By Inspector Matthew Walton, Borough Commander Spelthorne
I hope all residents have a had lovely Christmas and happy new year from all of us at Surrey Police!
Over the Christmas period the team have been hard at work, starting December off with eight warrants across the borough with two in Sunbury relating to the supply of illegal drugs. This led to ten arrests with illegal drugs and money seized and two closure or-ders on properties (one full, one partial) using ASB legislation. We couldn’t do this without the support and information coming in from the public so a big thank you from us to you. We know sometimes it can feel like you are constantly sending information through to us but nothing happens, however, believe me we are looking into what you send and once we have a full picture (and enough to secure a warrant from a magistrate) we do act! On that, following on from my last article around two pleading guilty to drug supply, they were both sentenced to over four years each in pris-on plus we are working on trying to get a seri-ous crime prevention order in place for both of them so once released their ability to com-mit further crime is severely limited.
We have been continuing to increase our lev-els of community engagement and it was lovely to be able to talk directly to the public at the Shepperton Residents’ meeting in No-vember; please get in touch if you want us to come along to your local event or meet-ing. We hope you managed to talk to us at the Sunbury Common Lantern Festival or the Big Tree Night in Shepperton in the run up to Christmas as we loved being there. On the topic of improving our community engage-ment I would like to welcome another PCSO who is joining our team, Connor Brown. He will eventually be placed in Sunbury once he has been tutored by one of our other PCSOs on the borough, so please say ‘Hi’ when you see him. We are still recruiting PCSOs, PCs and in particular contact centre staff (the ones who answer 999 calls and other calls like 101) so please consider going to the main Surrey Police website www.surrey.police.uk/jobs or forward it on to someone you think might be interested for more details.
Some more good news for Sunbury Cross as work has been successfully completed on the underpass to improve lighting and new ex-panded CCTV coverage of the entire ar-ea. We will be working over the next couple of months to get new artwork created by local schools added to the underpass and new CCTV for Sunbury library, all paid for in part by the PCC Safer Streets fund. Crime preven-tion is just as important as crime detection for us, and we were out at local hotels this month marking tools with a unique code that is invis-ible to the naked eye. Not only has this con-tributed to a reduction in thefts at the hotels but also means that if we find a stolen tool, we can identify the marking and return it to its rightful owner. Crime prevention starts at home so please remember to make sure your properties are secure, by storing your valua-bles at home in a safe or keep them offsite in a safety deposit box, install ‘dusk til dawn’ external lighting, ensure all doors and win-dows are fully locked, leave a light or the radio on when going out, consider installing CCTV plus security light. You can also con-sider something called “defensive planting” which involves using the right garden plants to make your property even safer; you can see a video on this by going to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fZQU3KbfwI
3180 Inspector Matthew Walton
Borough Commander Spelthorne
Specialist Neighbourhood Team
Staines Police Station
Email: Matthew.Walton@Surrey.Police.uk Tel: 01483 639286 / 07967986937