Sad times

I start my blog today with some very sad news. Our friend and colleague PC Craig Postlethwaite passed away this week after being involved in a collision in a nearby town. My thoughts are with PC Postlethwaite family at this very sad time. His funeral is being held this coming Monday. It is such a sad loss for the Constabulary and for all the people who knew and loved Craig.  

I have not had much time to update my blog in recent weeks due to being busy with both family life and work life. I have still been out on duty but have been working with my S/Inspector and S/Chief Inspector to improve the team where I work. This involves developing the team with additional training and by planning operations.

Part of my portfolio for my NPT is to develop and run Roads Policing operations and in conjunction with regular NPT supervisors work out where best to help reduce collisions. Recently I set up and ran an event in the local NPT area to target speeding vehicles. This was an education campaign and helped us to teach drivers the danger of speed on the roads. We spent time in various areas across the NPT including St Bees. This area has been outlined as a priority by the local Policing teams and community alike. We stopped around 8 vehicles in St Bees all for doing in excess of 30MPH. The drivers all took the information on board and were very pleased when they found out they would not be getting a ticket for the offence they had committed. We received lots of positive information from the local public, it is amazing how much thanks you get for attempting to solve a problem such as this in a community area. People really do appreciate seeing Police on their streets and it still humbles me when they thank us for the work we have done.

We spent time during the day around the area moving from St Bees in to Whitehaven itself then towards Distington a local town with speeding vehicle problems. We stopped more vehicles again and gave out various penalty tickets and producers for various offences. Again this was all received well by the public. We got the odd face pulled by people as they drove past but we are trying to make the road safer for them and their families!

Another couple of things of note from the previous weeks are the Streetsafe operation we ran along with various ASB patrols. The Streetsafe operation was run in conjunction with local charities and organisations such as Social Services. This operation is designed to make sure youths are safe when on the streets and if they are found drunk they get returned to their homes. This operation was quite successful and saw lots of youths returned to their homes and parents given advice. An ASB operation was also run in conjunction with PCSOs where officers tackled various anti social issues in the BCU.

We recently also did training on Fast Roads Policing, this allows us to be safer on the local roads and protect vehicle accident scenes.

I am looking forward to running another operation soon!

If you require any information or would be interested in joining the Special Constabulary please contact our Coordinator PC Shirley Murray on 101.

Nick.