SUSSEX Police are facing criticism for being "woke" after changing warrant card numbers to be gender-neutral.

Bosses abandoned male and female identification for new officers after LGBTQ+ cops complained the system was outdated.

Previously, men were given A or C at the start of their IDs while women had B or D.

Now, police in Brighton and the rest of the county are identified by the same EA code numbers so the force does not distinguish between genders.

The move has raised concerns it will take longer to respond to certain incidents where a female officer is needed because IDs will have to be checked.

One serving male police officer described the EA numbering system as a farce.

He said: "It used to be the second letter was your surname followed by your number.

"So, mine is C for male followed by the first letter of my surname.

"It was really handy because if you were two male officers, and you nicked a female drink driver - you can't search her.

"Then you would just have look on the call signs and find a car with a female officer and call that unit up to come and search this woman because I can't do it.

"It made life easy.

"But you can't have that, so everybody is Echo Alpha for Equality Act just in case someone wants to be a two spirit penguin or an alpaca for the day.

"Seriously?

"If that's all you've got to worry about, life must be sweet.

"Let's worry about stuff like that rather than policing and doing the job properly.

"It's an absolute farce."

Sussex Police said they changed their numbering system after their own "LGBT network" complained.

Director of people services for the force, Adrian Rutherford, said: "We were approached in 2016 by our LGBT network to consider moving away from gender specific warrant numbers – the first letter of an officers warrant number indicated the gender of the officer with A and C being male officers and B and D being female.

"It was felt that this was very outdated and there was no need for the gender of an officer to be identified by their warrant number and apart from searching duties there is no requirements to know the gender of the officer.

"There was also the consideration of the gender neutral debate and issue that we needed to take into account and I think we were the only force at the time to have this distinction.

"From September 2018 we issued all new officers an EA warrant number so it did not distinguish gender.

"For the rest of the officer workforce it was voluntary for them to give up their current C and D numbers and move to an E number.

"We decided – due to the personal attachment officers have to their numbers – to have an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach."

The letter E was picked to be gender-neutral, with the first 999 new officers being labelled EA.

The next batch will have numbers beginning EB.