A snapshot of policing in district

A new workshop is being set up with the police and district councillors after Spt Mark Housley’s account of policing in the area.

Spt Housley called for greater partnership working between police and outside bodies, including South Holland District Council, while addressing the authority’s Performance Monitoring Panel where he was grilled on local policing issues.

He said the chance of any one person being a victim of crime is around 5.8 per cent in Spalding and 5.3 per cent in Holbeach compared with the highest in Lincolnshire which is Skegness at 8.5 per cent.

From July 1 to September 30 there were 1,590 recorded crimes and Spt Housley told councillors that year-on-year crime is currently down 3.9 per cent, which was to be expected because of the recent lockdowns.

“We’re now getting back to what we’d call the norm and what we’d expect to happen,” he said. “We shouldn’t expect crime to be the norm. We should always aspire to have no crime, but we do get to the position we tolerate so much and I don’t think we should tolerate any.”

Spt Housley also said that 32 per cent of the incidents officers are called to are in the most deprived areas and accounted for 18 per cent of police resources.

“That means victims are in those areas as well. Not just the perpetrators,” he added.

He also described the county of Lincolnshire’s record in helping others as “woeful” and “wasn’t very good” at joined up working.

“We have one in 25 of the working population in Lincolnshire working in the public sector. Surely between those people we can deliver a better service than we deliver.

“As police we deal with failure. We’re called in when everybody else has failed, be it the education, parents and local authorities.”

Spt Housley cited the Complex and Troubled Families initiative as an example of where partnership working had been a success.

“Youth offending levels have fallen through the floor since it was introduced. So it does work, it’s just we’re not very good at doing it.”

He continued: “We’ve got a bigger population in our prisons than we have had for 30 years. We know reoffending is massive. We know it (the current system) doesn’t work and the volume of stuff we deal with tends to be people who make poor decisions, are in poverty, the parenting is woeful and those conditions lead to them doing daft or stupid things.

“It cost us a fortune to chase after them and chuck them in prison. Between us we ought to come together and find a better solution.”

Spt Housley said police should listen more to all in the community.

“I believe in local police and local policing,” he said. “I think we’re not very good at listening to our local community.

“I think we decide what they want and deliver it and when we go out to a survey we tend to say people what would you like us to focus on, burglary or robbery and then they’ll make a choice based on no information or understanding.

“The reality is we get four or five people ring us every day to tell us what they want. That’s the clue, we should know what that community needs.

“I don’t want to be rude, but we’ve come from a position where we’ve been engaging with groups in the community but it was the same people who were confident and capable and have their views, which is fine and great, but the idea of a police based approach is everybody has a voice we need to try to understand.

“We need to understand what it is people need. It might not be just be me running around with my blues and twos on.

“It might be just some help around mental health issues we have in a village or homelessness in a town. That’s a different need so we’d want to deal with it in a different way.

“The issue is around expectation.”

In December 2018, Chris Haward was named as Lincolnshire Police’s Chief Constable replacing Bill Skelly.

“We are on a journey,” Spt Housley said: “We’ve had some challenges around leadership, we’ve become a reactive police force that a lot of us aren’t happy with but you have to suck it up sometimes.

“We’ve now got a chief constable who gets it and who understands that it’s about productivity.

“We’ve come away from a team who didn’t get partnership working.

“We’ve got that much overlap in what we’re trying to achieve,” he told councillors. “It’s the same community we’re all working to make safe.

“We do need to work better.

“There’ll be no magic wand but we will make progress.”

This is the second part of The Voice’s feature on policing. Part one is here and part three is here.