Wolverhampton City Centre

Anti-social behaviour

In last month's update I spoke of the city feeling much busier with young people congregating in large numbers. This is to be expected as it gets warmer and people are out and about but we have received calls for service from members of the public and businesses who feel concerned by the sheer numbers. We understand that young people wish to meet up and socialise and that social media enables them to coordinate meets. We come in where the groups engage in ASB or commit crime and this is something we have seen play out.

Officers have been working to identify the young people involved and speak to them with their parents. We try to get them to understand the negative impact on businesses and visitors to the city. Partners are assisting by supporting outreach work and providing details of support and diversionary activities.
Anti-social behaviour linked to young people remains a priority for us moving into June and July working with colleagues who cover the Bentley Bridge area.

During June we will continue our patrols of keys locations, Queen Street, Dudley Street, bus station and St Peter's Gardens.

As the weather improves we will see more people coming into the city centre and we want it to feel a safe place to visit. The lighter nights help with this feeling of safety.

We know we have key locations within the city where anti-social behaviour is more likely to occur. Our incident logs provide data to direct our patrols so we are in the right places at the right time. A Public Space Protection Order is in place for the city centre to provide a long term approach to reducing incidents of anti-social behaviour that is committed by groups of people and those wearing face coverings to conceal their identity. Residents, visitors and businesses can enjoy a safer space without fear of confrontation.

Report anti-social behaviour so we are aware and can target our patrols. Whilst we always want to reduce the number of crimes that take place, we want recording to be a true reflection of the problems so we will continue to encourage reporting. We are aware the locations can change where anti-social behaviour happens and this can depend on the time of year and weather conditions.

Reducing public place violence

As part of our daily work we review 24 hour crime and also understand daily, weekly and monthly data. The city centre still sees violent offences - this refers to both violence with injury and violence without injury offences so includes lower level arguments. During May and into June we still see slightly elevated numbers in the daytime and night time economy and we are managing ongoing cases. This is predominantly around serious youth violence. This is measured where we have crimes with victims under the age of 25. Some of these offences are linked to the other priority of ASB as issues that start at a low level escalate into bigger problems.

The city centre teams have had over 40 arrests in May with nearly half being in relation to violence. We are working hard to get positive outcomes for victim's of crime and in recent weeks we have had offenders charged for assaults (mainly linked to the night time). Project Servator operations have seen officers from across Wolverhampton come and work in the city centre. Our first deployment in June has already taken place.

Officers from the city centre teams are regularly joined by officers from our Guardian Taskforce and they have done a number of deployments over the last 4 weeks. This work is ongoing and look out for updates on social media and in local press.

We are encouraged to see that members of the public are reporting crimes to police and city centre premises. Crime figures alone do not tell the whole story and although we see a rise in some offence types being reported to us, we hope this is the public trusting we will act on the information and get an outcome in line with their wishes.

Outstanding offenders

Officers on the neighbourhood teams carry a workload of investigations. Some of these matters have outstanding offenders who need to be arrested and processed in line with the wishes of the victim.

In June, we will focus on dealing with these offenders in a timely way so we can seek justice. The team have arrests on a daily basis but some offenders are harder to trace and we will focus our attention on locating them. Some images will be shared on social media to enable us to identify the people involved.

Where possible we use civil interventions to prohibit or encourage behaviours with a view to preventing further problems. We also work with business groups such as Pub Watch to promote the Barred from One, Barred from All - this initiative aims to prevent violence.