Crime in Bedfordshire has dropped says chief constable as police 'answering phones and responding quicker'

Crime in Bedfordshire has dropped, according to new figures, despite people contacting the force “more than ever”.

During this month’s Police and Crime Commissioner and Chief Constable Accountability Meeting (March 4), the commissioner said a recent press report found “Bedfordshire to have among the lowest crime rates in England and Wales”.

Commissioner Festus Akinbusoye asked the chief constable if the drop was “because people have given up reporting crime.”

“Or are there other reasons for this reduction?” he asked.

“[The public] has been contacting us more than they ever have,” chief constable Trevor Rodenhurst replied.

“We’ve made ourselves more contactable, we’ve made it easier to report a crime. You can report a crime online now with a simple process. I’m pleased that there was an article and I know that the article is correct. They pick the certain dates and times and someone else might pick a different date and time and a crime type and try and provide a counter narrative. But I can see that crimes in general have gone down.

“I’ve got the last four quarters of crime figures in front of me and I can see that three of those four quarters there were significant reductions, and one was a slight increase.

“We’ve got more deployable resources because we’re upskilling our people and they’re becoming effective. We’re responding quicker, we’re answering the phone quicker, we’re going to less stuff [that] we shouldn’t [attend].

“Therefore we should be getting better at either preventing or detecting crime. I’d like to think that’s a sign of a plan coming together rather than good fortune.”