more … ]]> I’m really surprised by the news that the Home Office is planning to pull the funding on Hampshire’s 101 service from February.

This is one of those endless Home Office initiatives that actually seemed to be working!

As explained on the Government’s website:

101 is a 24-hour number provided by your police and local council to deal with community safety issues, including certain non-emergency crime, policing and anti-social behaviour.

101 is for:

• vandalism and graffiti;
• noise nuisance;
• threatening and abusive behaviour;
• abandoned vehicles;
• dumping and fly tipping;
• drunk and rowdy groups;
• drug related anti-social behaviour; and
• broken street lighting.

Locally we’ve been encouraging people to use the 101 service to report anti-social behaviour. I know from speaking to PCSOs and local police officers how helpful it can be. It’s not perfect – there have been some teething troubles – but it’s better and simpler than what we had before. We should be trying to improve it further, not cut it.

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Fascinating visit to the CCTV control centre today. Although, overall, Winchester has relatively low crime figures, that doesn’t make things any better for any individual who is the victim of crime, and CCTV is having a good effect in making the centre safer.

That said, the system is beginning to creak. There are too many trouble spots that are not covered by CCTV and, for technical reasons, it’s hard to extend it to cover areas outside the city centre. It’s been made clear to me during earlier visits around the city that there are still some areas which would benefit from CCTV that don’t have it.

It can also be difficult to link the system in with other CCTV systems, which could help make things safer for people late at night and make it easier for police to track criminals escaping from Winchester by car.

People have raised concerns about CCTV and civil liberties. As long as it is used, as it is currently, to spot crime, collect evidence of crime and direct the police ‘in hot pursuit’, I don’t think it poses much of a threat. Indeed, I would like to see Winchester’s CCTV system modernised.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t watch for (and oppose) some of the developments that are being put forward in other places. The Conservative Council in Ealing is planning to start using hidden cameras disguised as house bricks and tin cans, supposedly to watch for fly-tippers. The Labour Party is pushing for a national ID card and database which, if combined with face tracking technology (which, in turn, is being asked for by police chiefs), would enable CCTV cameras to track everyone as they went about their lawful business.

These new technologies, if unchecked, could mean that we end up with hidden cameras everywhere (rather than in areas at risk of crime as currently), tracking everyone simultaneously as they go about their business (which also can’t be done currently).

The critical thing is that we don’t lose sight of our objectives when using CCTV. If we’re using it to watch for and tackle crime – it’s fine. As soon as we go beyond that, it’s not.

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After a meeting with Mark in his Westminster office to discuss our campaign plans, I went on to meet Nick Clegg MP to discuss the crime survey that we are launching in Winchester. We want to hear local people’s experiences with crime and their ideas on how to make our community safer.

The important thing is that we are focusing on sensible, pragmatic and liberal policies that will reduce crime and the fear of crime.

One obvious step would be to reverse Labour’s planned cuts in the number of Police Community Support Officers in Hampshire. We shouldn’t be spending billions of pounds on compulsory ID cards for innocent law abiding citizens when that money could be better spent on front line policing.

The local community should also have more power to close pubs and clubs that cause trouble. People of all ages should feel safe going out after dark in town or city centres.

We’ll have a chance to discuss all this with Nick in more detail later in the year when he speaks at our annual dinner.

more … ]]> As some of you may have seen in the news, earlier today Ming Campbell and Nick Clegg launched our latest campaign – ‘We can cut crime’.

It lays out five Liberal Democrat priorities:

• More police officers on the beat
• Taking back town centres by giving communities more powers to close pubs and clubs that cause trouble
• More honesty and clarity in sentencing
• More work and training in prison – to cut reoffending
• Better compensation for victims – paid for by prison work

You can find out more about the campaign at the campaign website at www.wecancutcrime.com – which you can also sign the party’s online petition.

You can also read or watch a subtitled video of Ming’s introductory speech via his website.

more … ]]> What a depressing Queen’s speech: full of more rhetorical Home Office legislation, sounding ‘tough’ for the tabloids, chipping away at freedom and fairness, but having little or no impact on terrorism, crime or anti-social behaviour. If legislation was all that was needed to make Britain safer, you’d expect that the 59 Home Office bills passed since 1997 would have made us the safest place in the world.

What we need is effective application of already existing laws, a roll-back of laws that erode our freedoms and add complexity and bureaucracy to the system but do little to tackle crime, a more visible targeted and locally decided presence of police and wardens in times and places that suffer from anti-social behaviour, closer collaboration between councils and police to tackle problem areas (as seen with Liberal Democrat councils in Liverpool and Islington), a prison regime that doesn’t make people’s drug problems worse and lead to such high reoffending rates with more training, education, work and drug rehabilitation, and more effective community punishments that have greater involvement of the community in identifying what work convicted criminals should be doing.

On terrorism, I don’t understand why we still aren’t going to see legislation to allow phone-tap evidence to be presented in court. We need to make it easier to close down terrorist operations and successfully prosecute those responsible earlier in their planning.

There are some bright spots, including free bus travel for pensioners (as promised in our last manifesto) and a climate change bill. Again on climate change, it would be good to see some more concrete actions proposed, particularly a green tax switch, rather than only target setting. Even with target setting, it’s interesting to see how Labour seems happy to set regular targets for everyone else, but currently only wants to set themselves a binding target for 2050.