South Kesteven policing plan (HTML)

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

Foreword

Working together to make the district of South Kesteven the safest place to live, work and visit.

South Kesteven is a geographically diverse and widespread district located within the beautiful countryside of the south west of Lincolnshire. The majority of the 143,000 population resides in the four historic market towns of Grantham, Stamford, the Deepings and Bourne. The remainder live in the network of villages and rural dwellings in between. 

The largest of the towns and main administrative centre is Grantham. This is the location of the area’s main police station. The station contains the custody suite facility for the area, housing up to 14 detainees at any one time. Investigative, safeguarding and roads policing resources are also based from Grantham. In addition to Grantham there are operational police stations in both Stamford and Bourne, with teams of response officers covering calls for service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Neighbourhood Policing Team for the district is based at all three of the stations within the area and are supported and managed by three Sergeants. The two wards evidenced to be most at risk each have an additional allocation of two police community support officers.

I am the Inspector responsible for Neighbourhood Policing in South Kesteven and have been in post for two years. I see the hard work undertaken day to day by our officers and I am proud to be associated with such a dedicated team of people.

In the coming year we will continue to work in partnership with other agencies to ensure we use a structured and an evidence based approach to achieve the vision of making Lincolnshire the safest place for people to live, work and visit.

Inspector Mark Hillson
Neighbourhood Policing – South 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.

Anti-social behaviour

Anti-social behaviour covers a range of different conduct which is usually judged by the impact on the victim or the community. Our activity for the next year will focus primarily on open spaces including parks and waterways and the use of off-road motorcycles and e-scooters. However, this will not preclude intervention in other areas by the team. We will endeavour to tackle that anti-social behaviour by working in partnership with the SKDC neighbourhood team, housing providers and other statutory partners. We will use a staged approach to ensure that conduct is addressed at an early stage to prevent problems manifesting. This will make full use of the range of legislative powers available to us and our partners. Working with SKDC we will support the policing of the recently renewed Public Space Protection Orders that are in place in Stamford and Grantham. We will maximise opportunities to educate young people to understand the impact of behaviour on would-be victims. We will do this through education sessions with primary and secondary school students as part of planned engagements as well as utilising bespoke sessions for specific identified issues.

Prolific offenders

A disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a small number of offenders. Through analysis we will seek to identify these offenders and prioritise our response to reducing the impact they have within our communities. As an area we will make considered use of both criminal legislation and ancillary orders to target the offending behaviour, restricting their ability to commit crime and seeking to address the root cause of their offending. We will be collaborating with partner agencies and work with the business community to make South Kesteven a more difficult place to commit crime. This will include supporting and working with the Chamber of Commerce to support Shop Watch schemes across the area. Research has shown that dealing robustly with lower-level offences also reduces the occurrence of higher level acquisitive crime such as burglary.

Problem solving

We will work closely with our problem-solving team to ensure that we use a structured approach to tackling issues using data and evidence to lead our decision-making and to ensure we are achieving what we set out to do. We will look wider than our local area to establish best practice, what has worked elsewhere, and we will share our positive results. We will work closely with local partners establishing who is best placed to lead on an issue regardless of who they work for.

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.

Drug supply and exploitation

We are aware of the concerns regarding the use and supply of drugs within our communities. We know this criminality can lead to acquisitive crime, disorder and ASB issues. In recent months we have carried out a specific long term operation in Grantham which has successfully disrupted and brought to justice local and county line dealers. Drug users are often vulnerable and can be subject to exploitation. Subsequently, much of the work carried out by the team focuses on reducing that risk. This work will continue across the area into the next year, making best use of police intelligence and information from the public to target our activity.

Safer streets and night time economy

As a team, we work closely with our licensing team, SKDC and licensees themselves. We are working together to improve safety in the night time economy and wider open spaces with our towns. This will include additional joint agency patrols at weekends, training for bar staff to extend the Ask for Angela initiative and also provide resources and training to prevent drink spiking. The Pubwatch scheme will receive an upgraded radio system and there will be additional signage in the town identifying safe routes.

Roads Policing

Our Roads Policing Team work in conjunction with local resources in targeting Fatal 5 offences. Officers are deployed on Operation Excess, attending locations that have seen the most harm caused in our county. Information obtained from our parishes feeds into that work. The Neighbourhood Team, with assistance from Roads Policing, will work to support volunteers from our Community Speed Watch programme, which remains an invaluable resource. Operation Stronghold are targeted days of action to deny criminals the use of the roads and Operation Snap allows the submission of dash cam footage from members of the public.

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.

Communication and engagement

We know that there are groups within our communities who are seldom heard and we will strive to ensure that we are accessible to all of our communities. We are populating our engagement calendar and evaluating where we can reach as many people as possible and be most visible. We will work to increase accessible communication formats and will continue to communicate through social media platforms and publish key messages.

School engagement

In addition to the Mini Police program and planned educational inputs, the Neighbourhood Team will engage with schools where local issues arise. Engagement with schools will also focus on building relationships, gathering information and informing pupils around the dangers and impacts of ASB and other criminality on victims, themselves and the local community as a whole.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG)

StreetSafe is a great site where people can report the times and locations when they have felt vulnerable or unsafe. This can be due to a number of factors including environmental issues such as lack of street lighting. 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’re worth reporting. We will use detailed analysis through our analysts to identify the best places to deploy our officers and, through visibility and engagement, will create a safe environment.

Working in partnership with

• Lincolnshire County Council
• South Kesteven District Council
• Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue
• Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner
• Safer Lincolnshire Partnership
• NHS Lincolnshire
• Probation Service
• Longhurst Group
• Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce
• East Midlands Ambulance Service
• NCHA
• The Children's Society
• CrimeStoppers