LOSING THE DETECTIVES: VIEWS FROM THE ... - Police Federation

The reductions in the size of GO CID teams in all the forces visited are alarming.
They raise important questions about the quality of service the detectives remaining
in these teams are able to provide to victims and witnesses. They also raise equally
important issues concerning the welfare of those detectives, their workloads and the
long hours they are required to work on a regular basis. These issues are addressed
later in Chapter 8.
There are areas of the country where CID Offices are, in effect, regularly shut down
for lengthy periods because there are frequently no detectives on duty to cover those
tours of duty or closed because the few detectives that are on duty are all involved
on an investigation that has had to be fully resourced.
We’ve got two reliefs wiped out at the moment, all abstracted to the
various murders or major incidents. At this precise moment in time
the CID Office is closed. That means there are no [GO CID]
detectives working in the town of N.
There was a twelve-month period where myself and a colleague
were the only two left out of an office of 12 - two of us!
GO CID teams are typically operating today with between a half and a third of their
formal ‘establishment’ of detectives.
At the moment we’re carrying six DC vacancies plus six other
abstractions, that’s twelve missing out of the 28 we’re supposed to
have.
I work in the main CID Office. There are four DSs and each one has
one DC and two TDCs. We're meant to have two DCs in each team
but we don't have the capacity to do that. Invariably I find I am the
only substantive detective on a late turn for the whole BCU.
Out of potentially six staff we’re usually running with two officers.
I’ve got seven staff in my team on paper but four are currently
absent [lists reasons for the abstractions] so actually doing the work
I have got three and that’s looked at as quite good in our office, you
know, I’m flush!
In the last six weeks, we’ve had two DCs leave on promotion to
sergeant then three went on an enquiry that started last week. None
has been replaced and that’s a third of the Office.
In some forces the staffing position has become so desperate that management has
decided no detective is to be permitted to transfer out of GO CID. Promotion is the
only escape route from these BCUs.
The majority of BCUs have been ring fenced. People in those BCUs
are being treated unequally – officers can’t move off them unless
they go for promotion as an escape.
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