Community safety

Community safety affects us all

A new Community Safety Team has been appointed at Bedfordshire County Council to support work to make the county a safer place to live.

Community Safety Manager, John Seamarks, together with Community Safety Officer, Karen Lang, bring extensive experience of community policing and work with young offenders in the county to their new roles.

Community Safety was a key action point from the last Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) and the team are busy updating Bedfordshire County Council's Community Safety Strategy to cover all services.

To achieve this overview, each service area has been asked to nominate a Contact Officer to help the team to identify the broad range of community safety issues covered by the Council's work. For example, Transport and Education can assess the impact of safer routes to school.

The team also has links with the Borough and District councils, the Police, and other key agencies with a community safety role, to support and develop work to reduce anti-social behaviour, neighbourhood crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence.

John explains: "Community safety is not just about reducing crime. It is about improving people's perceptions of the issues and reducing their fear of crime so that they can feel safe where they live. To take action we need to get an overall picture of what is happening across the county."

Karen adds: " We are currently explaining to staff just how broad the area of community safety is. We are very keen to hear from anyone who feels their work contributes to community safety in some way."