Met numbers fall 4% in year
The number of Met officers protecting London has fallen by nearly four per cent in a year, official figures revealed today.
Home Office statistics show that there were 1,243 fewer police in the Met in September last year than 12 months earlier. Much of the drop occurred in the last six months of the period as cost-cutting by Scotland Yard saw 784 jobs either axed or left unfilled. The findings came as national figures showed police numbers across the country at their lowest level in a decade.
The new figures show that in September last year the Met had a total of 31,657 officers. That compared with a total of 32,900 in September 2010 and represents a drop of 3.8 per cent. They follow government-imposed cuts on police funding across the country which have left the Met facing the need to make tens of millions of pounds of savings.
Kit Malthouse, the deputy Mayor of policing and crime insisted that police numbers had risen overall under Mr Johnson. "The Mayor is on target to deliver 1,000 more police officers at the end of his term than at the beginning ."
