Lancashire police and crime update 3 September 2023

Lancashire police and crime commissioner Andrew Snowden with an update on rural crime week

Transcript

00:00 Hi, I'm Andrew Snowdon, Lancashire's Police and Crime Commissioner and we've recently

00:06 had Rural Crime Week which is a focus of attention across the country on rural crime and how

00:13 different police forces are responding to rural crime. It's really, really important

00:19 that the police take crime that happens in our communities that are in the countryside

00:23 as seriously as those in the cities. Rural communities and individuals are more isolated,

00:29 they're often targeted by organised crime gangs either for residential burglaries or

00:34 for plant and machinery off farms stolen to order. Drug gangs use country roads as cutabouts

00:39 to go about trying to avoid the police as they ship high amounts of drugs and other

00:45 criminal activity. And therefore in Lancashire I'm really pleased that we now have one of

00:49 the largest rural policing teams in the country and they are doing tremendous work. We've

00:56 got more officers coming online within those teams as part of that £700,000 investment

01:01 I made last year in rural crime. But already the number of arrests that are being made

01:06 for rural criminal activity, the number of stop and searches they're having, the number

01:09 of vehicles that are being stopped with cash and drugs and other activity seized, over

01:15 £2 million of stolen plant and machinery recovered since those teams were set up. That

01:22 is equipment that would otherwise have been shipped off elsewhere in the world to be used

01:26 and to be sold on for criminal gain and would damage businesses right here in Lancashire.

01:32 So it's been great to have a full week of activity, there's been stuff happening all

01:35 over the county. In Rossendale there was 50 suspicious vehicles stopped and searched in

01:40 the week alone. So that activity has been taking place but that reassurance that rural

01:45 crime is taken seriously here in Lancashire and we are leading the way across the country

01:51 tackling it, not just in Rural Crime Awareness Week.