POLICE officers are taking as long as a week to respond to burglaries because of crippling staff shortages, the Police Federation warns.
Thousands of 999 calls are having to be put on hold every day with officers only able to respond immediately to crimes involving violence or vulnerable people.
Lower level crimes are instead logged and dealt with at a later date when there are officers available to attend to them.
However, forces all over the country have experienced unprecedented demand over the past year which has meant the backlog of cases is now higher than ever. Officers now attend break-ins or car thefts days after the initial call, by which time vital evidence could have been lost.
And there is now such a shortage in officer numbers – 20,000 fewer than in 2009 – that sometimes police decline to attend incidents of shoplifting and petrol theft.
Senior officers are warning that the service has “regressed to 1980s-style policing” which only reacts to crime rather than proactively preventing it.
Dorset police has lost 300 of its officers since peak levels eight years ago but is now operating at twice the demand.
Tony Tester, chairman of the Dorset Police Federation, said: “It’s not uncommon for my members to report coming into duty and finding 10-15 pages of open incidents.
That equates to 100-150 incidents that couldn’t be dealt with at the time but now need allocating.
“These lower level crimes, like domestic break-ins, have still impacted on people and evidence can disappear while waiting for a police officer to attend.
It might take six or seven days for you to get round to someone.
“Then there’s the effect on police officers themselves who, although battle weary, are good people who have a passion to serve the public but it really beats you down when every day you walk in and look at the in-box and go, ‘Oh I’ve got that to do today’.
That pressure has to take its toll on an officer’s welfare and morale.” West Yorkshire police are experiencing the same issues.
Over the past year 224 of its officers were off work with mental health-related illnesses.
Nick Smart, chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Federation, said: “Calls relating to violence or vulnerable people are dealt with straight away but crimes where there’s no CCTV footage, no positive ID on a suspect, no witnesses or blood left at a scene are dealt with far less urgently.”
The Metropolitan Police, meanwhile, is now so stretched that in some parts of London officers work three weeks without a break.