Review of Community Safety
To consider the report of the Community Safety Manager on a review of Community Safety in Spelthorne Borough during 2014-2015.
In accordance with the Police and Justice Act 2006, and the Overview and Scrutiny Committee being the Council’s designated Crime and Disorder Committee, it is required to meet to consider crime and disorder matters at least once in every 12 months. The role of the Committee is
a. To act as ‘critical friend’ of the Spelthorne Community Safety Partnership, providing it with constructive challenge at a strategic level rather than adversarial fault-finding at an operational level;
b. To consider actions undertaken by the responsible authorities on the Spelthorne Community Safer Partnership.
Minutes:
The Community Safety Manager gave an update on Community Safety (CS) issues over the past year.
He reported that the Joint Enforcement Team (JET), piloted in the Borough since December 2014, has had a positive impact and was well received by the general public.
He highlighted the fact that there were no government grants or allocated funding from the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) to support the Community Safety Partnership (CSP), and that funding was reliant on contributions from external partners.
He detailed the performance data for the period April 2014 to March 2015 for the key priorities for the Community Safety Team: house burglary, vehicle crime, criminal damage, theft (shoplifting) and violence against the person (injury).
Overall, reported crime figures were up by 6%, but this was largely due to violence against person crime having increased by 41% or 148 offences. The Community Safety Manager explained that there had been increases in all crime nationally, due to three factors, which had also influenced the increase in Spelthorne’s figures for crimes of violence against the person: lack of police resources, different reporting methods and police officers being diverted to deal with 'new' crimes, e.g. child sexual exploitation via the internet. Additionally, he indicated that a lot of violent crime injury was sustained by police officers during the course of their work and this had skewed the figures.
The CSP team were working with police to address violence with injury crime, which had a strong link with domestic abuse, and encouraging both men and women who were victims of such crime to report it.
The current CSP Strategy and Action Plan for Spelthorne Borough were available on the Council’s website. The 3 year Strategy was refreshed every year following feedback on the public’s priorities given at the PCC Summit.
Resolved to note the report of the Community Safety Manager on the review of community safety 2014-2015.