Rural crime has been estimated to cost the economy more than £800 million annually, with people being markedly less satisfied with policing in rural areas than across the country as a whole.
With a large number of people in Warwickshire living in smaller towns and villages where farming and the countryside are focal points for the community, Philip Seccombe wants to ensure that rural crime, such as burglary, agricultural theft, fly-tipping, rustling and trespass is taken as seriously as crime in urban areas.
To help deliver safer rural communities across Warwickshire, Philip Seccombe has launched a charter to tackle rural crime:
- Ensure efforts to tackle rural crime, including high value thefts of farming equipment, receive higher policing priority, with more effort put into identifying strategic solutions to reduce these crimes.
- Make sure people from rural communities represented on Community Safety Partnerships and for police plans to be ‘rural proofed’.
- Tackle rural crime by protecting neighbourhood police numbers meaning quicker emergency response times and more visible policing on the county’s streets.
- Improve efficiency in policing so that the police can spend less time behind desks and more time across Warwickshire’s rural communities.
Tackling rural crime nationally
Protecting local policing. Conservative PCCs have been more successful in protecting local policing than Labour and Independent PCCs. Labour and Independent areas have cut neighbourhood policing by an average of 17 and 29 per cent respectively from March 2012 to March 2015. In Conservative areas neighbourhood police numbers have fallen by only 2 per cent.
Putting police officers back on the front line. Conservative PCCs have been more successful in putting more police officers back on the frontline. The average increase in the proportion of police officers in frontline roles between March 2012 to March 2015 in Independent areas was just 0.8%.
Working to set up the Rural Crime Network. Conservative PCCs have been essential in setting up the network, which two thirds of PCCs are now members of, to share best practice and tackle rural crime.