Shropshire Star comment: We must not drop our guard
Shropshire isn’t perfect, and it isn’t crime-free.
But the message from the latest crime figures is that things could be an awful lot worse and Salopians can count themselves lucky compared to some other areas.
Like, for instance, London, where we seem to have fatal stabbings every other day, or other major cities blighted by violent gang-related and drug-related crimes.
The latest findings show a rise of eight per cent across England and Wales in offences involving knives or sharp instruments. Violent crime recorded by police has surged by 19 per cent. Homicides – murder and manslaughter – are up too, to the highest total since 2007.
It is a terrible picture, and one in which the West Mercia patch, which includes Shropshire, is a bubble of relative tranquillity, from which we can look out in horror at what is happening.
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But people living in the county will naturally be most concerned with what is happening here, on the doorstep. In West Mercia, violent crime is virtually static – it has risen by one per cent.
While it is the most serious crimes which naturally tend to grab the attention, in everyday life it is not things like murder and armed robbery which have a direct impact on ordinary people, as they are relatively rare.
Statistically speaking you are much more likely to be a victim of a crime of lesser magnitude which nevertheless can cause untold misery, such as burglary.
Crime overall in West Mercia has fallen by 2.4 per cent. One area in which the work of the police is demonstrably bearing fruit is drugs offences, which are very significantly down in the patch – and we all know how drugs can be a driver for crime.
In welcoming the figures, West Mercia’s police and crime commissioner John Campion has stressed that there is no room for complacency.
Indeed not. Crime is not a matter of graphs and statistics. It is a matter of real life experiences. Being told that crime is going down is little comfort when you are a victim, and there is a travelling breed of professional criminals who come here to prowl in the belief that Shropshire is a soft touch.
It is not of course as if crime has stopped in Shropshire, although the figures give us a wider context in assessing the ups and downs. So far, so good – but the hard work goes on.
