North Kesteven policing plan (HTML)

This is a plain text, HTML version of the North Kesteven policing plan. You can download the PDF version of the plan at the bottom of this page.

Foreword

North Kesteven is characterised by picturesque countryside, charming villages and historic market towns.

The district offers a mix of agricultural activities, with fields stretching across the countryside, as well as some light industry and commerce, particularly in towns like Sleaford and North Hykeham. The Royal Air Force has a significant operational presence in the district with RAF College Cranwell in the south and RAF Waddington in the north, home to The Red Arrows who are a regular feature in the skies of Lincolnshire.

Life here tends to be tranquil and slower-paced compared to neighbouring districts in the county.

North Kesteven is one of the safest places to live in terms of lowest recorded crimes per head of population. Of the seven Lincolnshire districts, it has the lowest crime rate overall.

The low crime rates go hand in hand with the area being in the top 15% of the least deprived local authority areas in England, and the least deprived district in Lincolnshire.

Teams of officers cover calls for service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Our Neighbourhood Policing Officers are split between North Hykeham and Sleaford police stations with five community beat officers and two PCSOs led by a neighbourhood policing inspector and two sergeants.

Our work relies upon the close support of several other teams including investigators responsible for volume crime, serious crime and crimes against children and vulnerable people as well as dedicated intelligence officers.

We also draw on support from countywide teams such as armed response officers, dog handlers, traffic officers and economic crime investigators. The neighbourhood policing team has strong links with all sorts of organisations and other agencies, forming local partnerships. We work daily with these partners to deal effectively with crime and disorder issues. It’s our job to identify the issues that are affecting the quality of life of those that live and work here, and to solve these issues both with early effective impact, and in some cases, working to resolve longer-term problems.

Whilst North Kesteven is a very safe place to live and visit, there are ongoing issues, and it is our job to identify quickly the issues representing the most significant harm and get to work on them. Each day, our focus will always be simply to keep people safe.

Sometimes, that will mean signposting callers to other forms of support for low-level nuisance, but by doing that, we can ensure our teams are tackling the detrimental issues based on an informed assessment of what poses the greatest threat, risk or harm.

There will also be a focus on being accessible to the public both in person and digitally. I want to make sure we work hard to capture the views, worries and concerns of as broad a cross section of our communities as possible - and that means giving a voice to demographic groups whose opinions we haven’t historically been good at capturing.

Inspector Rachel Blackwell
Neighbourhood Policing – North Kesteven

Our vision

Working together to make the county the safest place to live, work and visit.

Our strategy

In line with the force priorities there are three areas that underpin our neighbourhood policing plan 2024.

Stop crime and ASB

We will do our utmost to prevent harm before it happens and lessen the impact when it does.

Protect people from harm

We will work with the community to deliver a series of initiatives to make them feel safe and protect them from harm.

Help those in need

We will work with our partners to identify the most vulnerable in our community, offering a high standard of care. Ensuring we have the right resources in the right place at the right time.

How we will deliver this

We will engage

We will be in the right place at the right time, in the heart of our communities.

We will listen

We will listen to the views of all our communities, setting community priorities across the district in consultation with you dealing with the things that really matter in your area.

We will inform

We will communicate using face-to-face engagements and across a number of online platforms.

We will work together

We will seek out opportunities to work with our partners and offer community participation policing initiatives.

Stop crime and ASB

We will do our utmost to prevent harm before it happens and lessen the impact when it does.

Prolific offenders

North Kesteven has a small number of prolific offenders who are responsible for a high percentage of shop theft, street disorder and nuisance where they live. This has a huge impact on local businesses, communities and residents. The root causes of this offending can often be found in either drug or alcohol dependency, mental health or other factors affecting their social responsibility. The solution in these cases relies upon building a support plan that brings in our partners in Mental Health, Adult Social Care, Housing, Local Council and Probation. Where appropriate, the Neighbourhood Policing Team will seek Criminal Behaviour Orders for prolific offenders which grants power to police to take more positive and robust action.

Drug supply

We know that residents are worried about the presence of drugs in their communities and the associated crime that it brings. The team at Sleaford are relentless in their pursuit of drug dealers, and have carried out a high number of drug warrants, and significant arrests to disrupt the availability of class A drugs in our area. Our work will continue to build intelligence about who is dealing drugs and where, and to take early, effective action to shut that down, target the offenders and support users into services that might help reduce their dependency. We will target those who seek to exploit the most vulnerable in our communities including by taking early action to combat county lines operations and those involved in the supply of drugs or illegal vapes in our area. We will work with housing partners and other agencies to make North Kesteven a hostile environment for drug dealers. Wherever we can, we will share our activity with communities so they are reassured that we do take action and are encouraged to report concerns to the police. We will offer a range of methods to contact us including working with Crimestoppers to ensure anonymous reporting is available to all.

School engagement

We will continue to work with our local schools through initiatives such as Mini Police to educate children about safety and being good citizens. Through a range of packages delivered to children all the way from early years to secondary leavers, we will ensure we work hard to prioritise online safety to raise awareness of the risks that exist in the online space. Internet-enabled romance and sextortion crime are among the current priorities in North Kesteven. Close ties and frequent contact with local secondary schools allows us to have real-time awareness of the young people at risk of harm or exploitation, and also allows us to identify those responsible for nuisance or problematic behaviour either in school or in the community.

Anti-social behaviour

We will work to prioritise anti-social behaviour which has a significant impact on the quality of life of others. We have to manage the expectations of some callers who want us to resolve low-level nuisance or aggravation, often borne out of an intolerance of others. Similarly, lots of matters that might previously have been dealt with by police, are now referred to other partners who are better equipped to tackle issues such as noise complaints, inconsiderate parking, abandoned vehicles or noxious odours. Our time should be spent where the behaviour has a clear and significant risk of threat, risk or harm, particularly where the caller is a repeat or vulnerable caller. Seasonal nuisance and disorder has been a problem at a number of open spaces and beauty spots across North Kesteven, and each year we aim to target hotspots with a range of measures to engage with young people. Our aim is not to shutdown time with friends. The goal will be to prevent gatherings tipping over into mindless damage and nuisance to other people enjoying the same open spaces. We will do this through positive and encouraging messages through schools, directed patrols, planned engagements and social media about responsible choices and being good citizens. Enforcement will come where necessary, but only where other engagement and restorative sanctions do not fit.

Protect from harm

We will work with the community to deliver a series of initiatives to make them feel safe and protect them from harm.

County lines

In addition to our general work to address drug supply across the area, we will focus specifically on county lines. We recognise that county lines have had a presence in our communities, and Sleaford has been affected.

Our team has been hugely effective at shutting down county lines outfits when they set up in the town, with a high number of arrests, “cuckooed” addresses closed down to would-be dealers, and the vulnerable people living in them given wraparound support packages to ward off further exploitation.

Our successes rely heavily on information that comes from our community. We will help communities be vigilant against the risks of county lines and help become part of the solution. We will continue to provide open lines of communication to tell us what is happening, when and where. Much of our enforcement and safeguarding is as a result of just a simple report from a worried neighbour, concerned teacher or parent anxious about their child making risky or harmful choices.

We will use every available avenue of information and intelligence to help us target exploiters who seek to recruit and traffick our teenagers and young adults.

Over the past year we have undertaken intensive safeguarding work with partners to support a number of teenagers from the Sleaford area who have been drawn into the county lines lifestyle.

We will work hard to identify those children who live and go to school in our area who are vulnerable to exploitation, with the aim to keep them safe. We need to also raise awareness generally with young people, parents and caregivers, and will work with the local authority and other partners to make sure that we maximise education and safety.

Fatal 5 driving offences

Throughout the next year we will work closely with our Roads Policing Unit and other departments in a unified effort to tackle the top five factors that contribute to the high number of fatal and serious collisions that we see on Lincolnshire’s roads each year.

The #Fatal5 are:

• careless driving
• drink/drug driving
• not wearing a seatbelt
• excessive speed
• distraction (including Mobile phones)

Anti-social use of vehicles

One of the most requested policing priorities is to tackle anti-social or dangerous driving in built-up areas or open spaces, which are attractive to drivers acting recklessly or with loud modifications.

We will work with those communities most affected by these issues to provide speed checks and conduct targeted patrols of hotspots where there is a clear risk of harm. We will assist in the establishment of community speedwatch schemes in conjunction with the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership (LRSP) and we will work to carry out surveys where there is a perception of speeding to better understand where there are problems.

Hotspot locations

As a smaller team, our work, as always, will be to keep people safe, and what that means is knowing exactly what is going on in our communities, and identifying at the earliest chance any issue that presents a significant risk of harm or emerging threat.

What is clear is that there has not been an increase in crime or disorder as a result of the PCSO loss. It will mean that we focus our resources on issues that compromise the safety of individuals, residents, businesses or communities - as they arise. When we see a pattern of emerging crime or anti-social behaviour in an area it will be tackled by way of hotspot policing or a plan to take early effective impact.

If there is a worry or perception about crime, we will do our best to address concerns by providing regular activity and information on priorities and things that matter most to local residents, businesses and visitors. Sometimes, it will be important to provide messages of reassurance about issues causing worry, when in many instances fear of crime is greater than the actual issue. Timely information and updates will help reduce or take away that worry.

Help those in need

We will work with our partners to identify the most vulnerable in our community, offering a high standard of care. Ensuring we have the right resources in the right place at the right time.

Public engagements

We will make sure our engagements, resources and activity is focused on the areas of harm.

The Neighbourhood Policing Remodel removed the duplication of attendance at so many town and parish council meetings, as it was felt that police time is better spent tackling the high harm issues on the area, and keeping people safe.

In many instances, our attendance to provide crime and local updates was just to present information that is already widely available online.

Representatives from each local council will be invited to the bi-annual online event to stay informed, ask questions, and relay enduring worries on behalf of the communities they serve.

The local team will seek to hold regular public engagements throughout the district in areas of high footfall so they can gain views of what is important to the wider community. We will utilise these opportunities to provide crime prevention advice, signposting to other agencies who are identified to best support around problems raised and we will use the public’s view to set and manage policing initiatives and priorities throughout the year.

We will work hard to reach out to sections of our community that historically we haven’t found easy to access, and feed back to the community to show that we have listened, and take seriously their concerns. This will ensure that we continue to build on the trust we have established with the public in North Kesteven, and give confidence that we are working towards what matters the most to them.

Vulnerable repeat callers

We will work to engage partner agencies to support those who are repeat callers to police, repeat victims of crime or otherwise vulnerable. This will include those who are at risk of exploitation, scams or fraud and those whose mental health crises regularly requires police intervention. We will seek the full range of support available from other agencies and will only use the criminal justice system when all other avenues of support have been exhausted.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) 

The term ‘Violence Against Women and Girls’ (VAWG) covers a range of crimes, with the common theme that they disproportionately affect women and girls. The most recent statistics show that one in five women are victims of sexual assault (or attempted assault) in their lifetime.

In July 2021, the government launched its Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy. Evidence presented in the strategy suggests that some forms of violence against women and girls are so commonplace that many women and girls don’t even think they are worth reporting. This is the case for experiences like being grabbed, touched and/or threatened by strangers.

Through detailed data analysis we understand where our officers are best deployed to prevent offences and support those affected by such behaviour. Through visibility and early engagement, we will create a safe environment for women and girls to visit, work or reside in North Kesteven.

Working in partnership with

• Lincolnshire County Council
• North Kesteven District Council
• Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue
• Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner
• Safer Lincolnshire Partnership
• NHS Lincolnshire
• Probation Service
• Lincolnshire Resilience Forum
• Longhurst Group
• East Midlands Ambulance Service
• Home Office
• ACIS Group