Cutting Crime:
I will continue to focus on cutting crime further. Whilst we have seen crime continue to fall, there is much more to do.
- Safer Town Centres - Expanding dedicated Town Centre Teams with multi-agency plans supporting our town centres to thrive. Our town and city centres are the hearts of our communities, I will ensure more police resources are based at the heart of our towns, visible and accessible, targeting the prolific offenders of shoplifting and antisocial behaviour.
- Safer Homes - Investing in specialist resources to target offenders of domestic abuse, sexual violence and exploitation. There continues to be too many incidents of domestic abuse, sexual violence and exploitation, including of children in communities across the three counties. I will continue to focus additional specialist resources to target the offenders of these terrible crimes to bring them to justice, I am will also provide further resources for perpetrator programmes to ensure we help break the cycle of abuse.
- Safer Businesses - Working with businesses to prevent crime and ensure they get a robust response when it does happen.
- Safer Countryside - Enhancing rural teams with more police officers working with rural communities & businesses to tackle crime. I hear too often from too many rural communities that they do not see police in their community regularly or understand what their police are doing to tackle local crime. I will continue to invest resources and focus scrutiny to ensure this changes.
- Targeting Illegal Drugs - Leading the fight against drugs and the harm it causes in our society. I will ensure a whole system approach including targeting those proliferating drugs in our community and ensuring there is support to those with addiction.
- Tackling Organised Crime - Investing in more resources and technology to tackle Organised Crime, targeting those benefiting from criminality.
- Prompt Investigations - Ensuring West Mercia Police has the resources and systems in place to respond promptly to reports of crime and conduct thorough investigations in a timely manner – ensuring more offenders are brought to justice.
Maintaining the confidence of the communities across West Mercia in policing is vital to protecting our country’s ‘policing by consent’ model. I will agree with the Chief Constable a number of service standards, which I will publish, and regularly publish performance against those standards.
Crime will continue to fall in West Mercia, ensuring our community is safe, and feels safe.