This week Theresa May accused the Police Federation of crying wolf over the danger that further cuts to policing represent. But as one disillusioned former officer reports, those dangers are real, and morale is collapsing among staff who are repeatedly asked to ‘do more with less’

Stop scaremongering and prepare for further cuts, Theresa May tells police Read more

January 2010: I am sitting towards the front of a stuffy auditorium in the Peel Centre, a glass window-lined hall at the Metropolitan Police Service’s main training centre in Hendon. At the front is a raised stage, upon which sit the staff – men and women in police uniform, with medals pinned to their chests, embodiments of the self-styled finest police service in the world. I am hot and tired and scratching my knees through my heavy wool tunic. Clean-shaven and with a crisp, short haircut, this is probably as smart as I will ever look in my police career, the royal wedding aside, when I lined the Mall with my colleagues in our ceremonial garb, posing for pictures and keeping a wary eye out for whatever threat might materialise from among the flag-wavers.

A member of the training staff is reading a citation for the recipient of the baton of honour, the Met’s highest prize for a recruit in training. It is only supposed to be awarded if someone meets the loftiest standards of leadership and achievement, and exemplifies the values instilled in us over months of arduous classroom and practical tuition. In other words, it’s a tough ask. And so when the speaker concludes: “The recipient of the baton of honour is PC Alex Stewart,” I am pretty over-awed.

I walk up the steps on to the stage, aware that my legs are shaking a bit. The Baton is presented by Tim Godwin, then the Met’s deputy commissioner. He takes my hand in his and tells me that this is a good start to my career, that now I have to make something of it, use it as a launch pad for greater things. I pose awkwardly for a few photos, look down at my parents, and blink back genuine emotion. I’ve joined the police family. It’s a proud day.

PC Alex Stewart receives a commendation for his work on a drugs operation in 2013.

December 2014: A bare office on the second floor of Stoke Newington police station, with a large screen showing the BBC’s rolling news. There’s a cluttered desk and, in front of it, Ch Supt Simon Laurence, Hackney’s borough commander, who is listening to me handing in my resignation. He is reasonably attentive, agreeing with some things I say, arguing with others. Then there’s a quick handshake and I’m gone. After a final week of getting my cases in order ready to hand over to my already shrunken, under-staffed team, I hand my warrant card and travel pass to a colleague and walk out of the back gate. And that’s it. Five and a half years’ service finished with a quick handshake and not so much as a thank you.

The Met is facing a period of unprecedented difficulty. Against a backdrop of fiscal austerity, the looming threat of terrorism – in some instances directed at police officers themselves – the shakeup of pay, conditions and recruitment proposed by the Winsor review, and the lingering impact of scandal that taints both previous and present management in London’s main police service, the Met is losing excellent police officers hand over fist. Those leaving are experienced and able, replaced by officers who are no doubt well motivated but have received a fraction of the training that we did, and often turn up to their first shift having very little idea of what they should be doing. I should know, because I was responsible for training some of them when they first arrived. These days, the blue line is very, very thin indeed.

Theresa May takes a different view of the police force’s problems. This week, she told the Police Federation – which represents ordinary officers – that it was “crying wolf” over the danger that the cuts to policing represent. But that diagnosis met with incredulity from the officers listening. In the Q&A that followed, one told her: “I’ve never known a time in the last 25 years when police morale has been so low.”

This difference of opinion is pretty striking. “The last five years have shown that it is possible to do more with less,” May told her audience, introducing the idea that they would soon be expected to do more with even less again. In the circumstances, it seems the right moment to ask: is her diagnosis of the past correct? And will the new police officers graduating now still be in the force in five years’ time? Or will they, like me, be driven to give it all up?

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When I began my career in the police, I truly believed I had found a job for life. I had spent years in academia, studying and teaching medieval English, but had become disenchanted with the idea of trying to professionalise something I loved. I knew a friend of mine from university, Sarah, had joined the Met and so I tapped her up to go along with her for two shifts in Camden, north London. I was immediately smitten: the excitement, the difficulty, the need to process information and make rapid decisions.

After five years in Camden, working in uniform and plainclothes, on the front line answering 999 calls, in public order situations, and assisting with long-term drugs operations, I became a trainee detective constable in Hackney. I approached the job with the attitude that I should offer myself up for everything going. Throughout my time in Camden, I had tried to suggest operational ideas, offered my help writing press releases and good-news stories, suggested that my team start and run a Twitter account, and attempted to introduce better ways of sharing intelligence. These suggestions were often deemed too complex or not enough of a priority, only to be introduced centrally months later. My ideas were not wrong; it was simply that the Met’s way of doing things stifles ideas that don’t originate from the corporate centre. I wasn’t the only junior officer who was full of ideas and positive about what they could bring to the job. But we all gradually realised that the Met does not want innovation. And in Hackney, nothing much changed.

On one thing, I agree with May: currently, victims of crime are not the priority; targets are. “Targets distort operational reality,” she said, and she’s absolutely right. But perhaps she is naive to assume that they can be turned back. These targets and the quest to meet them – to define quality police work in measurable terms rather than that intangible goal of making the public safer – infect every aspect of the job today. Getting to a call within the allotted time – a major target discussed by every borough’s senior management as the primary indicator of a day’s successful policing – has become more important than the reason for attending the call in the first place. A new system brought in during my time in Hackney meant that the first contact a victim of serious assault had with officers after the time of reporting was someone ringing up to check, among other things, that we had their email; this took an experienced detective away from investigating crime to, quite literally, filling out a spreadsheet.

Theresa May to Police Federation: you don't like me, but I don't care Read more

The Met is currently held together by the goodwill of the men and women on the front line, who make it work, regardless of the cost to them. The CID office in Hackney was full of people working double shifts without pay just to keep up with the workload. On top of their own cases, detectives have to give advice to uniformed colleagues, deal with high-risk missing persons, provide support to firearms incidents, attend crime scenes and deal with people in the cells.

For all that I was referred to as a “trainee” detective constable, I did not receive a shred of training. My detective sergeants, both superb officers and caring people, were so busy with their own caseloads and personnel management issues that they never had time to train us. In October and November of last year, there was a three-week period when my team operated at one third of our strength. There was no time to deal with anything properly, and a constant pressure from above to solve crimes. In itself, that was, of course, our job, but the pressure led to detectives taking on easier cases that would not ordinarily be ours alongside all the complex ones, simply because there was a better chance of ticking the box; the result was that the tougher jobs suffered, or staff pushed themselves even harder to stay afloat. I was swamped, unable to do my job properly, battling to stay on top of the most basic investigations due to the constant, insane pressure of a workload that kept mounting and never relented.

The physical toll was significant: I had never taken a day sick until I moved to Hackney, but my body caved in to the stress and I became ill. The stress levels in CID were beyond even what I had experienced in uniformed work, and I was not alone in responding this way. Our senior management knew we were drowning, because we told them, but we never saw them, with one exception – a caring female detective chief inspector (DCI) who has now handed in her resignation, too. We were promised more officers and changes to the way we operated. None of these things happened.

This lack of concern for staff in a relatively small department is exemplified by the fact that, despite having been at Hackney for three months, my detective superintendent had no idea I worked for him until I resigned, and my DCI didn’t even know when I was leaving. He was supposed to meet me when I joined the borough, to find out about me and what I could to bring to his team; this meeting never happened. There are good and conscientious senior officers – my first borough commander, John Sutherland, being one example – but they seem few and far between.

And so, in the end, I resigned. When I posted about my decision on social media, I became a lightning rod for colleagues – currently serving and fellow leavers – who wanted me to articulate their sense of frustration and sorrow at what is happening in the Met. One former colleague, Anthony, who spent eight years on the front line of policing, but now works with former gang members trying to get them on the straight and narrow, sent me an 1,800-word email detailing countless problems. His experiences and vexations chimed with mine. For him, the way senior management treated officers was perhaps the single biggest cause of concern. He recalled officers who became ill after being exposed to chemicals in a drug den, saying: “Welfare seemed to come last. Recently, several officers suffered the effects of entering a meth lab. The officers were treated terribly, called in the next morning and criticised and then kept on to answer calls due to a shortage of staff.” He also felt, like me, that targets, spreadsheets and needless protocols had come to govern policing. “I found that most of what we were doing on the response team was just arse-covering,” he told me, “or following a policy rather than using common sense as first officers on scene.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I’ve never known a time in the last 25 years when police morale has been so low,’ said one police officer in response to Theresa May’s speech this week. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Anthony finished his email by apologising for its length. He was never given the chance to have an exit interview, and talking to me was the closest he has got to being given a chance to explain in detail where he feels things are going wrong. “Sergeants in other units emailed me to say I made the right decision and that they would leave too if they could.”

One such sergeant, Amy, who now works in the private sector, told me that a sense she was no longer able to do what mattered caused her to call time on a 13-year career in policing. “I no longer felt I served the public properly, or focused on putting criminals in prison, assisting victims or mentoring and training those under my supervision. I merely juggled”.

Amy told me that the only glue holding some departments together now is loyalty to fellow officers: “The only reason many people still remain is their feeling of responsibility, not to the organisation but to their colleagues, who will inevitably feel the brunt of further losses to an ever-decreasing pool of experienced officers.” When Amy raised concerns, she received no support. “Sadly, I was reminded that if I didn’t like it, I could leave.” One of my colleagues in Camden complained about a shift-pattern change and was told by a chief inspector: “If you don’t like it, you can work at Greggs.” This constant struggle left Amy feeling that she had no option but to leave a job she loved: “I made the sad decision to follow that advice. Where there is no will to change, what positive impact can I possibly hope to have?”

This matters, because it puts the public at risk. Theresa May is right that crime is falling, but she misses a crucial point: the way that the force has absorbed the cuts of the last five years is not evidence that it will be able to do so again, but a serious obstacle to doing so. The service is at breaking point. The vast majority of officers who remain are miserable, stressed, overworked and feel at the sharp end of a political agenda that leaves them and the public critically vulnerable.

What does this mean for the public? Well, the IPCC is currently investigating a domestic murder in Hackney, where over-stretched officers missed an allegation of assault by a woman who was subsequently killed. I know that detectives and junior managers from that department consistently emailed and spoke to the borough’s management over a period of months to say they were sinking under the weight of investigations and unable to function properly, and that something would go wrong if they were not given more staff. They were right, and it did. Ask me what it means, and that is what I think of.

Or I think of the meeting I had, not long ago, with a former colleague from Hackney. She told me about a female officer who was badly assaulted, and a male officer who was chased down the street by a gang wielding knives and shouting “Kill the pig” after he tried to help her. They had gone to reports of a large fight in the street on their own because there was no one to back them up – because they were being expected to do more with less. “It’s only a matter of time,” she said, shaking her head sadly. We both knew what she meant.

• This article was amended on 22 May to correct the information in the caption below the picture of PC Alex Stewart.