Where are the boys in blue?

Residents and businesses in Chilton have recently had more than their fair share of problems with what many people call anti-social behaviour, but what I would call theft, hooliganism, drunkenness, criminal damage and traffic offences.

If you are naïve like me you believe that if in a state of desperation you need to call the police, perhaps because it is obvious that a crime is being committed close to your home, then a reassuring flashing blue light would rapidly appear and comfort and help would be at hand even if the miscreants had already fled.

I learnt at Chilton Parish Council meeting last night that this is not necessarily the case. What happens is you find you have telephoned a police call centre in Martlesham (or maybe in Essex if Martlesham is out). The call centre will almost certainly not pass you on directly to an officer closer to home. Instead they will give you an ‘incident number’ and then ask you to do their job for them by peering out of the window to ascertain whether you can see anything that might constitute evidence (such as a number plate for example); and that’s it! That’s it even if it’s the fourteenth time that you’ve called and problems have been keeping you awake at night making you a nervous wreck for over six months.

Apparently the call centre folk in Martlesham do contact the local police by radio to report your call, but this doesn’t seem to result in the actual appearance of a policeman either at the scene of the incident, or later at a community meeting where the problems are due to be discussed. Despite a request from the Chairman of the Parish Council, and others, for a police officer to attend the Chilton meeting, the only police presence took the form of a very pleasant and competent young woman called Jackie, a Police Community Support Officer. Jackie knew very little about anything however, but this was not her fault since her boots were so new that the labels hadn’t yet been removed.

We are told on the Home Office Website that

‘Police Community Support Officers particularly work to reassure the public and to tackle the social menace of anti-social behaviour.’

It is quite clear to me that what PCSO’s actually do is attempt to distract the public from failures of policing due to lack of resources and political will. They are also very useful people to be able to send along to Parish Council Meetings so that a real police officer doesn’t have to eyeball the people in the community that they are letting down.

If official crime figures are down, (which is debateable), then this is due to the fact that, disheartened by this sort of failure, people are failing to report crime since it is a pointless exercise. Diligent readers of this blog will remember that this is not the first time I have banged on about this issue and probably won’t be the last.