The visibility of our police officers – several callers expressed concerns about not routinely seeing officers on foot patrol within our communities. Although our data shows that we have doubled the use of the mobile police stations and that our neighbourhood officers attend more than 11,600 community events and meetings each year, this is clearly not being felt by the public. To improve this, I have commissioned our Local Policing lead to devise a simple way of mapping where our Neighbourhood Policing Teams will be patrolling within local communities. We will then share this information with the public as part of the Your Area section of our website and via our local policing Facebook pages. Despite the financial challenges we continue to face, I have committed to maintain our police officer numbers – around 1,200 – who are expertly supported by our PCSO and Special Constable cohorts in patrolling our county.

The issue of knife crime – understandably, following the tragic murder of Shayne Hambakachere in Chippenham last month, our communities are concerned about knife crime within our county. Firstly, I wanted to offer our deepest sympathies to Shayne’s loved ones. We will continue to offer them specialist support during this time and throughout the ongoing criminal justice process.

Police reform following the publication of the Government’s White Paper – I outlined my response to the proposed policing reforms last month, but I took the opportunity to emphasise that we must continue to improve service delivery to our communities and that I wholly support working more collaboratively to achieve this.

Our approach to tackling domestic abuse – I shared that one of the worst moments in my three-year tenure as Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police, remains our critical service failure regarding Clare’s Law disclosures. After the failures were identified in 2023, we reviewed more than eight years’ worth of applications (a total of 3,778) and have subsequently ensured additional resources and scrutiny are in place in this vital area of business. A detailed update on the changes and improvements we have made can be found here.

Our approach to tackling to Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) – although we have seen a decrease in the number of anti-social behaviour incident reports being made to us (from 10,242 in 2024 to 9,121 in 2025), the impact of ASB has a significant impact on local neighbourhoods. From some of the callers to the show, I can sense a perception that we are not focusing on this type of crime as much as they feel we should. My commitment to our communities is that we will always explore all reasonable lines of enquiry to hold offenders to justice when any crime takes place.

Organised criminality and rural crime – we know that a lot of the criminality happening in our county is linked to organised crime groups – specifically crimes impacting on our rural and agricultural communities. We have dedicated teams within our Force who are focused on tackling serious and organised criminality, but we need intelligence and information from our communities to help us bring those responsible to justice and deter future offending. You can report information to us here.

Our upcoming HMICFRS PEEL Inspection report – we are expecting this report to be published next month at which point I will dedicate one of these fortnightly updates to appraise you, Commissioner, and our communities of the outcomes and our next steps. Since joining Wiltshire Police, I made a commitment to ensure we evidenced year on year improvements to our service, and this has happened. For their upcoming report, HMICFRS took a data capture between October 2024 – March 2025 and then from June – September last year before inspecting us in person in December. Whilst I anticipate we will see improvements in some aspects of our service – particularly around our frontline policing delivery – we absolutely recognise there is more we need to do to improve the quality of our investigations and how we support victims of crime.

Use of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) – PSPOs give officers from both local authorities and Wiltshire Police the legal authority to challenge and fine individuals who are engaging in disruptive or dangerous activities within a designated area. We currently have four PSPOs active in Wiltshire – two in Swindon (one relating to town centre ASB and one relating to unauthorised car meets), one in Devizes (tackling issues such as street drinking in the Market Place) and one in Salisbury (which targets street drinking in the city centre). Earlier this month, more than 50 drivers were identified as breaching the Swindon unauthorised car meet PSPO. You can read more about our response to that incident here.

Road safety – tragically, we have seen an increase in the number of people dying on our county’s roads. 19 people lost their lives in 2024 compared to 23 in 2025 and 305 people were seriously injured on our roads last year. We are dedicated to improving the safety of our roads as evidenced by the increase in the number of drivers we are being arresting for drink and drug drive offences (454 arrests were made in 2025) and the number of proactive road safety operations we are undertaking which are supported by our incredible Community Speedwatch teams. To assist our efforts, I would urge all drivers to slow down and be more considerate when driving through our county – particularly during the current, adverse weather conditions.

Financial challenges – as I have outlined to you and our communities previously, I will need to deliver a minimum of £4.6m savings for 2026/2027. As with our Financial Review Programme, through which we identified much of the nearly £8m worth of savings for 2025/26, our priority remains achieving these savings in ways that minimise the impact on our people and on frontline delivery. We must continue to focus on the function of our organisation rather than its form, ensuring that we protect the quality of service we provide to our communities and victims of crime.