Team changes, an award and a busy couple of weeks

Hello again,

First of all, some good news for us, we have a new member joining the St Marys Safer neighbourhood Team on 6 July. PC Jeanette Denton is joining us from Shirley. She replaces PC Simon Bradshaw who left for the tactical cycle team last month. The bad news is that a few weeks after that I will be losing PC Steve McKenzie who will be joining the Town Centre Unit. Steve has been with me for about 3 years and has done a lot of good work in St Marys and will be missed, however good luck to him in the future. Jeanette will hit the streets running. Her specific areas of responsibility will include St Mary St, where we have just had the complaints of speeding, and rough sleepers getting into the rear of Corals at night and also Holyrood Estate where we still have some drugs issues. The other good news is that the whole team, and also our sector colleagues for Newtown, has been awarded Commanders Congratulations for - and I quote from the certificate - 'Good teamwork and community engagement over a prolonged period which has led to significant improvements in community safety, crime reduction and public trust and confidence'. It's nice to feel appreciated and fully deserved to the PCs and PCSOs that work really hard out in the patch.

I had a meeting with Charlotte Brown, head teacher at St Marys School and the caretaker, Mike Shergold. The school grounds are private property and actually belong to the Diocese of Winchester, but due to lack of green areas in St Marys, the school leave the grounds open evenings and weekends so the community, particularly children have somewhere to play. Unfortunately, this is being abused by dog walkers who allow their dogs to foul in the grounds. This is very unpleasant for the school and mike has to spend hours checking the playing field each morning and clearing up the mess. There is actually an offence of 'causing a nuisance on educational premises' which this clearly is and we have identified one culprit and will be dealing with that. We will be robustly dealing with incidents in the future. There are also people starting fires in the copse area, and again we will deal with that.

Last weekend was my nights weekend for the Night Time Economy, and what a busy weekend it was. We had over 10 prisoners each night and almost all the officers I had working for me had to stay on for overtime to finish dealing with their prisoners and paperwork. Thank goodness it only comes around every six weeks for me. Unfortunately, it takes me away from my community work for a week when I include the rest days before and after, so there was a lot of catching up to do this week - nearly there though.

Lunchtime today I attended the quarterly 'Safety in the Parks' meeting. This is another multi-agency meeting and the name is self explanatory. Fortunately there is reduced crime in the parks at the moment, but we discuss things like lighting, access and current trends. There has been significant work done in the parks over the last few years, including doubling the lighting in the main thoroughfares through Hoglands and extra lighting in the walkway in Watts Park behind the Cenotaph.

The team have been busy again this week. PCSO Kelly Drodge took our stands down to Albion Towers on Thursday morning for a few hours where Housing try to hold a roadshow each week and this week was our turn to help. In the evening Housing held a consultation event in Kingsland Estate with residents to identify their priorities for some funding that is available for the estate, so PCSO David Wright went along. This afternoon PC Phil Warwick is doing a joint visit with the housing officer for Northam Estate to a flat to advise the tenant that the behaviour breaches the tenancy agreement and the sort of action that the Council and Police will take if it continues. That’s a lot of work with Housing!

Well I think that’s about it for this week, thanks for those who have been trying to leave comments - they get attached to the blog that you click comment on, and may appear 'down the sheet' a bit. Have a good weekend

Cheers

Dick