Police forces in England and Wales face funding cuts of 20% over the next four years Government cuts will claim 28,000 police jobs, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has said.
The Acpo estimate for England and Wales has been made in a confidential memo to ministers published in the Guardian.Acpo predicts the jobs of 12,000 police officers and 16,000 civilian staff will be lost as a result of spending cuts.
Meanwhile, the Winsor review of police pay and conditions to be unveiled on Tuesday is expected to recommend cutting £180m in annual bonuses.
Greater Manchester Chief Constable Peter Fahy confirmed the job loss forecast - representing a reduction of about 12% of posts - to the Guardian.
He said: "We will have fewer staff, the same or more demands, and will need to incentivise staff to produce higher quality."
Pay structure The review of police pay by former rail regulator Tom Winsor is set to suggest scrapping a series of allowances and bonus payments, and reducing the amount of overtime.
He is also expected to consider areas such as police housing, travel allowances and shift patterns, in an attempt to modernise working practices and make the service more cost-effective.
Mr Winsor has said his review represents a "once in a generation" opportunity for reforming a pay structure he described as a "mess".
Acpo said overtime was needed to allow forces "to respond flexibly to any event or crime at any time whether it be a flood, a major murder investigation or public order incident".
BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw says the Acpo figures are the latest and most reliable figures on police job cuts since Chancellor George Osborne's Spending Review last October.
Home Secretary Theresa May has warned that reductions in police pay are "unavoidable" in order to minimise front-line job losses.
Speaking at the weekend, she said: "We are working with police forces to identify savings that actually go beyond the reduction on the central policing grant in the next four years.
"I know that some will reject in principle the very idea of reviewing pay and conditions, but I remind them that those savings will save the jobs of thousands of police men and women.
"Nobody is pretending decisions like these will be easy."
'Blind arrogance' Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the figures were the "latest nail in the coffin for the prime minister's claim that he would protect the front line at all costs".
"Chief constables are being put in an impossible position by a government that seems happy to ride roughshod over public safety and the morale of the police force," she said.
"The government is cutting too far and too fast with 20% frontloaded cuts.
"The home secretary and her ministers have a blind arrogance in their dealings with the police.
"Rather than working with them, they are bludgeoning police numbers, their budgets and their operational capacity."
The government is planning to cut its funding for the police by 20% by 2014-15.
The 43 forces in England and Wales currently employ about 244,000 people, comprising 143,000 police officers and 101,000 civilians.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12672329
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