Mr Kirkham was with the Met Police from 1981 to 2002.
Former Senior Investigation Officer of the Metropolitan Police, Peter Kirkham, has accused the government of outright “lying” to the public about the number of police officers on the streets.
In an interview with
Sky News, Kirkham said that : "The police service is in crisis as a result of the cuts. They're (officers) being dragged from pillar to post. We hear talk of extra police officers on the street, they're not extra, they're officers that have had their rare leave days cancelled, they've had their 12 hour shifts routinely extended to 16 hours. They're officers who are being drawn from other areas. They're from other duties and they're being burned out."
When pushed further on the issue, Kirkham once again denied Theresa May's claims that there are more armed officers than ever before on the street.
"No, there's not. No. Basically, people that are saying that are lying. The government are lying."
Earlier this year,
an IFS report showed that 20,000 police officers had been cut between 2009 and 2016.
During a recent press conference at Downing Street, Theresa May did offer a four-point plan to combat terrorism, but Kirkham feels that it was missing one key ingredient.
"I heard her speech and she raised four things that needed to change. She missed the most urgent one though which is to deal with ordinary policing. Yes, all those other things that she mentioned are valid, but what needs to be done immediately is to stop and reverse the cuts that have been made to ordinary policing. They're (more police) needed in intelligence gathering communities, they're needed in monitoring those 23,00 very low level people that are 'known' to local policing in their community," he said.
Kirkham adds: "In 2010 we had 1000+ more on the streets, they said they've a plan in place to bring this up by 2020, we are not there yet. We saw a brilliant response from the police officers in London, Westminster and Manchester recently, if this (terrorism) had happened anywhere else, you would not be seeing that kind of response. It is threadbare (police numbers) elsewhere in the country."
Here's the interview in full.
https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/871334312221736960
