INVESTIGATION | WATCH: Police insiders say North East officers close to breaking point
Claims stress levels increasing & staff struggling with increasing workloads.
Last updated 29th Jun 2017
North East police staff say they are close to breaking point, as the closure of Aberdeen’s control room takes its toll.
We’ve been speaking to police insiders about the stresses they face on a daily basis.
One former control room worker said it all got too much: "I left because I couldn’t deal with it anymore. All the hassle it was causing, the closure of the control room. The staffing levels were extremely low, poor. Morale levels were extremely low, and it was getting dangerous, frankly.
"I think the public has got to get used to the fact now, that there’s a lack of police officers on our streets. Even the ones that are on the street, are busy, they’re extremely busy, their workloads are huge.
"There was one time, for example, we had three major incidents on the go and we were about 50-per-cent capacity in the control room, and the stress levels were horrendous.
"You went home ill sometimes at the end of the day. There was one particular time, where all of us, when we went off duty, we were all just ill. Really - just headaches, sick. Even the inspector that day was just ill, it was such a horrible day.
"That was down to bad luck, in terms of, we had two or three major incidents coming in at the same time, but we had no staff to deal with it."
Another insider told Northsound News: "We all did a good job and you know a lot of the people in the departments surrounding us assisted us where they could, but unfortunately it was just the case where, it was quite clear there were issues.
"You got a particular sense of that you had staff members, not myself, but others that were regularly doing quite high levels of overtime.
"You would have people going home exhausted and feeling absolutely depleted of any energy or morale after shifts that were so challenging, whereas before they wouldn't be because you had sufficient staffing levels or you felt that you were doing the job and you were being valued.
"You went home ill sometimes at the end of the day" FORMER CONTROL ROOM WORKER
"People are doing the job to the best of their abilities, when they know that in a year's time the job is going to be gone."
We asked Police Scotland how many members of staff are taking time off due to stress, and they couldn’t provide the information, telling us the force would have to sift through every member of staff’s personnel file to collate the information.
What they could tell us is that AXA PPP, which has provided the force’s Employee Assistance Programme for the last two years, handled 955 cases in 2016/17, with nearly 1500 issues coming up. These ranged from counselling for stress to medical advice.
Assistant Chief Constable John Hawkins said managing the health and well-being of staff is Police Scotland’s top priority.
WATCH: Did you miss our special report on Northsound 2 at 1pm earlier?
He explained: "Policing can be a challenging environment and a challenging job, and I believe right across the organisation we have a culture of focusing on doing all we can to improve health and well-being. That's the way we think about these issues.
"We distribute newsletters laying out health and well-being advice. We have an initiative with a third-party provider who have provided free health screenings, mortgage, and pension advice clinics, and information around promoting a healthy lifestyle. And we'll continue to ensure we do all we can to improve our staff health and well-being, because what's most important to us is providing the best service we can to the public.
"We have a governance structure now around health and well-being. And we're seeking to do all we can to ensure that's fit for purpose and there's many different dimensions to that.
"The processes we are improving will make things better for our staff around the country.
"We look diligently and regularly at average call handling times, at abstraction rates, the percentage of our staff who are unavailable due to sickness, absence, training. And we make sure we have enough staff throughout our C3 division to answer the calls we would expect. So that's a really important thing we do on an ongoing basis."
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK...
HAVE YOUR SAY...