Mike Barton: What makes my force the best in the country

WELL, I’ve got good news in this column and believe me dear readers, the continuing bite of austerity has not given me many reasons to be cheerful over the last 12 months.

Making people redundant to balance the books is not why I joined the job, but, as a boss, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.

Sympathy should not lie with my challenges but with those people whose careers have been foreshortened.

So why am I so upbeat (sorry for the pun)? Durham Constabulary is officially the best police force in the country.

We are inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and they have adjudged Durham to be outstanding in efficiency terms. The three questions they posed were: how well do we use our resources; how sustainable and affordable is our workforce; and how sustainable is our financial position in the short and long term. We were graded outstanding in all three, no other police force was.

Currently we are also the only force in the country to be graded as outstanding at investigating crime and the only force to have two outstandings out of three grades for effectiveness (we were graded good in crime reduction).

So this column sounds a bit like self-publicity, but I say fill your boots when the accolades come along.

What does it mean for you? It means that you can trust Durham Constabulary, your local police force, to answer the phone promptly, listen carefully to what you need, send well trained people immediately if needed or when convenient to you and to collect the clues necessary to bring criminals to book.

What makes us that little bit different is we think differently. It is not enough to arrest people and send them to court, we have to reduce the chances of those people reoffending.

Currently, in our Checkpoint programme, we have 245 active cases of people engaging with services to get help.

One recent example was an 18-year-old woman arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

She was arrested at the scene of a disturbance at a pub.

As part of the Checkpoint scheme, the woman apologised in a face-to-face meeting and got help to deal with her alcohol intake.

She has since successfully completed her four month programme and it has changed her life around completely.

Examples such as this show we are now in the business of changing lives because that is how you break the cycle of people going back to prison causing repeated misery to the poor victims of crime.

I do a regular video blog to all our staff and it will come as no surprise that I have already circulated the good news to them because, quite frankly, it is down to their hard work that we are in such an enviable position.

There will be many family members and friends of people who work for the Constabulary who read this column and I haven’t thanked you yet because working in the police can be quite stressful. All of our staff appreciate the support they get from their family so give yourselves a pat on the back.

Now for the hard bit. I could retire tomorrow and leave on a high. But that’s not going to happen. Mrs Barton is not yet ready to have a retired Mike Barton foisted upon her so we’ve got to stay at the top and I have every confidence that our talented people will do just that.

One reason I am confident we will stay there is that the public are increasingly supporting us in everything we do, for example, Community Speedwatch involves trained members of the community tackling speeding where is endangers local people.

There is a difficulty in all of this. We now have visits from all other police forces finding out how we do it. We are not in a competitive business so we show them and regularly now Durham officers travel to other forces to advise them.

I suppose the good news for the people of County Durham and Darlington is that we are using these trips to find out what other people are doing that we are not.

Although we are outstanding, we are not perfect. We receive over 1,000 calls-a-day and we sometimes drop the ball. If you are a reader who doesn’t believe we are outstanding because of the poor service we offered then please get in touch so we can learn and improve.

I CAN already tell you that we need to improve in the way we tackle child sexual exploitation and cyber crime.

Both these threats have emerged with some venom over the last few years and, like all other organisations, we have had to catch up.

In cyber crime, old people like me have had to learn new words like “Instagram” and “Snapchat” (if you don’t know, ask someone under 16).

In terms of child sexual exploitation, I fear that this is a greater threat than any of us realise.

Young people are now regularly putting themselves at risk sexting photographs of themselves in states of undress.

And, of course, they don’t know who can see these images.

Internet safety is everybody’s responsibility and being a parent in 2015 means you have to be more internet savvy than your children.