We have received the following letter from the top Police Officer in Bath and North East Somerset, Chief Superintendent Gary Davies:
He states that, “I want to make this letter as interesting and useful as possible and so I thought that having some facts on how well your area is doing in terms of crime reduction, crime detection and the levels of satisfaction of people who use your police service would be quite useful. I therefore intend to cover each of these areas on a regular basis and include some basic commentary to provide a context for the figures which in isolation can be difficult to interpret.
• Total Crime -6.7% reduction compared to last year.
• Crime Detections 34.6% to date
• Customer Satisfaction 85.5% at the end of April.
Total Crime
The current 6.7% reduction when compared to last year is excellent. Most people thought that the economic recession was going to cause an increase but at the moment overall crime continues to fall as do house burglaries and vehicle crime. Violent crime is under some pressure but early in the crime year with low numbers means it can change rapidly in either direction. We are however carrying out some analysis to ensure we understand the problem
Crime Detections
I am pleased to see that we have the highest crime detection rates in the Force by some distance. The current 34.6% is the highest it has ever been although it has to be said we are only two months into the crime year.
Customer Satisfaction
I am very pleased with our customer satisfaction results they are noticeably up on last year and recent results show that the additional support we are providing for victims of crime in supplying much more information about the progress of their case has gone down very well.
In all of these three areas we are delivering well. However, we are not complacent and a recent episode of antisocial behaviour by a group of people in Keynsham resulted in numerous phone calls to us by people worried about what was happening. We failed to attend within a reasonable period of time. I am very sorry that we didn’t get this right and we have had a good look at what went wrong in an endeavour to improve our response. We should have done better and I apologise to those who were involved and rightly expected more.
A better story appeared on the television over the weekend which reflected well on my staff. They had a television crew working with them for a day. They executed a warrant on someone who we believed was handling stolen goods. The house was raided and a number of laptops recovered. Enquiries revealed these had come from burglaries in our area. We are still working on the case but one really nice aspect emerged when we discovered a memory stick attached to one of the lap tops. It contained the only copy of a student’s dissertation written for her degree. She had been absolutely distraught when it had been stolen so you can imagine the delight on her face when it was returned.
It is a national drugs week next week and so you will see some Police activity to support this initiative.