10-06-2025
Number of PSNI officers retiring on ill-health grounds more than doubles in two years
A former police officer who served on the frontline in Belfast for more than 20 years has spoken frankly about the toll the job has taken on his mental health.
The 50-year-old, who doesn't want to be identified, took ill health retirement in 2023 after being diagnosed with complex PTSD.
He first joined the PSNI up for the challenge - but left feeling the job had taken a 'good part of him away'.
He was first on the scene when 15-year-old schoolboy Thomas Devlin was murdered in a sectarian attack in 2005.
He said: "I just bounced from one call to the next to the next, doesn't matter how horrific you just got on with it.
"I have my name written on the walls in certain estates because I was black and white with the crime.
"It got to the stage you stopped caring, you just did what you had to do to get the call down and move off to the next one".
"I was a shell. I was broken. I had nightmares, I relived incidents that I'd been to. It caused issues with my family, I was angry and I wasn't nice to be around.
"The job had taken a good part of me away."
UTV can reveal the number of officers who have taken ill-health retirement has soared in the last two years.
The total number rose by a staggering 140% from 83 in 2023 to 200 in 2024.
A figure that is three times higher than in England and echoed the urgency of this issue during a recent Policing Board Chief Constable Bobby Singleton said: ''The work of our officers has become increasingly complex and importantly resource intensive.
"That combined with our decline in police numbers means our police officers are under increasingly intolerable and unimaginable pressure and stress.
"A reality which is already worn out in our service delivery and that's been recognised in our ill health and retirement data.''
Claire Duffield, the PSNI's Assistant Chief Officer added: ''Some of the roles that our officers do expose them to greater trauma than others.
"For example, we know that we have police staff and officers that do very specialist work in our public protection branch, in our collision investigation unit in the child internet protection team and they have much more regular exposure to traumatic incidents or material.
"Now we are focusing our resources to help and support, and we also know we have to be careful about the tenure of people in those roles.''
The retirement figures equate a significant loss of experience from areas of policing such as crime and public understands that among those who have taken ill health retirement are officers who worked on the Alexander McCartney case.
He's the Catfish from Northern Ireland who abused thousands of children online and drove one teenager to take her own life.
It was a harrowing and traumatic case for detectives to work on.
The sectarian murder of schoolboy Thomas Devlin in 2005 in North Belfast still haunts the officer who spent two decades on the frontline in the city.
"The hardest part of that job was, at a later date the family wanted to meet myself and my colleague to thank us and I just felt guilt. They wanted to thank me for trying when I couldn't do anything to save him."
