‘Police struggling to grasp organised crime blighting rural lives’
Public urged to make clear scale of crime
POLICE FORCES are still grappling to tackle the organised crime that is increasingly befalling rural communities, the chairwoman of the National Rural Crime Network said.
Julia Mulligan said countryside crime had risen in line with a growth in general crime nationally and more has to be done by police to crack the rural crimewave.
She said: “I think the police have not perhaps fully grasped the organised nature of the crime: people who know what they are trying to steal. They have a market and a supply chain for the goods they steal. They are deliberately setting out to take machinery and quad bikes, and a lot of work needs to be done to understand the impact of that on communities.”
The National Rural Crime Network launches its National Rural Crime Survey today and Ms Mulligan wants a full picture of rural crime to emerge so that she can make the case for more focused rural policing.
“The nature of crime is changing,” she said. “Police now have to deal with a very large increase in child sexual abuse, domestic abuse as well as counter-terrorism, so forces do quite sophisticated analysis that determine how best to allocate resources.
“Unless we know what’s going on in rural communities it is very difficult to make a case for resources in rural communities.”
THE HEAD of a national police crime network has accused forces of being too “responsive” to rural crime as she urged the public to help demonstrate the need for more proactive policing in the countryside.
North Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner Julia Mulligan, who chairs the National Rural Crime Network to inform better policing of crime in rural England and Wales, said she worries that countryside areas are being “short-changed” but that the true scale of the problem has to be quantified if that is to change. Ms Mulligan spoke to The Yorkshire Post ahead of the launch today of the Network’s second National Rural Crime Survey. The exercise to gather a clearer picture of crime affecting rural communities was carried out for the first time three years ago and the police commissioner is keen for its latest edition to generate a big response.
Some 13,000 people answered the 2015 survey and this led to findings that the true cost of rural crime exceeds £800m, dwarfing earlier estimates.
The network’s subsequent recommendations included fairer funding for rural areas, more joined-up working with partners and communities, building on rural resilience, embedding best practice, developing new policies and ways of working and ensuring a more targeted approach to policing in rural communities.
Asked what progress had been made since, Ms Mulligan said: “A lot of forces have taken some really positive steps. In North
Yorkshire for example we now have one of the largest dedicated rural crime taskforces in the country, but rural crime is still a major problem in our area.
“At the moment forces are largely responsive to rural crime and there needs to be far more proactive intelligence-led policing into this. I know in North
Yorkshire that the deputy chief constable who is the lead on rural crime is looking at this to see how the force can better understand it.”
She said she understands that more urban-centred forces had different challenges, but that rural communities have to speak up and make known the extent to which they are suffering.
“Police forces have to look at the priorities in their different areas and allocate resources accordingly but I do have a worry that rural areas are being shortchanged,” Ms Mulligan said.
“It’s challenging for police with large rural populations to
get their voice heard when there are very serious issues going on. The current concerns around the murder rate in London, for example, makes it difficult.
“But we need to understand the true scale of rural crime, its impact and we need to be able to demonstrate the demand in rural areas requires a response. At the moment that picture is different because of the scale of under-reporting. It’s really important rural people in rural communities report what’s going on.”
To respond to the National Rural Crime Survey, visit www. nationalruralcrimenetwork.net.
I do have a worry that rural areas are being short-changed. Julia Mulligan, chairwoman of the National Rural Crime Network.