Policing Peterborough: How 22 Criminal Behaviour Orders help to stop city's prolific offenders

I also hope you saw my comment that we are also not at the levels we were at before COVID-19.

We have also seen sizeable reductions in serious sexual offences and commercial burglaries in recent months.

It is fair to say we know the relatively small group of people who are regularly committing crime in the city well. It is also fair to say we spend a lot of our time dealing with these people – picking up the pieces of their actions with victims, arresting them, getting them doctors in custody to make sure they are fit to be interviewed, interviewing them and then spending time getting a charging decision from the Crown Prosecution Service. Then preparing case files, sending disclosure schedules and attending court to hopefully see justice done.

Virtually every link in the above process has a failure rate, a witness can’t quite remember who they saw committing the crime, the victim who doesn’t want the hassle and stress of attending court (although to reassure you we have a dedicated team here in Peterborough who support victims and witnesses through every step of this journey).

One way to target prolific offenders is the use of Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBOs). A CBO is granted by a Magistrate after application by the police or council. The application will normally include offending history, victim personal statements, a community harm statement and a map of where we would like to prevent the person going, or a list of conditions that we believe will stop most of their offending, such as a night-time curfew for someone who breaks into cars at night, or not entering certain shops when all they do is steal things from there.

By putting the CBO in place, we no longer rely entirely on witnesses, or people with already busy and demanding lives having to attend court. Many of the breaches we investigate are proved either through CCTV evidence or the statements of police officers and local authority staff.

We currently have 22 CBOs in place for Peterborough, these are to prevent issues such as anti-social behaviour in the city centre, shoplifting, theft from vehicles, violence, drug dealing and burglary. We see these as one of the most effective ways to tackle those who are hurting the city the most and will be actively pushing for more CBOs in future.

Clearly the best outcome is that someone stops committing crime of their own choice, we work extensively with the probation and prison services, as well as other groups across the area to try to divert people away from lifestyle choices that result in them committing crime. Where someone does not want to change, or for whatever reason can’t, it is on the police to do something decisive and proactive to stop them and CBOs are a key part of us doing that.