Clippings (May-July 2001)Clippings (May-July 2001)W Yorks in top six for crime (T&A, 19 July 2001)
Joyrider first for Big Brother punishment (T&A 17 July 2001)
Wrong impression (T&A 16 July 2001)
Councillors act as their cars attacked (T&A, 29 June 2001)
Theatre bosses to take on the "oiks" (29 May 2001)
Call to step up security at station (T&A 10 May 2001)
Spy-in-sky network is increased (T&A, 10 May 2000)
by Ian Briggs, T&A, 10 May 2000
Three closed circuit television systems designed to reduce city centre crime are to be installed in Bradford thanks to a £750,000 funding package from the Home Office.
The money will be spent on cameras and communication systems for the Little Germany Urban Village and in regeneration areas managed by Bradford Trident and Royds Community Association.
The money has come from the Home Office's Crime Reduction Fund and is on top of £1 million brought in from the same fund last year to pay for the expansion of the CCTV scheme and a new control room.
The funding bid for one set of cameras was made by the Bradford District Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership and will provide nine cameras in Little Germany worth more than £181,000. These cameras will cover the majority of streets in the Urban Village.
The £329,600 Bradford Trident scheme will involve setting up 22 systems in the Little Horton area covering the Marshfield, Park Lane and West Bowling areas.
These two schemes will be linked to the city centre control room which is due to open later this year.
A network of cameras is also to be set up covering key public areas in Buttershaw, Delph Hill and Woodside. This £250,000 scheme will provide cover for the Royds Healthy Living Centre in Buttershaw, Woodside Community Centre, the Delph Hill Centre, Buttershaw Retail Park and the Royds Learning and Enterprise Park, to be based on the Buttershaw estate.
Bradford Council leader Councillor Margaret Eaton said: "Closed circuit television helps people to feel a lot safer and has a good track record in preventing crime.
"I am delighted that Bradford can now offer a co-ordinated CCTV system which covers large parts of the city centre and some residential areas."
Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Dodd said: "The installation of these cameras will assist in the reduction of offences and will reduce crime as there won't be as many safe areas for people to commit offences."
Gillian Mayfield, the Council's acting community safety policy officer, is hoping the surveillance equipment is installed as soon as possible.
She said: "We are hoping that the equipment is fully in place by this time next year. They should all be installed within a year of the funding being granted."
Det Supt Dodd added: "This is another example of the police working in partnership with our agencies to make Bradford a safer city."
The Council is also working with Metro to apply for funding for additional cameras to be set up outside the city's transport Interchange. A decision on the scheme is expected by the end of the month.
by IAN LEWIS T&A Reporter, T&A 10 May 2001
Cafe bosses are asking rail chiefs to step up security at a busy railway station after suffering their second burglary in two months.
Stephen Greener, who runs Ruth’s Whistle Stop at Shipley Station with his wife Ruth, says he fears they may eventually be forced out of business unless the break-ins are stopped.
In the latest incident thieves hurled part of a paving slab through a window of the cafe before grabbing stock worth hundreds of pounds. A CD player was also stolen.
Mr Greener, who took over the business last September, said: "We didn’t open on Tuesday because of it and so lost a day’s trade.
"We’re not giving up — but you can’t keep losing stock like this when you’re in business and if it carried on happening we wouldn’t be able to continue sustaining losses of this kind.
"I’ll be getting in touch with Arriva Trains Northern to request a meeting so we can talk about what joint security measures we can take to stop this happening again and how to improve security throughout the station.
Among the ideas Mr Greener plans to put to Arriva are a new CCTV system and security staff to patrol through the station at nights. Rowland Dale, of the Aire Valley Rail Users’ Group, said: "We pressed very hard to get a cafe at the station because it was a facility that was badly needed.
"They are an excellent couple who provide a wonderful service but we risk losing it altogether if we can’t stop this sort of thing happening." A spokesman for British Transport Police said the break-in at the cafe was being investigated.
Peter Cushing, regional director for Arriva Trains Northern, said the company was committed to helping tenants to improve security He added: "The lease clearly states that the overall responsibility for security within the premises lies with the tenant.
"However we do have a small budget available to help with security measures.
"We have spoken to the tenant previously and made recommendations and it was suggested that we could help with the installation of an alarm to the premises concerned, and we are waiting for the tenant to contact us."
by JIM GREENHALF, T&A 29 May 2001
Car thieves and the run-down part of historic Little Germany are deterring people from going to the theatre, it Was claimed today
Now the Priestley Centre for the Arts’ management, determined to increase audiences and income, is employing a security officer to patrol the streets in the vicinity of the Chapel Street theatre when plays are on.
"We are employing him to keep Little Germany safe and secure from oiks who think they have the right to break into people’s cars and spoil people’s evenings — the area has a lot of that," said Christian Hohenzollern, recently taken on by the Priestley to market
the theatre. "A lot of the problems we face come down to the state of Eastbrook Hall. It is derelict; it is ugly; it brings the whole area down.
"It has become an eyesore and a very dangerous eyesore. Glass and masonry fall off it regularly
"Either restore it or flatten it. If they’d flatten it we could have wonderful car-parking in Little Germany"
Eastbrook Hall, built in 1904, was badly damaged by fire in February 1996. The former Methodist hall, owned by London-based Aldersgate Estates, was put on the market in July 2000. There has been much talk but no takers.
Nigel Rice, Bradford Council’s Little Germany coordinator told the T&A: ‘We have a proposal from a developer to turn it into offices. But if nothing has happened within the next couple of months the Little Germany Urban Village Company (a public-private sector partnership) will apply for a compulsory purchase order"
Mr Hohenzollern said car crime in Chapel Street was becoming a major problem.
"We have constantly complained about the lack of lighting to the urban regeneration people at Bradford Council," he said.
"Now we have this wonderful grant that’s going to put in lighting and closed circuit TV cameras; but until that has happened we are going to employ a security man, from next month, during play weeks," he said.
The CCTV and lighting is set to be financed out of a £28m Single Regeneration Bid grant to the I3arkerend, Leeds Road area, which includes Little Germany with its 55 listed buildings.
Although the bulk of that money will be spent elsewhere, Mr Rice said Little Germany’s street lights had already been made brighter and additional lighting was going up on four tall buildings in the vicinity of the Priestley Centre: 14 Chapel Street, the Arts Resource Centre and Hanover and Tayson Houses.
"And we have just heard that we have got £180,000 for nine high quality colour security cameras and the equipment for monitoring the information," Mr Rice added.
He said he hoped work on installing the cameras in Little Germany would start early in the New Year.
by Olwen Vasey, T&A, 29 June 2001
Bradford Council is to put pressure on the owners of the city’s NCP car park after hearing cars were attacked while coundlllors were at meetings.
Councillor David Heseltine told the environment scrutiny committee last night: "We need to lean on them and tell them to get their act together.
"It is very important, people should not have to go from nice, secure streets into a car park and find their cars have been trashed."
But Councilior Stanley King said the car park, in Hall lngs, had security and was constantly patrolled and his vehicle had never been broken into there.
The committee agreed officers should speak to the company as members considered a report on the district’s closed circuit television systems.
Officer John Blackburn said a new state-of-the-art CCTV control room in Britannia House was expected to open this September.
Almost 100 cameras will link into the "nerve centre" in a system which has been expanded through a £1.3 million grant from the Home Office.
Mr Blackburn said a wide ranging code of practice had also been developed for officers who would work in the control room, which included allowing people who requested film footage of themselves to obtain it.
Mr Blackburn said safety was also being stepped up in the district’s car parks. Vicar Lane/Bridge Street; Main Street, Bingley and Sharpe Street would shortly receive Secure by Design status. The designation requires quality lighting, CCTV coverage and improved signs. Mr Blackburn said £50,000 had been spent bringing car parks up to the standard.
He said help points would be provided in the car parks and city and town centres which would link into the new CCTV control centre.
Mr Blackburn added that safety in the district had also been improved after negotiations with Yorkshire Electricity led to a reduction in the repair time from 20 days to 12 days in all cases. He said major faults were usually repaired within two working days.
• Committee members called for a clampdown and prosecution where necessary on litter louts creating mess across the district.
Councillor Michael Walls said: "It is the people of Bradford who are causing the problems and dumping it and the law should definitely be enforced. It should be stopped."
Officers said some council litter-pickers would be given better training after members pointed out that some staff were simply "moving it around".
Letters to the editor (T&A 16 July 2001)
SIR - I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the headline on your report of the council committee meeting that was delighted to hear of well over £1 million being spent to make eight city-centre car parks safer with up-to-date CCTV and a range of security measures.
Saying that `councillors act as their cars were attacked' gave the impression that the decision was stimulated through self-interest, and ignored the fact that this investment had taken many months to achieve and was not related to any particular incident.
There was some anecdotal comment about car park safety but this was incidental to the main story and did not merit that misleading headline.
The word `attacked' is also on the vigorous side and does nothing to allay the fear of crime and the many measures taken by the Council that are leading to a continuing reduction in theft from vehicles.
Councillor Keith Thomson, Chair of the Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee, Heights Lane, Bradford.
by PA REPORTERS, T&A 17 July 2001
Home Secretary David Blunkett today visited the nerve centre of a "Big Brother"-style surveillance programme, which he believes, will provide "mean-ingful and effective" punishment for young offenders.
It came as a 14-year-old joyrider became the first persistent young criminal to be punished under the new scheme, launched in east London, which is designed to track every move he makes.
A £2 million closed circuit TV system run by the local council can recognise youths’ faces if they appear on screen.
The £600,000-a-year system, called the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme (ISSP), also boasts a voice recognition system which telephones juve-niles at set times to check their where-abouts.
"New technology will help us provide a meaningful and effective curfew, but what new technology can’t do is get the young offender to change their behaviour," said Mr Blunkett.
"Actually following it through with supervision on a particular programme that the young person is on is critical if we are going to stop their offending."
If the ISSP system catches the offenders in a place they are not supposed to be, or at a time when they should be taking part in an intensive rehabilitation programme, alarms sound in the control room and youth workers or police are sent to deal with them.
Mr Blunkett said community schemes would be vital in cutting offending, provid-ed the young criminal was a suitable can-didate.
"We know that young offenders’ institu-tions have a very mixed record when the youngsters come out knowing more about crime than when they went in," he said. The 14-year-old boy was today beginning his ISSP after magistrates at Stratford Youth Court in east London imposed a nine-month supervision order yesterday He will wear an electronic tag for six months and have to take part in a range of education and rehabilitation schemes. It was the seventh time the boy had been sentenced by the courts in the last year, said Peter Nicholson, head of the Youth Offending Team at Newham Borough Council. The youth has convictions for a number of motoring offences.
by Kanchan Dutt, T&A, 19 July 2001
Crime figures for West Yorkshire put the county sixth nationwide in the level of crimes per person despite an overall fall in incidents.
The total number of crimes in the county fell by half a per cent to 258,908 between last April and this March - a drop of almost 19 per cent since April 1995.
But a figure of more than 12 crimes per hundred people is the sixth worst in the country - though below the average for metropolitan police areas.
The biggest rise in Bradford was in violence against people, up almost five per cent to 4,703, but thefts from motor vehicles fell more than nine per cent to 8,186.
Councillor Clive Richardson (Con, Thornton), a member of the West Yorkshire Police Authority, said: "What these figures show is a need for more officers because people feel safe when they see police in uniform.
"CCTV will help with violent crime but at the end of the day we need more bodies on the beat.
"I don't think we will be up to 1997 staffing figures in West Yorkshire until 2003 at the earliest. In the last 12 months we have taken on 240 new officers, but 230 experienced officers have reached retirement age."
Violent crime in Bradford rose by 4.8 per cent compared to the previous year, sexual offences fell by 8.7 per cent, robbery rose by one per cent, house break-ins by 1.1 per cent, vehicle theft fell by 8.3 per cent and thefts from vehicles by 0.3 per cent.
The crime detection rate for West Yorkshire fell from 25 to 23 per cent, just below the Yorkshire and Humber average of 24 per cent.
Greg Dyche, Home Office crime reduction officer for the region, said: "There are no quick wins on crime, it is a long term investment.
"We have had real success with burglary and car crime but this was hard-earned. One continued area of concern is the continued increase in robbery, which rose by 19.2 per cent."
West Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable Steve Smith said: "Violent crime makes up a small proportion of overall crime, but is the area which causes most concern among the public.
"People will be pleased to see that the figure has fallen and that 71 per cent of such offences were detected.
"Robbery increased 22.4 per cent during the year, which is of concern, however much is being done to tackle robbery, identified as a particular problem in metropolitan areas.
"The Target initiative is making significant inroads into crime too, though having been launched in April this year, its effects will not be reflected in these figures.
"Initiatives are already in place to address the areas of concern and paying dividends."
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