Police officers took a record 500,000 days off because of mental ill health

The record breaking figure represented an increase at 24 forces, following a request made under the Freedom of Information Act, but was ‘no surprise’ according to Zoë Wakefield, chair of Hampshire Police Federation.

She said: ‘It’s not rocket science. You reduce police officer numbers, so out of the officers that you’ve got left to go to all the traumatic incidents you’ve got fewer.

‘So those officers are going to more traumatic incidents than they would do if we had adequate numbers of police officers, because the trauma would then be shared around. Obviously it’s not good that it’s shared around, but for a lot of officers it’s the repeated trauma.

‘They’re not getting time to process and deal with, for example, going to a road traffic collision where somebody dies, and then the next minute they’re going to a fight or they’re being assaulted.’