Police officers grilled on residents’ knife crime concerns

Richard Evans, Local Democracy Reporter

A senior officer has told a crime panel that police patrol plans consider a wider range of offences and challenges facing an area, following knife crime concerns.

The comments came during a North Wales Police and Crime Panel meeting today (Monday) at Conwy County Council’s Coed Pella HQ in Colwyn Bay.

At the meeting, Conservative Llandudno councillor Harry Saville questioned North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Andy Dunbobbin.

Cllr Saville’s question related to comments made by a senior police officer at a recent public meeting in the town about anti-social behaviour.

Cllr Saville said residents were “concerned”, alleging that a police officer attending the meeting had said a violent incident involving a knife would not count towards statistics used to inform police patrols dealing with anti-social behaviour.

Public meeting 

Cllr Saville said: “There was a public meeting in Llandudno earlier this summer around anti-social behaviour, and there was a comment made by a member of North Wales Police that an incident, a violent incident involving a knife, would not count towards statistics used to inform police patrols in dealing with anti-social behaviour, as an incident involving a knife is not anti-social behaviour.

“Now, I think members of the public were, unsurprisingly, concerned by that. I was certainly very concerned by that as well.

“Now, I can well imagine that perhaps you will have, or North Wales Police will have, different data metrics, and perhaps low-level anti-social behaviour will fall into a different category to knife crime.

“But surely there has to be some level of overlap when looking at where you target anti-social behaviour hotspots when you look at the data that the force receives.”

He added: “So my supplementary question to the Police and Crime Commissioner is whether he is able to go away from this meeting, have a discussion, perhaps with the Chief Constable or other senior officers, to look at whether the force makes the best use of data possible when it is looking at coordinating patrols to address anti-social behaviour issues.”

Serious crimes

North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Andy Dunbobbin said knife crime was more serious than an anti-social behaviour incident and that crime was recorded on the force’s systems.

“For me, I think knife crime in its own right will be far more serious than just an anti-social behaviour type of incident,” he said.

“But what I do know is that when we have our weekly updates of different types of crime that get received and recorded on the force’s RMS system, there is a section there of violent crime and violent crime without injury as well.”

Patrol plans

Assistant Chief Constable Gareth Evans said: “The simple answer to the question is we don’t patrol just based on the specific crime type. So whoever answered the question technically would have been accurate in that knife crime wouldn’t feature in the anti-social behaviour analysis.

“However, of course, we don’t just direct our patrols based on… we don’t sort of say one day we’re going to look at knife crime and one day we’re going to look at ASB.

“So the patrol plans that officers are briefed with on a daily basis form an oversight of all offences that we’ve had in the last 24 hours, week, whatever the challenges are we are facing at the time.

“So if it’s a burglary problem, that’ll coincide with the fact that we are also experiencing anti-social behaviour elsewhere.

“So please be assured if we’re aware of the issue with anti-social behaviour in the Llandudno area, I’m hoping that our neighbourhood policing officers have been well involved with stakeholders locally.

“We’ve had an operation running through the summer targeting a particular cohort of young people, which is starting to bear fruit. We are also looking at some analysis around whether staycations are having an impact.

“I think some of the anecdotal feedback we are having from our neighbourhood policing teams is they are coming across young people involved in anti-social behaviour that they haven’t met before and don’t know. So, we’re also going to have a look at whether that analysis shows that we need to target a little bit more on the understanding of visitors to the area as well.”

He added: “But obviously, if there is a report of knife crime, if there is a report of burglary, if there is a report of robbery, all of those will also feature in our daily patrol plans and will be in mind of officers when they are tasked and when they go out on a daily basis.”

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