Agenda item

Officers from Leicestershire Constabulary will be at the meeting to provide an update on police issues in Ward.

Sergeant Cara Guest, of Leicestershire Constabulary, gave an update on policing in the Ward.  A copy of the information provided is attached at the end of these minutes for information.

During her presentation, Sergeant Guest drew particular attention to the following:-

·           Officers covering this ward were part of the Hinckley Road Policing unit;

·           A lot of the work done by Police officers in the Ward related to developing and managing community safety.  The care of vulnerable people also was very important;

·           The Police took a leading role in identifying problems and developing Problem Solving Plans;

·           Local Police currently had four main objectives.  These were set out in the presentation, (slide 7);

·           Reducing anti-social behaviour had the additional benefit of stopping other offences being committed;

·           Anti-social behaviour issues were not likely to be case-managed unless they were repeat offences.  Since April 2012, there had been 19 case-managed ASB issues;

·           The Police currently were meeting all of their set targets through officers’ work and the involvement of the community.  The community was thanked for their help with this;

·           Police officers had been helping at a lot of events lately, (such as the Olympics), which had put pressure on resources locally;

·           Various operations were running.  In this ward, Operation Dynamo was the use of a burglary car and Operation Barley was the use of a staffed police vehicle to attend anti-social behaviour incidents;

·           All calls received by the Police were graded and managed accordingly;

·           Members of the public were encouraged to use the new 101 telephone number for non-emergency calls.  Calls to this number had a fixed cost of 5p, irrespective of how long the call was.  Despite a successful trial, this number had been discontinued for a time, but now was available nationally; and

·           The twitter account @LPRowleyfields should not be used to report emergencies or incidents.

Councillor Naylor reminded the meeting that he ran a virtual surgery in relation to his work as a Councillor and offered to include contact information for the Police on that.

Louise Lavelle, Community Safety Team Development Officer with Leicester City Council, introduced herself to the meeting and drew attention to the following points:-

·           The work of the Community Safety Team included helping to alleviate community tensions.  This could include working with young people;

·           Information on which the team acted came from various sources, not just Police data;

·           Things that were not reported to the Police were very important to the team, as they could show emerging issues.  This information could come from various sources, such as Councillors, the offices of local Members of Parliament, and Council services such as housing and parks.  Information from members of the public was welcome as well;

·           The Community Safety Team helped with work such as the installation and repair of alley gates, lighting and CCTV;

·           Gates orders were sometimes used to close an area at certain times of the day, for example to reduce antisocial behaviour in garage areas.  These had worked well;

·           Problems with excessive noise were usually passed to the Noise Team in Environmental and Enforcement Services.  These officers had equipment available with which to record the noise and establish if a nuisance existed; and

·           Local Police beat officers had increased their regular patrols around Gadsby Avenue during the building work at the Riverside site, but no problems specific to this had been reported to date.

In concluding, Sergeant Guest challenged everyone to see if they could get in to their homes without using a key, because if they could, so could a burglar.