However, a less-than-satisfactory telephone encounter with Suffolk Constabulary earlier this week caused me to be looking at their website, and I saw that there was a meeting last night in Eye, the large village/small town just 3 miles away. Speaking were the Police & Crime Commissioner Tim Passmore, the Temporary Chief Constable Gareth Wilson and my local Inspector, Tristran Pepper. So it was I arrived, early as usual, in the Community Centre car park waiting to play my part in feeding back community views on policing.
As is often the case, I found some humour in the situation straight away. Four youths were, as I arrived, sitting on the playground equipment smoking. Now it might have been that they could only afford the one cigarette and that was why they were passing round between them, but I suspect there may have been a less legal reason for it. And while they certainly looked up (and stopped sharing) while first the Chief and then the Inspector walked into the building in uniform it didn't actually put an end to their fun. How ironic, I thought, if someone were to mention youths taking drugs in public areas in the meeting about to begin. I wasn't disappointed.
As the meeting began I looked around at my fellow participants. Around 20 members of the community and a handful of staff from the PCC's office I guess. A man videoing the meeting for later upload to the website and a lady serving the free teas and coffees. With biscuits. Our part of Suffolk is very rural and eyeing the public attendees I realised that all were 10 years or so older than me with the exception of a 40-something man in a tie sitting behind me who seemed quite organised, being in possession of some sort of PCC publicity material upon which he had made copious "black spider" notes. I tried, mentally, to predict the issues to be raised. Cynics in the Met always say that, whatever the crime situation, the public always complain about dog mess on the pavement. I discounted this, if for no other reason than that the area actually has very few pavements, and put my imaginary bets instead on speeding, drugs use and visibility of police.
The meeting began pretty much on time and for once the audio and visual equipment worked flawlessly, at least after the PCC had found the button on his radio mic. He started, inevitably running through the financial challenges facing the Constabulary, the changing demands it faced and reassuring us that he would not be "chucking other people's money at it". Of course, not Mr. Passmore - you are a Conservative - we all know that is Labour's method. There was a quick reinforcement of his view that he was right to refuse to amalgamate the Constabulary's Control Room with our neighbours in Norfolk - the one most contentious decision of his reign to date - although without offering any reason for his conviction. Perhaps it has been all been done before; certainly nobody seemed to want him to expand. He ended by explaining that much research had been conducted on domestic violence and acknowledged that "the system does need improvement" and then touched on innovation, referring to an initiative titled "Evidence-based policing". Which, I thought, didn't sound all that innovative - surely policing had been based on evidence for a very long time. Or at least ought to have been?
The Chief was next. He has a pleasant and relaxed style which I warmed to. He stressed the changing nature of demands, that "cyber-crime" and other new problems had largely filled the gaps in demand created by the fall in more traditional crime, hence the overall demand levels had changed, he said, very little. He accepted that staffing levels would continue to fall and suggested that this could only be met by reducing calls for service, which would enable him to do a better job but with fewer resources. He was keen to talk about serious and organised crime, the Eastern Area Specialist Operations Unit, Counter Terrorism unit, the ATHENA regional intelligence project, mobile working and body cameras. I couldn't help but think that, as interesting and exciting as all that might be it was possibly a little beyond the issues that this audience was keen to explore. The course of the discussion later confirmed this to me. Lastly, and what was much more relevant was his desire to "understand the demand on the public sector in the county" - with a view to reducing demand by identifying duplication and overlap.
The final presentation was Insp. Pepper, who ran us through the (improving) figures for victim satisfaction and reductions in anti-social behaviour and domestic burglary in the area. He was entirely reassuring and gave the clear impression that he was a man who cared about his role and succeeding in it.
So, on to questions from the floor. First up a well-spoken man in the 'pole-position' seat, by the aisle in the front row. He advanced his view that drugs were the root cause of all crime, and expressed his horror that he had recently heard there was heroin in the area. The PCC sympathised, said that he personally loathed drugs and that it was the top priority of the policing plans, adding somewhat curiously that we should "rest assured that everything is being done that can be done, but we can always do more I suppose". Eh? A few more comments from the floor drew the expected and ironic reference to drug-taking in public areas and then the microphone was passed to the man behind me with the notes. Who started eloquently but suddenly and without warning flew into a 'hang em and flog em' rant as to how all drug users were criminals and had to be treated as such, arrest them and prosecute them and it is problem solved. He used the phrase 'nail them' a number of times; I don't think he was actually advocating crucifixion but to be honest I don't think any of us was absolutely certain. It was a very interesting point in proceedings for me - how would this largely senior, probably pretty conservative audience react? I was a little surprised and quietly relieved that he received absolutely no support.
A few references to policing hunts followed, from which I learned only that it is a subject which polarises opinion - as if we didn't know that. And then on to speeding. The Chief was, as throughout, calm and measured in his responses, explaining that the mobile speed cameras were not a cash cow, were sited so as to have the maximum impact and that Community Speed Watch schemes were expanding and successful. A few eyebrows were raised when he said that on some rural roads it was difficult to enforce speed limits because it was dangerous to put officers there - due to the speed of passing traffic......... He quickly qualified this by saying that of course it could be done but that the officers' safety had to be paramount. We knew what he meant but it was just a slightly clumsy way of expressing it I suppose.
We went on with a discussion about 'eyes and ears' which enabled me to make my point about the difficulty of getting deployment decisions right; I was entirely happy that my feedback was well-received and will be taken into account. Those on the platform appeared to accept that new methods and processes were unlikely to be right first go and that adjustment would made where it was needed.
The last point was made again by the man with the notes. He started by apologising for his earlier rant, and in complaining about the lack of police visibility in the town of Stowmarket even made passing reference to Roy Jenkins and the Unit Beat scheme of the 1960s, before spoiling his apparently comprehensive knowledge and research by getting the year of the Brixton riots wrong and repeating an urban myth about the role played by local officers in it. Which upset me a little, but not as much as it did the pole-position drugs man, who stood up, turned round and forcefully accused notes man of monopolising the meeting and ruining it for everyone else, High drama.
Except it wasn't quite the end, as the microphone then got passed to an elderly man who had so far remained silent, and who proceeded to ask the PCC a question about youth engagement. Which was a little odd in that there had been scarcely a mention of this throughout the rest of the meeting. The PCC though clearly relished the question and gave us a 5 minute run-through of the 3 initiatives he was working on in this area. It was certainly a friendly question to ask him and actually made me wonder if it wouldn't have been better for the answer to have been delivered as a statement in the PCC's opening remarks.
That, then, is my factual report of the meeting. In my next blog I will try to unpick a few of the issues it highlighted to me.
I would like too put forward something about an old child disappearance case privately
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