Excellent meeting at Shrewsbury Police HQ

Last night the Shropshire Police Authority members had our regular 6-monthly meeting with the Divisional Command Team. It is a chance to sit around the table and have discussions about any current issues, and we certainly covered a great deal of ground in nearly 3 hours of talking.

We looked in detail at the crime levels and - in general - it is good news. Crime in Shropshire continues to fall, in general. It also seems that the recession has yet to make any negative impact on the number of burglaries, for example (it was expected that this sort of crime would rise, nation-wide).

We also look at some of the "repeat offenders" how have been released from prison back into the community. The work that the police do to monitor these people is very important and very impressive.

The officers also gave us an update about the working that Community Support Officers in particular are doing to increase community confidence in specific "hotspot" areas. This is really good work and we will continue to monitor it.

Unfortunately, there have been some especially serious crimes of late in Shropshire and we were briefed on those. It is reassuring that Shropshire continues to be a very safe place to live, work and visit and in the rare occasions that a serious crime occurs, detection and conviction usually follows very quickly.