THOUSANDS of police officers are to protest in London next month in the latest demonstration against government cuts.
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The Police Federation announced today that it is to hold a mass meeting in Westminster on 13 July for members fed up with the 20% cuts in services planned by the government.
“This is part of a long programme of events we will be organising over the next few months and years,” Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever told Police Professional.
“We have a duty to get across to the Government, and the public, that the road they are going down is a very high risk strategy.
“We are not ruling anything out in the future. We will do anything we can that is within the law.”
Officers are unhappy with cuts in police numbers; a pay freeze; harsher pension arrangements, and being forced to spend time reorganising departments to take account of the cuts, rather than nicking villains.
“We should be out there trying to catch criminals and locking them up,” McKeever told The Telegraph.
“We seem to be more concerned about the police, not the criminals.”
McKeever said that morale within the police was at “rock bottom”. One recent survey of 42,000 police officers found that, since the budget cuts came in, 98% thought morale had slumped.
