Decrease in crime in our area – latest ONS figures released

Message from Humberside Police:

Deputy Chief Constable Chris Rowley said: “I am pleased to see that the latest quarterly crime figures highlight a 3% decrease in crime, excluding fraud, recorded in our force area in the 12 months leading up to March 2020.

“We have seen a significant reduction in robbery, sexual offences and theft, all crimes that have a huge impact on their victims. Our teams are continuing to work hard to investigate reports of this nature and take offenders off our streets to prevent further incidents. 

“Whilst we have seen an increase in drug related offences and possession of a weapon, much of this can be attributed to the positive proactive work that we have been doing to seize drugs and take weapons off the streets.

“We have recently introduced our Operation Galaxy Team who are solely focused on proactively targeting those criminals that are having the biggest impact on our communities.

“Their activities to tackle local and county lines drug operations, organised criminals and those who pose the greatest risk to our communities have resulted in more warrants, arrests, charges and offenders being taken off our streets.

“And more crimes have been recorded as a result of this, many of which are related to some of the more serious offences, such as drug related crime or possession of weapons.

“Our communities have also been fantastic in responding to our appeals for them to contact us with information about people in their communities that are involved in crime, which has enabled us to target our activities to have the maximum impact.

“Having more officers on the ground also means that we are able to respond to more reports of antisocial behaviour, which has led to us recording more offences.

“Last year forces across the country – including Humberside – were still seeing rises in reported crime linked to improvements in the way that crime is recorded, rather than an increase in crimes actually being committed.

“This can be seen with public order offences, which has seen an increase nationally. For us at Humberside Police this has increased by 9% but it is important to consider that this is partly due to improvements in recording offences. 

“These processes are now well embedded and we are starting to see overall levels of reported crime beginning to fall to reflect that. These latest figures around Public Order Offences show an improving picture when compared to the previous statistics released.

“The latest data held by Humberside Police shows that the rise is reducing further still, with the force recently recording an increase of 4% in the period July to June of this year in comparison to July to June of last year.

“Our priority is always to protect the public and ensure we have a good understanding of our communities so that we can work closely with them to help prevent crime.

“We would always encourage people to report offences to us, so that we can investigate and take offenders off our streets.”