Inspector praises new Suffolk policing model

26 February 2024

Inspector Ed Scott has spoken about the positive impact that the change to Suffolk Police’s operating model is having on community policing.

Speaking to Suffolk Police Federation, Ed said the change had freed up officers to be more visible on the county’s streets, to work with partners, and to understand what was important to communities.

Ed said: “It’s a different style of policing.

“In the old days, the safer neighbourhood teams (SNTs) would have had all the volume crime. Officers would be bogged down in an office churning through volume crime.

“Now, with the community police teams (CPTs) we’ve removed all of that investigation work and our community police officers are free to do visible policing, work with the community, with partners, and with residents, and to try to understand exactly what is important to them.”

Inspector Ed Scott has praised the change to Suffolk Police’s operating model.

The Force’s new policing model was launched in December in response to rising and changing demands to the service.

The aim was to enhance the way Suffolk Police engages with local communities, responds to emergencies, investigates crime and deals with other incidents that cause the public to make contact.

Ed, who is the Halesworth inspector as well as a Suffolk Police Federation rep, said: “The work we do is fairly broad. It’s being at the heart of our communities to get to grips with what they want.

“It’s about building public confidence, developing those relationships with our communities to help them trust us, give us more information, share intelligence, so we can really tackle what’s important to them.”

He said the CPTs had priorities to tackle, including antisocial behaviour, youth imagery crimes, and hate crime.

“That involves working young people to try to prevent any potential offending and to support them to divert them away from crime,” he said.

“On top of that, what are priorities for our communities?

“At the moment we’ve got Operation Night Owl, which tackles overnight and inquisitive crime.

“We’ve had a rise in burglaries from outbuildings, sheds, thefts of motor vehicles.

“It’s trying to work closely with our colleagues in the crime community hub, and reaching out offering crime prevention advice.

“We’re working with farmers and businesses who are rural and may feel isolated, and trying to put some target hardening in place to make it more difficult for them to be targeted.

He said officers were also revisiting people who have been victims of crime to offer them reassurance and also to ensure all avenues have been pursued.

“Historically, where we may have crimed an incident that over the phone and the victim had some contact with one person, now we’re now revisiting people, looking at links, getting to that fine detail.

“We will have done a lot of this work in the past, but we now have the time to really get back to people.

“We’ve gone back to people recently who had some CCTV and we didn’t realise. It’s helped one of our recent crimes, it provides a link to suspects and helps to establish whether they are involved in other criminality in that area.

“Just by taking that time to go back to people, being sensible and clever, and using all of the tools in our kit, we’re making a difference.

“We’ve now got the time, because we’re not bogged down with the volume crime. We’re able to be there, take time, solve problems and put long-term fixes in place.

“And it’s hopefully giving people the confidence that we are here, we do care, we are visible, we are patrolling, we will target what’s important to you.

“It’s gone some way to making the public think that they are seeing a lot more police officers, and it does appear they care and want to address it and fix it.

“If that makes people safer and is going to build that confidence and trust, and report more to us, then that’s great.”

It’s almost two months since the launch of the new model, and Ed said he believes it’s already starting to have a positive impact.

“The work my team has done already is keeping people energised,” he said. “Getting back to this model, back to basics, back to that proper community policing, building that trust up, so that we can then help fix and deliver some good results.

“We’re only at the start. We’ve still got a lot to do, some stuff to learn and to change but we’re heading in the right direction.

“I feel really excited about that. It’s nice to have time to slow down, to reflect and do some decent work.

“And it’s nice to be able to make a victim feel a bit safer and a bit happier.”