Special team set to cut burglaries
10:00am Wednesday 8th February 2012 in News
Det Insp Mike Rees with Det Con Kev Colledge with the dedicated burglary car
WILTSHIRE Police have been so impressed with a new scheme to tackle burglaries that was piloted in Swindon that they have rolled it out across the county.
Dubbed the Burglary Car, the initiative sees a specialist team of burglary police as the first responders to every report of burglary.
The scheme has been run in Swindon in the last few years and the police decided to roll it out in the north and west of the county due to its success.
It will also be implemented in the south of the county later this year.
The Burglary Car is being headed up by Detective Inspector Mike Rees, who was part of the Swindon burglary squad when it was set up in the 1990s.
Det Insp Rees said: “We have been doing this in Swindon for a while and it has been very successful.
“Until now you would have had a uniformed officer responding to reports of burglary but now it will be a plain-clothes specialist officer.
“They will be able to provide people with burglary packs which give advice on crime prevention and give them contacts for their local Neighbourhood Watch.
“It also allows our specialist officers to get the most information possible from that key first visit.
“They are trained and know burglars very well.
“They can often deduce who could be responsible by the modus operandi.
“If we can get an idea of who the offender might be we can then work with our teams back at the station to make arrests.
“It is about a much more professional service, a much more focused service for the victim.”
And it seems the scheme had an immediate impact as the team had a result on their first day of the operation on Monday.
Det Insp Rees said: “On our first day we went to a burglary in Trowbridge “And, because of the specialist knowledge of the officer, we made an arrest of an individual later that day.
“This approach obviously worked in Swindon and, if that first day is anything to go by, there is no reason why it cannot work in the rest of Wiltshire.”
