What do you do as an organisation when you don’t have enough people employed to do the job you need to be doing? One solution is overtime, making those you do have at your disposal work longer. But it comes at a cost. These employees are going above and beyond their normal working hours and the bills for their overtime can mount up.
While some employees will appreciate the extra payments, for others it can lead to resentment, cause issues at home, eat into any free time they have away from their job. With the PSNI, time away from often very trying circumstances is usually a necessity, rather than a luxury.
Plenty has already been said about the shortage of officers within the PSNI, now sitting at its lowest level since the Patten report of 1999 cited 7,500 as the minimum number required.
Numbers have been dwindling ever since, financial constraints have been gripping tighter, and police stations have been closing or reduced to call-in centres with little meaningful operating facilities.
At the same time the list of priorities has been growing ever longer. Tough choices have had to be made. Officers are thin on the ground, confidence in the service has been hit, and Northern Ireland has been left with a police force floundering to cope with the demands constantly being placed upon it.
It is when officers are overworked and under pressure that mistakes happen. And in the last few years, the PSNI has been no exception.
Despite all the ailments, there has been little sign of a financial package coming to the rescue. Money, it seems, is even harder to come by than an officer to attend the scene of a crime when needed to do so.
Some £106m has been spent on overtime in the PSNI in the last three years alone. And while Chief Constable Jon Boutcher may say that the use of overtime is “carefully managed”, you can only manage what you have at your disposal. He may also say overtime is only granted “when necessary”. But it has been necessary to the tune of £106m. There have been very few “reasonable alternatives” to consider.
In an ideal world, officers would do their hours and go home to their families. But from the PSNI itself, the message is ‘the PSNI does not have the number of officers it requires to deliver policing without the use of overtime’.
We are, of course, living in anything but that ideal world. It’s a world where more and more is asked of people and the cost is not purely financial — it’s in welfare, mental health, family life and, in the case of the PSNI, to the detriment of society. The PSNI is in dire need of stability. But stability can only come with the right level of support.