Fen| Special Investigation Special Inve
got. There's about 15,000 streets in the county. If you do some rough calculations, assuming the average length of a street is about half a kilometre, it would take a police officer about 200 working days to walk down them all, just once. And that's assuming that in all that time nothing happens – they don't stop to speak to anyone, or need to investigate something. “If you think about it, if you walk down a street, how many people actually see you in that period of time? You'd have to walk down a street multiple times before the majority of people in that street actually saw you. “It's not that high visibility policing doesn't work, it does, and it's not that we don't want to do it, we do. It's the sheer size of the county against the size of the police force. “It's just not realistic that everyone is going to see a police officer around on a regular basis. The key thing for us is targeting patrols, where there's a particular problem in a village. And that's what we do.”
He admits that anti-social behaviour can be a serious issue. He said: “I grew up in a small village on the South Cambridgeshire
It's just not realistic that
everyone is going to see a police officer around on a regular basis.
border, with no public transport links to the towns, so I know that kids in villages get a little bit bored sometimes, and sometimes that will manifest itself in anti-social behaviour. It's always been that way. Our role is that when it goes beyond what's acceptable, we intervene.” How does he respond to
Above: Residents can ring 999 and 101 but there's now also the ability to talk to someone online, via the police website.
Below: The key thing for rural communities is targeting patrols where there's a particular problem in a village.
suggestions that the police don't always seem interested when called out? He says that officers may decide not to get involved if it's deemed that the behaviour involved is “relatively low level”. “If something is genuinely low level, perhaps a one-off, then there needs to be an element of forbearance by residents. But if something is a continual problem that is if there's a problem address or a problem site where people are constantly congregating, then we absolutely want to know about it. “We've had issues like this in some villages, such as at Willingham and Little Downham and we've upped the number of patrols we have out there. “Even if we make a decision that we're not going to respond to an incident of relatively low level anti-social behaviour, we record everything, we log everything, and that helps build up a picture.” The message is that people should get in touch if they have concerns - something he insists is much easier than it used to be. Says Superintendent Sutherland:
“It's not just restricted to ringing 999 and 101. There's now also the ability to talk to someone online, via our website,
www.cambs.
police.uk. There are people there 24/7 to chat to.”
16
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
