Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner Sarah Taylor says Norfolk’s expectations of force are too high
Norfolk’s police boss has said that the public’s expectations of her force are too high, saying it does not have the resources to meet them.
Sarah Taylor, the police and crime commissioner (PCC) for the county, warned of a gloomy year ahead for the Constabulary, saying it needed to make cuts across the board and would also require a tax increase.
She said that without the combination of cuts and what is believed to be a 4.11 per cent rise in its share of council tax, the force would become unmaintainable.
Ms Taylor, a Breckland Labour councillor who was voted into the police post in May, said the force was increasingly stretched by a growing gap between its resources and what the public expected from it.
But her comments about public expectations may raise ire in some quarters.
Last year, it emerged the force had closed more than half of the reported cases of theft, either because no suspect could be identified or the crime had been “investigated as far as reasonably possible”.
And the most recent annual inspection of the force found it required improvement in the way it responded to the public, with more than a fifth of callers to its 101 service giving up because they took too long to answer the phone.
Ms Taylor said that the policing service was struggling to meet the expectations of people across Norfolk, which she believes have increased in recent years.
“We have got a growing gap between people’s expectations of us and our abilities to deliver with the resources we have,” she said.
She declined to specify in what areas of policing people’s expectations had risen.
She added: “Life has become so much easier in so many ways – such as shopping online at the click of a button. Our expectations of all services, including policing, have naturally increased over time and the constabulary has consistently worked to meet those expectations.
“The challenge is that, in the face of years of funding cuts, not only to the police but also the other partners involved in the criminal justice system, meeting those expectations is becoming increasingly challenging.”
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