Margot James meets Inspector Sarah Galloway, new chief of police for Stourbridge.

My meeting with Inspector Sarah Galloway, new chief of police for Stourbridge, was encouraging. I went with quite a long list of concerns. Hotspots of anti-social behaviour in and around Stourbridge are depressingly common. There are really too many to mention so I prioritised those that have most recently come to my attention, namely:

• Anti-social behaviour in Amblecote, arson, rock throwing and a feeling that there is a lack of police response.
• Rock throwing on to boats on the canal from the bridge at Junction Road and Richardson Avenue.
• Increasing incidence of vandalism, damage to property and cars in Vicarage Road/Thurmastone Street.
• Litter and groups of youths hanging around the Queensway and intimidating passers by.
• Drug dealing and youths congregating around Swan Pool Park on Friday and Saturday making a noise until 3am.

Clearly this was a far from exhaustive list but it was a summary at least of what typifies many neighbourhoods in our area. I will check in with Sarah next month to see what her officers have been able to do.

So what was encouraging? Shortly after her arrival Inspector Galloway established a new unit tasked with focussing on offenders rather than geographic areas. The 80:20 rule operates just as clearly with crime as it does in business. Roughly 80% of the crime is committed by roughly 20% of the criminals. Target them and put some of them out of circulation and you begin to make a real impression.

Officers in the new unit target people who the intelligence indicates will become 'persistent and prolific offenders' (PPOs). An officer from the unit tracks these people down at least once a day and keeps them under a degree of surveillance, making it more difficult than it used to be for them to make other people's lives a misery and get away with it.

Sarah agreed with me that CCTV was 'invaluable' in the fight against crime. (We really must persuade more of my colleagues of this - used properly CCTV is crucial to the early detection and prosecution of criminals, the more successful it is the more of a deterrent it will also become). I was pleased to hear that portable CCTV is to be made available, although disappointed by the scale of it. It sounds as if we will be lucky to have one such 'Sherpa Camera', as they are known, in Stourbridge at any one time.

At any given time I can think of at least half a dozen parts of the Stourbridge area that would benefit from this technology. Law abiding people are just sick and tired of having to put up with vandalism, theft, noise and abuse. There really should be no tolerance of this anti-social behaviour. All the form filling and bureaucracy that gets in the way of the ability of the police to do their job, combined with the lack of prison space that means that in so many cases the punishment does not fit the crime. This is going to take a lot of work by the next Conservative government (and financial resource) to sort out.

Photo: Inspector Sarah Galloway with Margot outside Stourbridge Police Station.