UK police chiefs unhappy over funding, staffing

By Ilker Girit

ISTANBUL (AA) - British police say they are under pressure to maintain counterterror efforts "with officer numbers at 1985 levels, crime up 10 percent in the last year".

Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, said the U.K. government is increasing the money spending on counterterrorism "but only five percent of this -- about £700 million [$950 million] -- is spent on policing."

"The current flat cash settlement for forces announced in 2015 is no longer enough," Thornton wrote in a statement, demanding more funding.

Thornton's claims come after five major terror attacks in the U.K. this year alone killed 36 people.

Prime Minister Theresa May faced criticism earlier this year for cuts to the policing budget introduced when she was the country’s Home Secretary, responsible for internal security.

Thornton claimed that policing budget allocation was to be cut by 7.2 percent in the next three years while "the volume and nature of threat is growing alarmingly".

Stating that the size of budget "is not the whole story," Thornton said police officers' responses to terror incidents put "extra strain on an already stretched service".

"In the response to the Manchester attack, three quarters of the resources deployed came from mainstream policing.

"This disrupts the daily work of policing on which the public rely, it creates backlogs of incidents in our control rooms and results in a slower response to the public," the police chief added.