Farm Watch Alert

Good Morning Farmwatch Members and what a lovely sunny day it is today!  

Please could I highlight the importance of reporting incidents to Police, no matter how insignificant they seem. 

We have been doing a lot of work raising the profile of Rural and Wildlife crime incidents such as dogs worrying livestock, poaching hare and deer, farm Security and security of machinery- but to continue to improve our response we need your help!! 

As a large rural force we need to record and map areas of concern, but we can only do that with your help in reporting all incidents. You never know when the small piece of information you provide will be the key piece of the puzzle in us solving a bigger problem and by us analysing and mapping reported incidents we are able to identify key problem areas and target those issues. 

An example of a small incident which we can work with- we have had a recent report of a very simple ‘someone has driven into my field', however by reporting this and police looking into it, we have analysed it and it is likely to be offenders poaching on land, and possibly even looking at what machinery is available whilst they are there (possible future theft?)- by the person reporting this incident we are able to alert the local neighbourhood team about potential concerns in the area, as well as us sending out messages like this- alerting our communities to potential poachers utilising land. This means that the community is more alert to what is going on, as well as people talking to their friends and spreading the word- this then gives us lots of eyes out in our rural communities.  

Please do report all incidents no matter how small. Non-emergency incidents are things that have already happened such as you finding damage the next morning, these can be reported to 101 on the phone or via the Devon and Cornwall Police website and normally takes less than 5 minutes to complete on the website.

If you prefer the phone, we now have a new call-back system on 101, which will save your place in the queue, and when you are at the front of the queue we will call you back, meaning you can continue farming instead of waiting for your call to be answered. It's really good and will save you time on waiting, whilst ensuring we still get the vital information and reports from our rural communities.  

Any incident which is ongoing or has risk of harm should be called into police on 999. 

Thank you for your time reading this Community Message. 

Lee