If police resources were allocated purely on demand, then the rural and community teams would probably be absorbed into Bedford or Luton.
A report presented to the Bedfordshire Police & Crime Panel on Tuesday (5 April) said the rural policing team currently consists of one sergeant, five constables and one PCSO.
Cllr James Weir, representing Bedford Borough Council, asked what the criteria were for determining the size of the team.
Chief superintendent John Murphy said: “It’s probably not as an exact science as allocating resources to other areas of policing.
“Because you can’t count everything that a rural crime officer would do in the same way that you would measure the amount of time required to complete prisoner handling files or something like that.
“We use our analysts to go through the crime data, the incident data, to try and determine the amount of demand that exists that’s attributable to rural areas in the same way that we determine the size of our community policing hubs.
“And then allow some numbers with that to account for things like engagement visibility re-assurance patrols, crime prevention work, etc.,” he said.
“That may sound a little bit woolly, and it purposely is woolly.
“On the basis of pure demand, which is exactly what we would have done two or three years ago, then actually what you would find is most of the resources for community policing and rural crime teams would be absorbed almost entirely into Luton and Bedford.
“We completely understand that we have to do things a bit differently around our rural community, and we can’t allocate resources purely on demand.
“We have to account for that kind of vulnerability, that social isolation, that you feel in those rural communities.
“That is why we have invested in the community policing teams, that is why we’ve invested in the rural crime teams and that’s why we will increase the numbers within the community policing hubs and within the rural crime team this financial year,” he said.
Freya Morgan, vice-chair NFU Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire said the north Bedfordshire communities feel that basing the rural crime team in Dunstable is too far away.
Ch Supt Murphy said: “Actually, when we increase the numbers, we don’t need to them all to book on in at one place [Dunstable], we’ve got technology in policing that we haven’t had before.
“Coronavirus has pushed us into Microsoft Teams, social media, WhatsApp groups and all sorts of things, a team can be booked on and briefed in exactly the same way 50 miles away, as they can within a police station.
“So we can make that happen, we can have people working in different parts of the county without too much trouble,” he said.
The police and crime commissioner, Festus Akinbusoye, said: “I don’t want us to have the impression that these are only the officers that we’ve got to work in the rural areas.
“Every police officer in uniform and with a warrant card can go anywhere that they are required to go, so to where the need is,” he said.
By John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
