Sidcup SNT

SUMMER POLICING

We hope you have all been enjoying the warm weather. We’ve certainly enjoyed meeting new people and catching up with familiar faces at some of the community events held over the past few months, The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, the Emergency Services Roadshow where we teamed up with the London Fore Brigade for a week at various places around the borough and more recently Lark in the Park. It was lovely to be able to join in at Lark in the Park again after the pandemic and this year was particularly good as thanks to Sergeant Catlow liaising with local businesses (Land Rover, Porsche, B&Q, Homebase, Halfords & Bookers to name a few) we were able to secure some nice prizes donated by the businesses for our speed run competition. We hope the lucky winners enjoyed their prizes! The team have been busy making enquiries into a spate of commercial burglaries which occurred in June at several businesses in the High Street and Station Road. We have some good CCTV images of suspects and are hoping it won’t be too long before we can identify the culprit!

Unfortunately, with the nice weather this year we have seen an increase in anti-social behaviour. We have been trying to work with local businesses in the High Street to identify members of a particular group responsible for a lot of the anti-social behaviour in the area. We have been successful in identifying some and some have been referred to the local council for breaching the public spaces protection order. We are in the process of trying to progress this further with the more persistent offenders, including two young males who decided to light a fire in the middle of the field at Sidcup Place. Thankfully the fire was put out quickly before it spread.

Over the next few weeks, the team will be focusing our attention on our Safer Summer patrols which includes patrolling hotspots suffering from anti-social behaviour and open spaces. We would like to remind everyone, or educate those who are not aware, that Bexley Council has a public spaces protection order in place until October 2024 for which anyone caught behaving in an anti-social manner who is over the age of 18 will be given a £100 fine by the council and anyone under 18 will be referred to the council’s anti-social behaviour department. Persistent offenders will be dealt with by means of a community protection notice or behaviour contract prohibiting them from attending certain areas or engaging in certain behaviour. This is enforceable by both Council and Police.