South Warwickshire Community Safety Partnership

Community Safety Partnership is the new name for the body responsible for reducing crime, disorder and drugs misuse in an authority area (formerly Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships). The Crime & Disorder Act (1998) places a duty on the Responsible Authorities to work together to reduce crime and disorder.

Following a seven year history of collaborative work the Community Safety Partnerships for the districts of Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick were formally merged on 12 September 2008. This body is now called Safer South Warwickshire.

The Partnership is made up of the following Responsible Authorities:

• Warwickshire NHS
• Stratford-on-Avon District Council
• Warwick District Council
• Warwickshire County Council
• Warwickshire Fire Authority
• Warwickshire Police
• Warwickshire Police Authority

• Warwickshire Probation

Priorities

South Warwickshire Crime and Disorder Reduiction Partnership (CDRP) is charged with developing and agreeing realistic and challenging targets annually to address crime and disorder.

The Partnership produces an annual strategic assessment which informs a rolling 3 year joint partnership plan to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in both districts. The Strategic Assessment identified a number of high risk issues and at the Strategic Member Board meeting of the SWCDRP on November 9th, 2009 the following crime types were confirmed as priorities and ranked as follows:

• Serious Violent Crime
• Anti-Social Behaviour including criminal damage and arson
• Serious Acquisitive Crime ( includes domestic burglary and vehicle crime)

• Road Safety - controlling speeding vehicles in residential areas.

Problem Oriented Approach

SWCDRP has agreed to adopt the Problem Oriented Partnership (POP) approach to crime reduction. POP refers to the process used by agencies working in partnership to address the fundamental problems that underpin crime in order to improve community safety in a locality. POP approaches attempt to move beyond community safety being solely a matter of dealing with offenders through the criminal justice system. Whilst robust enforcement is an important part of the process, relying solely this has been described as treating the symptoms but not the illness. POP encourages the wider use of intelligence within a partnership setting to identify patterns of offences in relation to type of perpetrators, localities or victims. Problem solving techniques are employed to get to the root of the pattern and to put in place solutions that will make crime and disorder less likely to take place in the future.