Police taken off patrols to man phones

Police are being taken off the beat to man control and call centres originally intended to be staffed by civilians.

Experienced patrol officers are being transferred because of recruitment and budget difficulties, it is claimed.

The Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, claims as many as 800 may be needed to man the operation rooms across London.

In addition, it says 300 police officers are being used to help run three new state-oftheart call centres originally intended to be fully staffed by civilians.

However, the Met insists only about 30 officers have been transferred so far, and says claims of 800 officers manning control rooms are a "worst case scenario".

Fears over the centres are contained in an internal federation memo leaked to the Standard. It warns that the project to modernise the Met's call handling and despatch system is facing difficulties.

Scotland Yard strongly disputes the gloomy assessment, but if true the claims would be a serious embarrassment to Sir Ian Blair, who will take over as commissioner in February.

Sir Ian, the present Deputy Commissioner, is in charge of the ?275million Command, Control, Communications and Information project - called C3i - which is being rolled out across the Met over the next two years.

The scheme is aimed at streamlining the Met's 32 call handling centres which are expected to take about 23 million inquiries by 2010. In future three call centres, at Lambeth, Bow and Hendon, will handle the Met's 999 calls and despatch fast response cars to crime scenes. Two years ago Home Secretary David Blunkett praised the scheme, saying that by using civilian call handlers the Met would be able to return about 800 officers to front line duties.

However, the C3i project has been dogged with difficulties and the federation report says problems remain linking the system to a new police radio network. The project is already several months behind schedule.

The report reveals concerns in the Met about handing over the role of 999 call operators and other operations room staff entirely to civilian employees. The Met has set up operation rooms in each borough which will use the new C3i technology to give fast response cars detailed intelligence before they reach a crime or emergency scene.

It is these borough control rooms - called Integrated Borough Operations (IBOs) - which are taking police officers off the streets because the Met has not budgeted to provide them with civilian staff. So far only Lambeth and Southwark have established IBOs and they have been forced to transfer around 30 patrol officers

Commander Bob Broadhurst, who is overseeing the project, said civilian staff are being recruited and trained to replace them though this would take time. He added that it was vital to put uniformed officers into the "24/7" operations rooms to begin with to provide experience and knowledge of systems and police practice. He said 300 officers were also being retained, for the time being, in the 999 call centres to allow civilian staff to gain experience of the system.

"We will eventually go to full-scale civilianisation but this will be phased in over two years," he added. "There is no way we are going to put 700 to 800 police officers into the borough control rooms in two years' time. These recruitment issues will ease as we get down the line."

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