Engagement and Community
We put a number of questions to the Superintendent about funding, jobs and access to services. Firstly we asked about where residents could expect to see the community engagement sessions being held.
The Superintendent said, “Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you regarding the new launch today. In essence, there’s going to be a renewed focus on prevention and intervention across the Force area where we’ve rebranded our neighbourhood policing teams as ‘neighbourhood policing prevention teams.
“Specifically in relation to the question you asked about community engagement and accessibility, in relation to community meetings, there’s an expectation in each team to to hold a quarterly one-stop community engagement event that will be in the form of an in-person community meeting and there will also be online opportunities to join those meetings so opportunities to digitally engage with those events as well.
“There’s also a monthly expectation that each team will hold a community surgery in-person which will include a ‘Meet the Street’ event within that team area or a street briefing. So the meet the street event is where the neighbourhood policing prevention team will attend any given street where we perceive there are ongoing issues or policing demand issues, we will then ensure that we knock every single door within that street, introduce ourselves, explain what the team sets out to achieve, properly try to get an understanding of what that community perceive are the issues facing them within that given street or community.
“The street briefings will also be held on a monthly basis. Every single month each team will hold a street briefing with key local individuals and they could include our local councillors, other community leaders who will meet with our staff within a community on the street for those leaders to tell our staff what the issues are.
“We will then ensure that every team posts their priorities based on that community feedback onto their local social media channels and indeed on our Force website. Each month, you will see the priorities for that team uploaded and the month that follows we will update our communities on how we’ve progressed against those priorities, how we’ve delivered against them. But also then set out what the priorities are for the forth-coming month.”
More Jobs and more Police
We asked the Superintendent about the Government cuts to spending on policing and whether there would be more police officers on the streets as well as jobs created for people looking to join the Force.
The Superintendent said, “There’s two elements to it. The first being that in April of this year, we instigated a formal internal review of our neighbourhood policing teams to ensure that we’re getting the most out of them for our communities.
“What we identified as part of that review is that we were ordinarily using our neighbourhood teams to support the response to incidents and calls that were coming in to our control room or digitally via social media etc.
“What we weren’t doing overtly was giving our neighbourhood teams protected time to problem solve, engage with communities and increase their visibility. So as part of this renewed focus, what we are now setting out is a new abstraction policy in the Force where we will ensure that neighbourhood teams will have protected time away from responding to calls because we have the resources to do that within the response teams or roads policing teams for example.
“Our neighbourhood teams will have this protected time so they can increase their visibility in areas that most need it, as well as others. We will monitor that visibility through electronic heat maps that we now have access to in force where we can understand and ensure that all areas are having equal levels of visibility within the Force.
“We’re going to achieve it through that protected time for our neighbourhood teams away from response demand and towards visibility engagement and problem solving.
“Secondly, we’ve just recently applied with the Home Office for a specific grant to tackle anti-social behaviour in the Force through dedicated patrols.
“I can tell you today that we’ve been successful in receiving a one-million pound grant from the Home Office which is now going to support 11,000 hours of dedicated patrols to ten areas across our Force area. And those ten areas have been identified through our demand analysis where we can see those areas being the ten areas which experience the most ant-social behaviour related incidents within the Dyfed-Powys Police area.
“Within Carmarthenshire there are four areas within the county which will now receive those dedicated patrols and I want to point out that this time that those patrols will not detract us from the launch that we’re pushing out today around wider visibility.
“Those dedicated patrols will be undertaken by our staff through over-time or days off. So we will pay them to work their days off with that million-pound grant or achieve it through over-time so we’re not detracting our staff from the wider visibility approach that we want to take across the Force.”
The Youth and Anti-Social Behaviour
We asked the Superintendent what the Force would be doing to fully engage with younger people and adolescents in community centres, schools and colleges to ensure that younger people are being educated on the impact of crime on their own community.
The Superintendent said; “An integral part of this new approach to prevention and intervention is absolutely on young people. We recognise if we don’t give the afforded time that young people deserve, that is absolutely going to contribute to an increase in anti-social behaviour and other societal issues that communities will experience across the Dyfed-Powys Police area.
“I can tell you today that our new rebranded neighbourhood teams, as part of their protected time, will have an increased focus on young people. We have a scheme in force called ‘In-Tact.’ The In-Tact Programme is a dedicated programme which wholly focuses on intervention and prevention towards young people and those young people up to the ages of 24.
“The In-Tact programme enables our neighbourhood teams to refer young people that we perceive are at risk of entering the Criminal Justice System and that may be because of a number of reasons.
“We also monitor school attendance data within the Force with our partners in the local authority so can understand if there are young people in our Force (area) who aren’t ordinarily attending school for a number of reasons. those individuals will be referred into our In-Tact programme.
“It offers a wide variety of intervention schemes such as boxing classes, entry into youth clubs where our staff will host those events and be an integral part of them. On every night of the week now across Dyfed-Powys, we also hold football sessions as part of our Kicks Initiative.
“We’ve teamed up with a number of football clubs in our region who now support us in delivering a dedicated football session in every part of the Force or certainly on every evening of the week at this moment in time.
“That is to enable the young people within the organisation to have somewhere to go, something to engage in in order to deter them away from engaging in anti-social behaviour.
“Furthermore, you may also be aware that in the past couple of weeks we have announced as a Force that due to funding secured from our Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn, we are continuing to invest in our schools programme across the Force.
“It’s a Dyfed-Powys Police school service which has fourteen police officers from across the Force wholly dedicated to the service. They are protected again to deliver a dedicated curriculum to schools across the Force area which focuses on our three priority areas and that is drug misuse, sexual offences and domestic abuse.
“That is the main focus of that curriculum but of course what we will also do is have a blended approach whereby if there is a school or community in the area that experiences an issue outside of those three priority areas, we are able to flex that curriculum to deliver those sessions and lessons to schools and to young people based on those local challenges.
“I can tell you today that for the first time ever in our history as a Force we will now be expanding that programme to Higher Education establishments within Dyfed-Powys Police, We will now deliver that specific programme to all colleges and universities in the Dyfed-Powys Police area.
“We will ensure that that programme is specifically focused on the challenges that those establishments may experience such as the spiking of alcohol offences. We recognise that there is a need to wholly focus on young people as part of our renewed focus towards preventing crime, preventing victims and reducing police demand.”
We asked the Superintendent if he envisaged the strategy being a wider success and how much time he intends to dedicate toward overseeing and managing all of the dynamics and elements of the new strategy.
The Superintendent said: “The role I have been posted into in the organisation is a brand new role for Dyfed-Powys Police. Prior to May this year, we’ve never had a dedicated Superintendent role focused on prevention.
“Previously, I would have held portfolios in addition to a role I was undertaking as part of a command function, where-as now, as of this summer and as part of this renewed focus, the role I am in is wholly dedicated to this initiative.
“I am not being detracted to other policing areas at this time. My whole focus is on prevention, the new neighbourhood prevention teams which are supported by a central prevention hub that we have in the HQ. We have a cohort of staff based at our Headquarters supporting the delivery of our neighbourhood prevention teams across the Force area.
“I can say is that my time is wholly going to be spent on this programme moving forward. In relation to an assessment as to how well it’s going, I can tell you that today, since we’ve instigated what we call ‘Operation Invydene’ which is the one-million pound grant from the Home Office for 11,000 hours of protected increased patrols to deter anti-social behaviour in those ten hot-spot areas.
“It’s been up and running now for around six weeks and already in that time we’ve experienced a 17.5% reduction in anti-social behaviour in those ten hot-spot areas across Dyfed-Powys Police.
“In relation to further accountability and a measure of our performance, we have a new monthly internal performance meeting. That’s a neighbourhood prevention strategic meeting that sits every single month and is chaired by our head of uniform policing, our Chief Superintendent, who holds myself and my four Superintendent colleagues within each county to account on the delivery of this programme. That happens on the third week of every month and where we see gaps in our performance we will of course work to address it.
“In addition to this, His Majesty’s Inspectorate Constabulary (HMIC) which is an independent body, come into the organisation annually to look how we are performing. We know that next summer, neighbourhood policing and this area of work is going to be a specific focus for the HMIC who will then publish an independent, external report and assessment. That assessment will take place next summer to determine an independent analysis of our performance in this area.”
HMP, CJS and Early Releases
We pressed the Superintendent on questions about the early release of prisoners from HMPs across the country and whether there will be some assurances that these prisoners being released early will be monitored as they re-enter the communities across Wales and the United Kingdom, as well as the Criminal Justice System and whether devolution would be in the Force’s best interest.
The Superintendent referred those questions to his colleagues within other departments. stating that he would be happy to refer the questions but did not have the data readily available to answer them properly.
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