I CARE - - UK: Far-right protests draining police resources, figures reveal South Yorkshire police forced to spend almost £5m since start of 2012 on keeping peace at demonstrations

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I CARE - - News - Internet Centre Anti Racism Europe - 25/12/2016- South Yorkshire police have spent nearly £5m on policing far-right protests since the beginning of 2012, figures have shown. Freedom of information requests by the Guardian have revealed that 99.5% of the force’s overall expenditure on protests from the beginning of 2012 to October this year went on policing demonstrations by far-right groups. Between the start of 2012 and October 2016, the force spent £4,672,083 on policing demonstrations by the far right, with a single demonstration in Rotherham in September 2014 costing just over £1m. The figures provided by the force do not include salaries and planning costs, so the total figure is likely to be higher. Of the police forces that responded to the Guardian’s request for information, South Yorkshire’s overall costs were by far the highest.

West Yorkshire police spent £1,055,732 between the start of 2014 and October 2016, compared with £2,907,955 by South Yorkshire. In the same period, West Midlands police spent £898,767. The Metropolitan police said they did not routinely cost such events and Greater Manchester police said the information did not exist in an “easily retrievable format” in their database. South Yorkshire’s biggest bill was run up on 13 September 2014, a month after the Jay report concluded that 1,400 children in Rotherham had been sexually exploited by groups of mostly Asian men over 16 years. Hundreds of far-right protesters descended on the town and the cost of policing was £1,010,343. Rotherham experienced 14 demonstrations by the far right in the space of 14 months following the publication of the Jay report.