Written 08/03/05

Last night's parish council meeting was attended by our local copper, PC Phil Shulver, his boss Inspector Ormerod and Brian Quinn customer services manager of Milton Tesco. The reason they had been invited was to discuss the issue of anti-social behaviour in the village principally being undertaken by one or more groups of youths most of whom come from from outside the village.

It was a useful meeting and some progress does seem to be being made by the local police. Patrols have been stepped up with increased levels of patrolling by PC Phil Shulver and PCSO Lee Page. In additional special constables have been patrolling on Friday and Saturday nights and force's reactive units have been told to prioritise Milton.

The youths involved have been identified and parents have been sent letters (essentially saying "do you know what your child has been up to?") under the police's "Guardian Awareness Programme".

In the longer term a new PCSO, Ellie Hains, has started work and is in training now. She will be on the beat in Milton from April. Various other organisational changes have also been undertaken to reduce the number of villages PC Shulver is responsible for and also to group beats together so that the Milton, Histon and Cottenham beats, each of which has a Community Beat Manager (Phil being ours) will share intelligence and cover for each other - so when Phil is on leave or away we will still have a CBM available who knows about the village.

In the end Brian Quinn and the police did agree a strategy which would allow youths who were identified and banned by the store to be subjected to a "Acceptable Behaviour Contract" the next step below an ASBO but this doesn't directly tackle the issue of youths hanging around outside the store unless they also cause problems in the store.

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