Police are frustrated about giving up their time to adjudicate disputes

Police are spending too much time on trivial social media rows rather than tackling burglary and serious crime, the new head of the Police Federation says.

John Apter said that its 120,000 officers were frustrated at being dispatched to deal with online spats. He acknowledged the need to investigate hate speech and cybercrime but said that it should not jeopardise traditional police work.

Forces in England and Wales are “so stretched”, he said, that the demands on their time from emerging crimes threatened to make a mockery of their efforts. Officers were being called to adjudicate “the argument over the remote control, the dispute in the playground, the row on Facebook”, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Last week it emerged that one force had