Eight Minutes An Hour
Quiz time!
Q. What amounts to just eight minutes an hour?
A. The length of time a policemen spends on the beat.
Eight minutes per hour. Eight out of sixty. 13.8%.
Home Office data for the 43 police forces in England and Wales show that just 3.8 per cent of police time was spent on patrol in 2007-08.
It means that in a typical 12-hour shift worked by an officer, an average of only one hour and 39 minutes is spent on the beat.
Time spent on patrol has fallen in recent years. In 2004-5 it accounted for 15.2 per cent of police time, but the figure declined steadily to a low-point of just 13.2 per cent in 2006-7, before recovering very slightly last year. (The Telegraph)
Absolutely ridiculous. Our police service should not be so hampered by red tape and paperwork that they spend such a ridiculously low amount of their time actually walking the beat and actively protecting us.
They must be freed of paperwork, of which filling out paperwork related to incidents taking up about 50% of their time*. When paperwork is this important to a policeman’s time, one can but fear for our safety.
* 64% of a policeman’s time is spent on “frontline duties”, which includes paperwork relating to a incident. And 13.8% of their time is spent on patrol. You do the maths.
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