West Lindsey District Councillors want Lincolnshire Police to have more money to strengthen community-focused policing efforts and enhance public safety.
Councillors unanimously supported a motion calling on local and national officials to support funding that enables Lincolnshire Police to restore the principles of neighbourhood policing established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing.
Cllr Stephen Bunney said police officers needed to build trust within communities, focusing on preventing crime and disorder through public engagement rather than punitive measures.
Peel’s model has inspired Chief Constable Paul Gibson’s current Making Lincolnshire Safe Strategy 2024-25, which prioritises neighbourhood policing as a pathway to building public confidence and reducing crime.
Cllr Bunney said the strategy had worthwhile aspirations, but was not being fully met across our district. “The limited number of officers and resources available are focusing on detecting and solving serious crime – leaving precious few resources and individuals to carry out ‘preventative work’.
“In some areas, levels are so low that neighbourhood teams are providing minimal part-time cover for less than half the week, hardly working with the police to bring about community safety and welfare. In fact, it harbours the opposite, because residents do not have confidence in the force and so do not report issues etc, taking the attitude there’s no point as there’s no officers to deal with a concern anyway.”
However, the council notes that inadequate funding threatens the fulfilment of these objectives in Lincolnshire, which has the least-funded force in the country with the third lowest number of officers per 1,000 head of population.
Cllr Bunney added: “This is detrimental to our low-density rural area where the numbers of officers per head of population need to be higher than the national average to compensate for the time taken travelling between communities and to visit the myriad of hamlets and ‘isolated’ standalone properties.
Cllr Paul Howitt-Cowan said: “We had the police come to Overview and Scrutiny Committee only a few weeks ago. One of the things we learned was that there was a suspicion of underreporting and it’s so important that we report incidents because that will help to give support to our police to reinforce the vigilance by the police on the ground. It’s so important that we report all incidents.”
