I recently joined local PCSOs on a walkabout in Hampden Park, and it was heartening to meet several residents who told me how pleased they were to see officers ‘on the beat’.
Community policing is a local, proactive, and collaborative approach which focuses on preventing crime rather than just simply reacting to it.
Police numbers have been stretched to breaking point after years of cuts by the previous Conservative Government. In too many neighbourhoods, the familiar “bobby on the beat” has become a distant memory. This is often because Safer Neighbourhood Team officers are regularly redeployed to emergency response teams to plug gaps.
I want to see more officers on the beat, not stuck behind desks or just on a hamster wheel of emergency responses. I’m also calling for more investment in PCSOs, who often act as the eyes and ears on the street, but who too often lack the recognition or resources they deserve. Over the last decade, PCSO numbers have been cut by 4,500.
I’ve recently written to the Chief Constable of Sussex Police, Jo Shiner, urging her to move more operations from their Hammonds Drive base on an industrial estate to their Town Centre Hub on Grove Road, whose building now has extra capacity for potential additional police personnel due to the departure of DWP operations from the building. This would bolster their town centre policing presence, a current hotspot.
As someone who has spent years supporting young people out of crime in my career before becoming our town’s MP, I’ve seen the impact that the loss of youth centres has had on youth offending. These spaces help young people build the pro-social values — teamwork, communication, empathy — that steer them away from the margins and towards positive futures. We need East Sussex County Council to urgently invest in this having made cuts over many years.
I’ll keep campaigning for more investment in crime prevention, and for the policing presence our town deserves.