New Peterborough police chief vows to get the basics right to 'lock up the bad guys'

Peterborough’s new police chief has promised to focus on the basics of policing to ensure ‘the bad guys are locked up’ and victims are treated with care and respect.

Superintendent Ben Martin is the new Area Commander for Peterborough and Fenland, having taken over from Superintendent Neil Billany at the end of last year.

Having worked in Cambridgeshire for the last 18 years, Supt Martin has been in a variety of roles, predominantly as a detective both in Cambridge and Peterborough, working in investigative roles covering crimes from violence to drugs, burglary to rape, and domestic abuse to counter terrorism.

More recently he spent a relatively long period of time working within the Professional Standards Department for Beds, Cambs and Herts.

‘Policing is very straight forward’

In the first of two stories, Supt Martin spoke about what his focus would be in the job – and the challenges facing the force at the moment.

Speaking to The Peterborough Telegraph, Supt Martin said that while it was often portrayed as complicated, policing was ‘straight forward’ – and he and his teams would be focusing on getting the basics right. He said: “All I’m focused on is trying to get the basics right. I know my predecessor probably said the same thing. Policing can be portrayed as being complicated. Actually it is not. It is very straight forward. Get to the jobs quickly when members of the public phone us up, do a really good job when we get there, gather the evidence, find out what happened, treat victims with respect, with care, be professional, lock up the bad guys, and do our paperwork right so we can achieve enduring justice. That is really our job, it is really quite straightforward.”

‘We don’t have the ability to put a bobby on every beat’

One thing that residents often talk about is the ‘lack of the bobby on the beat’ – and while Supt Martin said it was no-longer viable to have that service, he wanted residents to feel they could approach officers to raise concerns.

He said: “We go where the demand takes us. I’m trying to improve visibility and engagement. We don’t have the ability to put a bobby on every beat, we are demand led so we go to incidents where incidents occur. We have a neighbourhood policing model in Peterborough which has improved in recent times, we have cops out and about, engaging with local communities and trying to find out their problems.

"To improve visibility generally though, what I am asking of my colleagues and teams is not just to drive fast on blue lights to an incident, that is not visibility. What people want to see is the car stop, the bobby put his or her hat on, and engage with members of the public, and to talk to people and understand what their issues are, what they are thinking, what they are feeling, and if there is anything they want to talk to police about.

"We haven’t got the capacity to do that all the time every day, but where we can I’m encouraging my officers here to do that, to engage with the public and listen to their concerns. It is a national issue for policing, because there is a recognition of that is what people are asking.”

More Cambridgeshire officers than ever before

While the force does have challenges with demand, there are currently more officers than ever before in Cambridgeshire, after a number of new recruits joined – but that has led to other issues.

Supt Martin said: “We have more police than ever in Cambridgeshire, because of the Government uplift programme, we had about 240 new cops – yes we had lost some, but we have more police than ever.

"One of the challenges that we are working through is experience, because of the way we have recruited, there is an experience gap as there is a lot of new people – they are excellent people, but they are not as experience yet, and rapidly getting up to speed with how to investigate a crime, how to respond to the public, how to deal with neighbourhood issues, all of that together makes things take a little longer. In time it will get smoother, slicker, better.”

The second part of the interview, looking at specific issues in Peterborough, will be on the Peterborough Telegraph website this week.