Nearly 1,200 Ulster police officers have been injured over the past seven years in riots related to the type of loyalist marching dispute currently raging in north Belfast, the Guardian has learned.

The Police Federation of Northern Ireland said the casualty figures, which include 62 officers hurt over the past 48 hours, showed that police officers on frontline duty in the province stood a one-in-four chance of getting injured in riots.

As the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) braces itself for possibly a third round of rioting in the Carlisle Circus/Lower Antrim Road area, the organisation representing rank-and-file officers said that, even leaving terrorism aside, their members were under more threat on the streets than any other force in Europe despite policing in the time of the peace process.

Responding to two nights of violent disorder during which loyalists attacked PSNI lines with petrol bombs, fireworks, golf balls, bottles, bricks and other missiles, the Police Federation described the number of casualties between 2005 and today as "an appalling indictment".

A spokesperson for the Federation in Northern Ireland said: "The actual odds on frontline officers getting injured in these riots who are working in the Tactical Support Group (the PSNI's riot squad) may be even higher than one in four. There will be instances in this figure of 1,200 of officers being very unlucky; of a single officer getting injured a number of different times in different riots.

However, we believe the vast majority of those injuries are related to individual policemen and women who are attacked in these parade-dispute riots.

"Where is the political will to solve these disputes, because the price in terms of police officers injured in far too high? Police officers have human rights too and it is time the politicians took that on board while they seek to resolve this problem."

The PSNI's press office said it could neither confirm or deny the casualty figures which the Police Federation insisted were an accurate picture of the price their members were paying in disputes as far flung as Drumcree in Portadown and the current controversy in the north inner city of Belfast.

Tension remains high in the Carlisle Circus/Lower Antrim Road area, with loyalists linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) holding a protest on Tuesday night against what they claim were oppressive police tactics over the past 48 hours.

The latest trouble flared up on Sunday afternoon following a republican flute band parade near a local Orange Hall close to the loyalist Lower Shankill estate. Loyalists claimed that no restrictions had been put on the republican march. Republicans counter-claimed that loyalists unilaterally attacked their rally, sparking two nights of sectarian disorder.

The violence close to loyalism's Belfast heartland reflects the confused and unstable state loyalist paramilitary movements are currently in. Despite both the UVF and UDA being on official ceasefires, factions of the two movements have continued to engage in low-level violence and criminality. Until recently most of the UVF and UDA's violence was directed against internal enemies in their own Protestant communities. However, there are fears among the security forces that the UVF in particular is being forced by its rank and file to eventually confront dissident republicans who have a growing presence in north Belfast.

Senior police commanders have avoided stating that the UVF or UDA is officially sanctioning the attacks. However, Assistant Chief Constable Will Kerr confirmed on Tuesday that individual members of those terror groups were involved in the violence.

Kerr warned that someone could be killed unless all sides pulled back from the brink.

Commenting on a forthcoming loyalist rally at the end of this month to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Unionist Ulster Covenant in 1912, Kerr said: "Northern Ireland cannot afford an 11th hour solution."

He also challenged local political leaders to "sort this out, and sort it out now" before the Ulster Covenant Day on Saturday 29 September.

This latest instability along one of north Belfast's sectarian faultlines dividing working-class Protestant and Catholic communities continues just as the new Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, take up her post. David Cameron's latest appointee to the position arrives in the city at a time of simmering sectarian tensions.

The short-term roots of the current trouble go back to 12 July when a loyalist flute band from the Shankill Road was caught on camera playing sectarian tunes outside St Patrick's Catholic chapel en route into Belfast city centre. The same band and others then defied a legal ban on them playing sectarian songs outside the same church on 25 August during another loyalist rally. But the deeper antecedents of the violence can be traced back to the disconnect between the compromise hammered out between unionist and nationalist politicians at Stormont and the ongoing divisions on the ground between deprived Catholic and Protestant communities in areas such as north Belfast where there are few signs of any peace dividend.