Business and other crime in Glastonbury has halved thanks to Community Watch. Fact. After the Action Against Business Crime conference, Ros Wilkins told Mark Rowe how.
Full report on the AABC conference in the April print edition of Professional Security.
At the risk of spreading stereotypes, it has to be said that Glastonbury is a new-age sort of place. Ros Wilkins puts it this way: “I don’t have a firm office in the town; I hot-desk with different agencies; and the police don’t currently have a firm office in the town. But if you sit in a cafe in the middle of the Market Cross, which we can do, you are high profile, and you see what is going on. And you can be sat with someone who is a punk rocker, someone who is dressed as an ayatollah, someone who is in a Celtic church; you can be sat with druids, with people who are dressed like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; and the elderly lady, and middle of the road person, young mother. Nobody looks at each other as if they are anything strange; that’s normal in Glastonbury.” While the new age shops sell witches’ brooms, crystal penises and buddhas, the business crime is not shoplifters with new age crystals under their coats, but the burglaries and shop theft that any other town suffers. Ros Wilkins is an area regeneration officer for Glastonbury; the five ‘towns’ of Mendip each have one. She is a Mendip District Council employee. Each of the five officers does their job differently. Besides, each town is different; they include the smallest city in England (Wells) and the largest village (Street). Basically, as Ros says, she is the face of the council in the town. Her job has five sides: business and retail, community, accessibility, amenities, and publicity and marketing. So business crime is only a part of her job, which includes everything from skateboard parks and dog poo to rubbish bins. She works closely with police, something speakers at the AABC conference stressed too. Glastonbury, she reports, did have effective groups, but there was duplication; groups did not know of each other.
Communication, also, is important, she says. Community Watch has radios, that link ‘everyone’ in the town, including police and the Mendip CCTV control room, and the Clarks Village, a 57-shop retail park near Street, which has its own CCTV. If a Community Watch member has an incident to report, other members and CCTV operators can follow the suspect (literally in the case of taxi members). Ros speaks of cases where police have been called so that a police car is waiting for a suspect at a bus stop. If a member has only a suspicion, there is a dedicated email address to send a report to. As Ros says, a member who sees something that simply does not look right, by mailing details can provide the proverbial last piece in the jigsaw. Communication, in another sense, matters; letting members know that their input has brought results. As Ros puts it: “It works because it is successful, and success breeds success.” And members are talking in a friendly way, not merely between officials with job titles. Jokes over the radio are allowed. Besides the halving of crime, there is a detection rate of 43 per cent. It’s not because the town’s police are doing anything differently; the only difference is Community Watch.
