‘South Holland is a safe place’ – that’s the view of Spalding Police Inspector Gareth Boxall as he addressed rising crime numbers, funding issues and social media rumours while being questioned by councillors.
Amid warnings that public confidence in the police is waning, the inspector told South Holland District Council’s Performance Monitoring Panel in detail as to why the public should continue to report all crime, even if the police find it difficult to work out whether crime really is increasing as ways of recording crimes continue to change.
The meeting’s chair Bryan Alcock said that “the problems of the city seem to be coming to rural areas” and questioned why crime figures, particularly violent crime, had increased in Crowland.
Inspector Boxall responded: “I have my concern about publishing crime figures because they only tell part of the story.
“Our violent crime has probably doubled year-on-year and we’ve seen that increase across the force.
“That’s because of the way we’re recording crimes. The rules state now if there’s any suggestion of crime occurring we must record it, no matter what evidence to the contrary.
“With violent crime, it includes people being injured in assaults, but also includes things like malicious communications as well as controlling and coercive behaviour, which is a domestic abuse offence.
“That’s an offence that didn’t even exist until a few years ago but the way we’ve recorded it (as violent crime) has changed.
“That makes it very difficult as we struggle to have a true picture of whether violent crime has increased.
“I get it’s difficult for members of the public looking at those figures and thinking ‘oh we’ve got a high number of violent crimes here’.
“The other thing to bear in mind is that the majority of violent incidents will have taken place in the home.
“With regards the violence we see recorded week-on-week, the majority, certainly more than half, is domestic abuse.
“We try and do what we can to prevent domestic abuse but it’s difficult to prevent violence in the home.
“Domestic abuse is not a new thing it’s happened for years, but what we’ve worked hard to do is to get people to report it. Then the figures go up.”
When asked about public confidence in the police Inspector continued: “We have to accept many, many crimes we’re not going to catch someone for as there’s no evidence of who has committed that crime, but we still need those crimes to be reported so we can build a picture of what’s happening and the far end of that so we can get the funding for Lincolnshire.
“It helps get the right number of resources to South Holland and so I can know where we need to put our resources.
“We had an increase in burglaries in Pinchbeck recently so I put more resources in Pinchbeck. If nobody had reported those crimes there would have been no more resources in Pinchbeck.
“We’ve seen those burglaries reduced. We can never know if that’s due to us being there ot there is some other reason, but whatever the crime is we need to report them.
“If someone takes the law into their own hands then they become the criminal.”
Chief among much of the concerns and reasons for recent change was funding, Inspector Boxall said.
“We should be on a par with other forces,” he told the meeting. “ You look at funding per heard of the population and we’re the worst or one of the worst in the country.
“We’re not talking about a small margin. Some of the metropolitan forces are funded twice what we’re funded.
“People will say there’s more people in urban areas, but we’re talking per head.
“They have their own challenges such as terrorism, which thankfully we don’t have to take day-to-day, but we have our own challenges as well.
“In the city it is easier to get places as they’re close by and you can pull your resorces a lot tighter.
“As you know in Lincolnshire, we’re one of the biggest forces by geographical area, so that makes it more difficult for us.”
It was recently announced that Lincolnshire Police had secured extra funding and in a statement said the force would be recruiting 400 officers in the next three years.
However inspector Boxall said it was unclear how many new officers would be based in South Holland, that figures includes how many officers the force would normally have to replace every year anyway and that replacements were already needed.
He said: “The extra we are promised will no doubt help
“I will push to get a fair share of them, and I know my bosses agree with that, but we’re already short and some of those will be filling gaps.”
Inspector Boxall also addressed issues surrounding rumours spreading on social media platforms, especially local Facebook groups.
“We do what we can to try and dispel some of the rumours and myths (you see online). We follow all these groups or as many as we can on social media. Again there’s a resourcing implication because it does take time to trawl through them and I often find myself in my own time dispelling some of those myths.
“But some of those incidents are subject to a criminal investigation. There was an incident in Spalding, we’ve made a press release with some basic facts and that talks about the age of person arrested and the age of the victim and generally what’s occurred but we give any more information.
“Unfortunately there are some rumours kicking around which are completely untrue connected with that, but we cannot go down the lines of correcting all of that because there’s a criminal investigation ongoing.”
He continued: “No-one takes to Facebook to say what a wonderful people the police are. They take to Facebook to say I’m not very happy with the police, this is why, and people are quick to jump on that bandwagon.
“We’re always going to be in the case that the majority of crimes that occur, and unfortunately it will always be the majority, we’re not going to find the person that’s done it because there’s not the evidence to do it so there’s going to be more that feel let down by the police than the other way.
“We’re not magicians. We can’t magic up evidence but people want their crimes solved or probably prevented before they happen and I completely accept that.
“The majority of the time it’s impossible.
“We need to accept force wise that we need to get better at our good news stories out there and when we have put good news stories we’ve seen support.
“We probably need to get better with selling ourselves.
“It’s difficult though. Some of these good results take quite a while to come. If you read a reports saying someone’s been arrested and it’s not been more than a day, we still get criticised and try and counter that by providing reasons.
“Whatever people think, South Holland is a safe place. I know plenty of people who have worked in cities and say ‘my goodness it’s so peaceful here’.
“There’s the odd violent crime and a murder every now and again but there’s places in the country that have that day in, day out.
“We should be grateful for what we have and generally the public do respect authority.
“In terms of proper criminality do we welcome better punishments? Yes we do, but for me that’s just about putting more people in prison.
“We want to make sure people don’t return to crime.
“Our focus locally is to keep people on the straight and narrow early. There’s all sorts of stats and figures about returning to criminality
“If you’ve been to prison you’re more likely to go back so we do a lot of work to try and make sure we don’t have repeat offenders.”
