Police have become too preoccupied with progressive issues, leaving little resources for urgent police work, a veteran Detective Sergeant has warned.
DS Dave Speight, 63, spent over three decades putting some of Britain’s most violent criminals behind bars and is said to be responsible for offenders receiving half a millennium of jail time.
The former Detective Sergeant led a specialist unit at Leicestershire Police, with a focus on gang crime and taking firearms off the streets.
In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, the now-retired policeman has warned: “The police has changed from when I joined because now nearly 51 percent of our work has nothing to do with investigating crime. It’s servicing the public and mental health and that sort of thing.”
He says that most officers think the focus should be on preventing and punishing crime, but fears that non-crime related policing is just “getting bigger and bigger”.
In his time in the force, DS Speight has worked on some of this country’s most violent crimes. From hunting down violent rapists, gang members, and fugitive murderers, he dedicated most of his life to catching the bad guys, which resulted in him winning the title of Investigator of the Year in 2015, as well as being nominated by the Police Federation for the National Investigator of the Year award too.
Reflecting on the changes he’s observed during his time in the police, DS Speight warns that the shift in police priorities has resulted in officers spending more time at their desks dealing with safeguarding tasks than on the streets catching criminals:
“It’s good in the way that we now serve the public more and we’re a lot more diverse in what we do, but the problem is—it’s the usual thing—there are so few officers, and it doubles or triples the workload.”
“It’s the old saying, they’re all sat around doing paperwork, though they’ve got laptops nowadays.”
In his decades-long career, he was responsible for solving a number of high-profile cases, such as that of Charlie Pearce, a pornography-obsessed teenager who raped and tried to murder a woman in Leicester City Centre in the summer of 2017.
On top of this, he received praise for his investigation into an armed robbery at a jeweller on the Golden Mile, which led to the arrest of four criminals. He also executed European Arrest Warrants in Madrid and Amsterdam to retrieve two dangerous criminals wanted for separate attempted murders.
Though his career has now come to an end, his daughter Lauren joined the force five years ago and became a detective constable in the Child Abuse Investigation Unit.
DS Speight said: “I’d never push her into doing anything, but I think her decision was influenced by me coming home and talking about what I’d been up to.”
