South Kesteven policing plan

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

Download a PDF version of this plan.

Foreword

Neighbourhood policing for South Kesteven is challenging and rewarding in parallel; the district has varying needs, from more urban and densely populated areas such as Grantham or other larger towns like Stamford and Bourne, to smaller villages.

I am the Inspector responsible for Neighbourhood Policing in South Kesteven. I have been in neighbourhood policing for five years and have been in post locally for the last three years. I see the hard work undertaken day-to-day by our small team of officers and I am proud to be associated with such a dedicated group of people.

The majority of the 143,000 population resides in the four historic market towns of Grantham, Stamford, the Deepings and Bourne, so we base our officers strategically to best serve our communities out of Grantham, Bourne and Stamford police stations.

A large number of officers from all policing disciplines – CID, Response, Protecting Vulnerable People (PVP), Roads Policing Unit (RPU), and Neighbourhoods – are based out of the administrative centre of Grantham Police Station.

The station contains the custody suite facility for the area, housing up to fourteen detainees at any one time. In addition to Grantham there are operational police stations in both Stamford and Bourne, with teams of Response officers responding to calls for service twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The Neighbourhood Policing Team for the district is based at all three of these 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 (PCSOs).

In 2025 the CCTV Service, which is run by South Kesteven District Council (SKDC), will be moving to the Grantham Police Station. This will enhance the partnership working arrangements between Lincolnshire Police and SKDC and is part of a larger project to upgrade the CCTV network across South Kesteven.

In the coming year we will continue working in partnership with colleagues and other partner 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 (ASB) covers a range of issues which can impact victims directly or the wider community. Many victims of ASB are vulnerable, and we will maintain our focus on assisting those at most risk from this type of behaviour.

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.

Working in partnership with SKDC neighbourhood team, housing providers, and other statutory partners, we will use a staged approach to ensure that conduct by perpetrators is addressed at an early stage with a view to prevent problems manifesting further. Our approach will make full use of the range of legislative powers available to us and our partners.

Working with SKDC we will continue to support the policing of the Public Space Protection Orders that are in place in South Kesteven.

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.

Drug users are often vulnerable and can be subject of exploitation. Subsequently, much of the work carried out by the team focuses on reducing that risk. We will continue to seek out intelligence, especially from members of the community, to enable a proactive response to those wishing to bring harm to our neighbourhoods. As a team we will coordinate policing efforts within the area into the next year utilising force and cross border resources to assist is our work.

Safer streets and night time economy

The Safer Streets initiative in 2024/2025, within Grantham town centre, saw many successfully completed projects including upgraded radios for both licenced and retail premises and improved safety signage. We will continue with our multi-agency working in the next year looking to expand initiatives to other areas. As a team, we will continue to work closely with the police licensing team, SKDC, SIA and licensees themselves.

Joint educational talks to college students and staff will hopefully give girls and women more information and confidence in how to report crime. Premise licence holders are also being offered general training to help people stay safe.

Roads Policing

Our Roads Policing Team work in conjunction with local resources in targeting #Fatal5 offences.

The #Fatal5 are:

• careless driving
• drink- and drug-driving
• not wearing a seatbelt
• excessive speed
• distraction (incl mobile phones)

Officers are deployed on Operation Excess, attending locations that have seen the most harm caused in our county. The Neighbourhood Team, with assistance from Roads Policing, will work to support volunteers from our Community Speed Watch programme, which has increased its footprint in the last year and remains an invaluable resource. More support for this area is planned.

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)

VAWG covers multiple crimes with the common theme being they disproportionately affect women and girls. We will work with other policing teams to ensure such crimes are robustly dealt with and work with partners to ensure such behaviours are shown not be acceptable. y

We will work with external partners including CrimeStoppers to promote and participate in local and  national campaigns to ensure that those who may be victim of criminality from all communities and backgrounds have the confidence to speak out and report matters to the Police. We want women and girls to feel safe across the district day and night.

We continue to promote the use of the StreetSafe site, where people can report the times and locations when they have felt vulnerable or unsafe due to factors like inadequate street lighting. Through visibility and early engagement, we will create a safe environment for women and girls to visit, work or reside in South Kesteven.

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
• Lincolnshire Environmental Crime Partnership
• Lincolnshire Recovery Partnership