Police resources not being ‘sucked into urban centres’, urges crime commissioner

Incidents of rural crime are not borne out of police resources being ‘sucked into the urban centres’, says the police and crime commissioner.

Thames Valley Police has undergone a significant structural change to local policing since June 2023, replacing the previous 11 Local Policing Areas with five Local Command Units.

Changes to the management structure have increased resource flexibility while growing neighbourhood policing teams, commissioner Matthew Barber told the Thames Valley Police and Crime Panel on Friday.

But Cllr Mark Howard described a ‘distinct different message’ about the reorganisation from conversations he has had with police officers in Windsor and Maidenhead.

The RBWM councillor referred to a ‘resigned situation’ where police officers were sent to places ‘further up the pecking order’, such as town centres, resulting in fewer patrols and ‘sporadic checking on vehicles’ in rural areas.

“[It] doesn’t mean it’s not as important. We have communities which are blighted by rave-type activities which are happening in beauty spots, drug taking in laybys, and recently rapes which were happening there,” Cllr Howard told the meeting.

Mr Barber said it was a ‘natural’ and a ‘fair and understandable concern’ as having a larger Local Command Unit means resources can be moved and ‘surged’.

“At times, resources will go into those more populous areas to deal with those crimes being reported, but it works both ways,” he added.

“There will be those higher crime areas, and frankly, it's quite right that policing deals with those, but that shouldn't be to the detriment of those other areas.

“Why I think the change was the right thing to do is, we shouldn't ringfence resources in one place and then leave other jobs undealt with.

“Our neighbourhood teams have significant areas to cover often, but they will maintain those geographical bases.

“You've got good sergeants, good PC's who still get to know their communities. They get to know people in their local villages, and they’re still patrolling those areas.

“Clearly, I can’t direct operationally, but within the realm of day-to-day fluctuations between what’s needed, I don’t think [resources are] being borne out elsewhere.”

Mr Barber said there's a requirement to respond to inquiries within 72 hours, and each local team now has a shared mailbox where responses are ‘dip-checked’ to ensure they are ‘meaningful’.

Have Your Say meetings and police surgeries are also allocated to ‘make sure officers are getting out there’ for ‘visibility’.

But Cllr Howard said that smaller rural areas are ‘not getting attention’ due to other policing needs in the town centres.

“The issue of Saturday nights – especially Windsor and other places with certain needs for policing – events happening in smaller rural areas are just not getting attention,” Cllr Howard said.

“When we are approaching the police, they are effectively saying we’re being sucked elsewhere, and it's that proactivity of being there to stop the 100-person event means the 1,000-person event doesn’t happen as well.”

Mr Barber referenced recent raves in rural Oxfordshire where the local neighbourhood team would have been ‘hugely outnumbered and unresourced’ if left to deal with the incidents alone.

“The reality is, you've got a big, significant incident like that, you can withdraw resources from your more urban areas,” he said.

The commissioner said ‘proactive patrolling remains important’ and had seen continued use of the rural crime task force in RBWM, but no evidence of ‘significantly limited rural patrolling’.

“We would all love to see a patrol on every street all the time, but I’m sure if you went into urban Maidenhead, people would say they would like to see more patrols,” he said.

“I don’t think the evidence of other areas has borne out that all of the resource gets sucked into the urban centres.”