Rural Crime in Suffolk Still Falling
This was the headline in Saturday’s East Anglian Daily Times. The article doesn’t seem to have been posted.
I’ve only had a couple of incidents in the last twenty years and these involved people nicking stuff from outbuildings where I lived.
The figure shows that in the whole of Suffolk, just 68.8 crimes were reported per 1,000 of the population, making it one of the lowest levels in the country.
The Police put it down to the work of Safer Neighbourhood Teams, but I actually wonder if the low levels of crime are for deeper reasons.
Suffolk is a pretty prosperous county and it has fairly low unemployment, so there are probably a lot fewer people who need to turn to crime. It also hasn’t until recently had a large student population and according to various writers, a lot of crime is around students, who are not as careful with their accommodation and possessions than most of us.
I travel to London a lot and you notice a very different attitude on the part of the Police you meet on the street between the Met and the Suffolk Constabulary. The former tends to be remote and aggressive, whilst my local force tries to act as part of the community and be reasonably pleasant. So is it just that in Suffolk, we give the Police the information they need. Ipswich certainly did that with the murders of several women a couple of years ago.
So there might be a lesson here.
Keep the Police forces small and local. Co-operate on a higher level by all means and use compatible systems, but do people prefer to deal with an officer, who is not just a policeman, but part of the community as well?
I think they do!
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The Anonymous Widower 
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