Lancashire police and crime commissioner Andrew Snowden with an update on rural crime week
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00:00 Hi, I'm Andrew Snowdon, Lancashire's Police and Crime Commissioner and we've recently
00:06 had Rural Crime Week which is a focus of attention across the country on rural crime and how
00:13 different police forces are responding to rural crime. It's really, really important
00:19 that the police take crime that happens in our communities that are in the countryside
00:23 as seriously as those in the cities. Rural communities and individuals are more isolated,
00:29 they're often targeted by organised crime gangs either for residential burglaries or
00:34 for plant and machinery off farms stolen to order. Drug gangs use country roads as cutabouts
00:39 to go about trying to avoid the police as they ship high amounts of drugs and other
00:45 criminal activity. And therefore in Lancashire I'm really pleased that we now have one of
00:49 the largest rural policing teams in the country and they are doing tremendous work. We've
00:56 got more officers coming online within those teams as part of that £700,000 investment
01:01 I made last year in rural crime. But already the number of arrests that are being made
01:06 for rural criminal activity, the number of stop and searches they're having, the number
01:09 of vehicles that are being stopped with cash and drugs and other activity seized, over
01:15 £2 million of stolen plant and machinery recovered since those teams were set up. That
01:22 is equipment that would otherwise have been shipped off elsewhere in the world to be used
01:26 and to be sold on for criminal gain and would damage businesses right here in Lancashire.
01:32 So it's been great to have a full week of activity, there's been stuff happening all
01:35 over the county. In Rossendale there was 50 suspicious vehicles stopped and searched in
01:40 the week alone. So that activity has been taking place but that reassurance that rural
01:45 crime is taken seriously here in Lancashire and we are leading the way across the country
01:51 tackling it, not just in Rural Crime Awareness Week.