Jayne Dowle: Why we can’t afford to lose our ‘plastic police’

IT is a reassuring sight on a summer evening. A brace of police community support officers patrolling the streets and keeping an eye on things. There is quite a lot to keep an eye on. The bored teenagers off school for six weeks. The long summer evenings giving opportunist thieves the chance to walk off with hanging baskets and garden tools. The dodgy blokes hanging around on the corner waiting for who knows what. And that’s not to mention the speed-freak youngsters who use our roads as racetracks.

IT is a reassuring sight on a summer evening. A brace of police community support officers patrolling the streets and keeping an eye on things. There is quite a lot to keep an eye on. The bored teenagers off school for six weeks. The long summer evenings giving opportunist thieves the chance to walk off with hanging baskets and garden tools. The dodgy blokes hanging around on the corner waiting for who knows what. And that’s not to mention the speed-freak youngsters who use our roads as racetracks.

However, this reassuring sight could be about to disappear. Funding for those valuable and respected PCSOs is under scrutiny. Rumours that their numbers face a cull refuse to go away. And it is not without reason. No one doubts that these officers are a useful and highly-valued element of any police force, but the sums are just not adding up.

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Huge cuts to police budgets are taking their toll. In West Yorkshire alone, the police force has to find savings of £23.3m in the next two years. Although funding for PCSOs has been ring-fenced, the intake of new recruits was frozen in November last year, and West Yorkshire’s temporary Chief Constable, Dee Collins, has admitted that the current numbers of PCSOs are by no means sustainable.

Who would have thought that such a furore would be brewing over what were once dismissively derided as “plastic police”? When David Blunkett, the now retired Sheffield MP, introduced the concept of community officers during his tumultuous tenure as Home Secretary, few were convinced that PCSOs would be taken seriously – either by the force itself or by the law-abiding public that they were recruited to serve. Who would have thought, a decade down the line, that PCSOs would have become the face of the police force that the public most often see?

Without their presence on the streets, it is arguable that recent figures of reported crime would not be as encouraging as they are. Without their important work of bridge-building in communities, it is possible that we might witness more civil unrest, and certainly more nuisance offences such as graffiti.

Does the Government, and the Treasury in particular, understand this one single bit? Has George Osborne wandered the streets of a council estate as twilight falls on a summer evening? Where and how does he expect beleaguered police chiefs to find ways to slash their spending by such substantial amounts? This is not just in our region. It is across the country. I despair really, especially when I think that one of the key responsibilities of a government is to keep society safe and free from disturbance.

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In spite of reform after reform to streamline the service, the police force is still riven with bureaucracy. It is split with factions determined to fight their own corner. The current arguments, not just over PCSOs but the police’s wider relationship with the public, illustrate this. It would be a tremendous shame if the role of these vital community stalwarts was submerged amidst all the controversy and the continuing stand-off between the Home Secretary and Police Federation.

Put simply, the public need to be reassured that the police are looking out for them. For too long, the force was seen as just that – a force. The presence of officers on the streets, especially in the former mining areas of South Yorkshire where I live, was seen only in negative terms. This bred suspicion and resentment which ran through families and communities like bad blood.

I know of one local family who were not treated kindly by the police during the miners’ strike more than 30 years ago. There were arrests and rumours of intimidation. That, though, is now history, in all senses of the word. The head of the family, long-retired and in his late 80s, found himself the victim of a particularly nasty set of local youths, who would “entertain” themselves by knocking on his front door and running away.

When they got bored of this, they started stamping on the flowers in his garden. This tough old miner, who had seen things in the pit which would have made their eyes water, ended up in tears himself. Victimised and depressed, he didn’t know where to turn until a local PCSO got wind of what was happening and popped round to see him.

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She found out the names of the youths, took notes and informed her police colleagues at the station. The perpetrators were challenged, two were cautioned and one, the eldest of the gang, was given a community service sentence as it was discovered he was also harassing other elderly people.

This might not sound like a dramatic tale in the scale of crime, but for one old man and one community, it was a victory for decent, ordinary people. And it was a victory too for a police force which has made progress in places where it never even expected to be welcomed at a front door.

That is why PCSOs are important, and that is why their value goes beyond any budget cuts.