Facing up to difficult times (From Daily Echo)

Facing up to difficult times

1:08pm Wednesday 15th September 2010 in Chief Superintendent 's Blog By Matthew Greening, Chief Superintendent

Last week, a statement from our Chief Constable spoke about the cuts we may have to make to meet expected budget reductions.

He said that he will do all he can to protect local front line policing but it seems we will have to lose staff.

If the government cuts came in at the top end of what has been talked about then that could equate to approximately 1,400 fewer people working across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight but it remains to be seen what actually happens. These are uncomfortable headlines for everyone and of course for our staff, many of whom will be fearful for the future. I have one member of staff whose family includes 3 people who all work for the Constabulary.

Difficult times but my job as the local police commander in Southampton is to do all I can to carry on delivering a good service to the city. We have started a review of how we work in Southampton.

In fact we started that before the risk of cuts became clear. I wanted us to review how we do our emergency response and local neighbourhood policing in Southampton to make it better and to make best use of our new police station in Southern Road.

That review will also have to deliver whatever is required out of the expected force wide cuts.

However, in line with what the Chief has said, we will still deliver what the public in Southampton need from us; effective emergency response, visible and accessible neighbourhood policing, good protection of vulnerable people and good investigation so we keep on catching criminals (for example good news that we got the person you may have read about this week who tried to snatch a bag from an elderly lady and badly injured her in the process). So other some good news is that during our summer campaign on anti-social behaviour we managed to get incidents down. Since April it's down by 14 per cent (or over 1,000 incidents) compared with last year.

We are now having a push until Christmas on violent crime especially domestic violence and night time, alcohol related violence. So some tough times ahead but it wont stop us working hard for people in the city.