and other wellbeing issues when it comes to those officers."