The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has described the bureaucratic burden on his officers as “death by 1,000 paper cuts.”
Rowley told a joint summit of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners on Wednesday: “Some of the officers I talked to are more worried about getting in trouble for not filling in forms correctly than they are confronting dangerous people on the streets.”
He also revealed that only 22 percent of the calls the Met received were about crimes and said he wanted to begin “pushing back” on demands on the police.
Rowley said his officers were sometimes unnecessarily being sent out to assist with welfare checks and to sit with people suffering mental health crises in hospitals….