New Peterborough police chief says city centre is safe at night - as he looks to focus on ASB and car cruising

Peterborough’s new policing area commander has said people are telling him the city centre is a safe place to be – but he is ‘not blind’ to issues in the city.

Speaking to The Peterborough Telegraph, Superintendent Ben Martin said he had been speaking to residents about their concerns and views of the crime in the city.

Supt Martin has now been in the job for a few months, and said it had been a positive experience speaking to residents about their issues.

When asked if people had asked him if the city centre had become a ‘no go zone,’ particularly at night, he said: “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m blind to what is happening, that everything is rosy in the garden – I’m not saying that by any stretch. People are saying to me that they feel safe, but I am also aware that there are, sometimes in the city centre issues around anti-social behaviour (ASB), street drinking – yes we are looking at that with our city centre teams, with our neighbourhood teams, as well as our partners at the council around the PSPOs.”

Supt Martin said he had met with the council to express his willingness to work with the authority, and that they had reciprocated that willingness – to try and understand ASB and impact on those issues.

Also on his agenda was the issue of anti-social driving associated with car cruises and shoplifting.

He said: “]When I talk to communities in Peterborough, It is generally positive, people have a good relationship with the police, there is good community cohesion, everybody I speak to feels safe the majority of the time in the majority of spaces in Peterborough. There are some issues – economic crime has been raised as an issue, around increases in shoplifting, increases in crimes against businesses. We had an operation around shoplifting, around a small amount of people committing a large amount of retail crime.

“We are focussing on small cohorts of people causing large amounts of issues in society.

“ASB gets raised – things that impact on on people’s quality of life. ASB can manifest in different ways. In the south of the city, anti social driving is a problem, so we are impacting on that in a variety of ways, neighbourhood teams have an intelligence focus on understanding who some of the ringleaders are around the car cruises, and seeking to seize vehicles, and preventative messaging around ‘don’t come to Peterborough to cruise because you’ll end up losing your car.

"It will be a focus for us.

"ASB in other ways – the alliance area in Millfield – looking at organised crime, and how it can manifest into ASB – it is a bit like the broken windows of policing, we try and clear in partnership with the council, trading standards and other agencies – try and remove criminality as much as we can, and rebuild community spirit and community confidence."