Opinion: Peterborough top cop says force won’t arrest it's way through tackling street-drinking

With recent interest in the city centre and issues of anti-social behaviour, street drinking and begging, it is an appropriate time for me to talk about what we want to achieve.

Firstly, this is not a new problem, I was aware of issues in the area before taking this job on, and acknowledged it head-on in my initial discussion with the Peterborough Telegraph.

Tough challenge

What we want is to make the city centre a safer and more pleasant place to visit, either socially or as a business owner or worker.

Improving the look and feel of any town or city centre is a tough challenge, even more so now with the ever-increasing costs our businesses are having to pay just to stay open.

Supporting our businesses is critical in keeping them in the city, and the role of the police is to create as safe an environment as we can to allow businesses to thrive.

As such we will be doing more with retailers to target those who make a living stealing from shops.

Emotional backstories

We have had some notable successes recently in terms of charging and remanding prolific shoplifters and are now pushing for Criminal Behaviour Orders to ban them from the area full stop.

Looking at those begging or street drinking, my first assumption here is that most doing this are not doing it through choice.

There are some horrific backstories that have led people to see begging as their only option (although we also have ‘professional’ beggars who use your good nature to make money).

What we need is an approach that cuts across the partnership, for example a lot of our work centres on the services offered by the Light Project, Peterborough City Council and the Change Grow Live (CGL) Aspire Recovery Centre.

We won’t arrest our way through this – even when crime is committed it is generally low level and won’t result in harsh sentencing from a court.

All we would achieve is people back on the street looking to beg for even more money to pay fines.

An example of this at work, one person we recently supported away from this life was a habitual beggar.

Working across the partnership they disclosed a long history of unreported domestic abuse.

We were able to support them in making an allegation against the partner.

This resulted in the (now ex) partner receiving a four-year prison sentence and the victim taking positive steps to a better life.

Policing alone won’t fix street drinking

Another recent case involved someone caught up in excessive drinking and, when drunk, causing anti-social behaviour.

Initially they failed to engage with the support offered so we started the process to secure a Criminal Behaviour Order against them.

This had the desired impact of them deciding to talk to support groups, ending with them going to rehab and securing accommodation away from the streets.

I hope this offers some reassurance that we do want to address the issues, but also accepting that policing alone will not fix this.

You rightly expect us to be dealing with crime and locking up criminals and I must balance issues in the city centre against other challenges occurring elsewhere.