President's Column - Police budget cuts
“The looming cuts to the budget are causing consternation to police at every level. They areworried that the level of response, mostly to victims and complainants, will be reduced.”
For this reason, we are encouraging members to co-operate with efforts to reduce leave.
It is one concession to the recession and means we can do our bit to minimise the reduction in service to the public.
As our businessman friend observed, nothing annoys police more that feeling like we are not looking after the public properly.
It’s going to be tough over the next wee while, but no-one will be spared the effects of a reduced tax take.
We will be working to minimise the impact on Police but in the meantime, the bottom line has got to be that the criminals must not become the beneficiaries of the recession.
That’s where we can all do our bit.
Some years ago, in response to a review of Police, we at the Police Association established our own external committee to ‘audit’ the so-called Martin Review.
This proved a successful exercise and the worst impacts of what was a ‘once over lightly’ exercise designed to extract $50 million dollars from the Police budget were mitigated.
The mainstay of our audit team was a successful New Zealand business owner who had never been exposed to policing or police officers before.
At the end of the exercise, he commented to me that in all his years in business, he had never met a group of people - referring to the numerous police he had met - who were so committed to delivering quality service to their ‘customers’ and whose complaints to him almost invariably related to impediments to getting the job done properly.
I’ve been reflecting on his comments in the past few months as I have travelled around New Zealand listening to police talk about the job.
The same situation still exists. The looming cuts to the budget are causing consternation to police at every level.
They are worried that the level of response, mostly to victims and complainants, will be reduced. It’s a tough one. Obviously, Police cannot expect to be exempt from an economic crisis impacting on the national budget.
We have been fortunate to obtain a payrise for sworn staff, and hopefully can do so for non-sworn staff, which will keep up with inflation.
However, the Police budget is unlikely to be adjusted to take into account those same inflation increases.
Which leaves us in the position of still trying to maintain the same level of service to the public with less, or at best, the same amount of money less the inflation rate.
We can sympathise with senior managers tasked with finding savings and having to put pressure on those below them to implement such changes.
We get many queries at National Office around the pressure to get leave levels down, with some members reluctant to take leave as they feel they are leaving their colleagues and the public vulnerable by their absence.
However, as Police must actually put aside the real dollar equivalent of each day’s leave owed to all of us, reducing
