Average Salary of a Police Constable in Jersey is a little over £40K. In order to have 1 police officer on duty 24 hours a day 7 days a week you require 6 police officers (to take into account shifts, off days, holidays, sickness etc). So it costs about a quarter of a million pounds a year purely in salary (so not including all the training costs, equipment costs and any other related costs) to assign one police officer to patrol an area. Given the cost factor, it is not particularly surprising that Home Affairs wants to maximise the use of their resources and having police officers hanging around simply to provide peace of mind is hardly maximising their effectiveness.
You also have the issue that SOJP are an island wide police force and therefore have to allocate its resources based on the needs of the island as a whole. Deputy Macon will tug for more resources in his district; every other deputy / constable will tug for those same resources elsewhere.
This sounds to me like a case of having to ask the question, “Why do you want that?” People in St Saviour No 1 are saying they want an increased police presence; the question is therefore “why do they want an increased police presence?” If it’s to target burglaries then a greater police presence will not help them, and it would be actually be doing them a disservice to provide one as it simply gives the impression of tackling the problem rather than actually addressing it. Instead measures that would actually be effective should be employed along with helping educate members of the district. If it is something different that they want the police presence for then maybe something else would be the appropriate action to take. Either way it is a case of finding out what the constituents actually want, rather than what they think they want.
In respect of response times, again all calls put through to SOJP are assigned a priority order. A genuine emergency call will have a unit on the scene within 8 minutes (in St Saviour often a lot sooner, but that is their target response time). Incidents that are assigned a lower priority will be responded to much slower, as and when resources are available. A very low priority incident (the good old ones “there are some kids looking scary on the corner”, cat stuck up tree, noisy party) is likely to take quite a while to get a police response, especially when other incidents have their priority. Likewise anything that doesn’t require an immediate presence (my wallet was stolen yesterday) is again likely to be pushed down the priority list. This ensures that when you actually need the Police ASAP, you get them and that should always be the priority.
Another thing Deputy Macon could consider if he wants to help deal with crime in his district is that each parish still has it’s own Honorary Police Force, which with a bit of work could deal with the majority of the issues the residents seem concerned with. How about working on improving his own Parish Force, coming up with away to attract a higher quality of Honorary Officers and dramatically improving training and levels of competency? A more effective Parish Force will allow you to put Police Officers exactly where and when you want them within the Parish and not be as dependant on SOJP, who are a lot of the time stretched very thin cleaning up the streets of St Helier. As another suggestion, any initiatives that would result in the lowering of street crime in St Helier, particularly on Friday and Saturday evenings would instantly free up a number of officers who would then be available to assist elsewhere.
