Police in the North are overstretched and some officers are at "breaking point", the PSNI’s chief constable Mr Colin Cramphorn said today.
After 15 months of street disorder and with the threat from dissident paramilitary groups running at the highest level for five years, the pressures on resources left "little to deliver ordinary day-to-day policing," Mr Cramphorn said.
In a message to the Policing Board, Mr Cramphorn revealed: "In many areas we are simply responding to emergency calls and little else."
Mr Cramphorn’s comments come after another night of loyalist rioting in east Belfast left nine officers injured.
|
Mr Cramphorn said by putting themselves between the warring factions in certain areas police had "prevented them from descending into an orgy of violence that would have surely cost many more lives and caused widespread destruction".
However, he warned the pressures of constant frontline duty were getting to the men and women of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, with some reaching breaking point.
He revealed during a meeting with the Policing Board's Corporate Policy Committee: "There are now worrying instances occurring where individual officers have come to breaking point."
Figures show that 10 per cent of PSNI regulars and full-time reservists are currently on sick leave.
The Police Service had seen "all the pain of the new beginning for policing, but had yet to see any of the gain which was the rationale for that new beginning being embraced," he said.
PA