Shrewsbury police sergeant 'all in favour' of more bobbies on the beat
A serving police officer has told a local Rotary club that he would personally like to see more police officers in Shrewsbury Town Centre.
But whether that will happen, Sergeant Gary Lansdale said ’I remain positive that senior officers are doing their best to make this happen.’
Speaking candidly to members of Shrewsbury Severn Rotary Club, the sergeant – who heads the West Merica Police safer neighbourhood team covering Shrewsbury town centre – was responding to a question ‘you never see a police officer in town’.
“I would challenge that because I have a dedicated team for the town, but due to numbers on the team, one could be at one end of Pride Hill one minute and the next dealing with something in Wyle Cop the next minute, so they are spread thinly,” he told Rotarians.
“Since September I have been in charge of a dedicated team of officers covering Shrewsbury town centre. We currently have two Police Constables and one Police Community Support Officer and a rotation of student officers on attachments. In addition to this Shrewsbury is still covered by 24/7 uniform patrol team.
“From a profile perspective I do think there should be more police officers in the town, and Inspector Ben Tanfield and I routinely bring this to the attention of Shropshire command team around the problems we face - and that we need more officers in the team.
“A lot of responsibility falls on the uniform side of policing. We live in hope that we shall see a big increase in police. I would like to see it, but whether it will happen, I don’t know.”
Dealing with the question of people sleeping on the streets, Sergeant Lansdale said this was not something that we could police our way out of and it needed a multi-agency approach to tackle the underlying issues around this, such as mental health, drugs/alcohol addiction and personal circumstances.
“We are pushing for that,” he said. “Other agencies have come on board and it has improved. But it is still an issue – and always will be an issue. We can’t stop it 100%. We are hoping things we have put in place have more structure to them and there have been success stories.”
He admitted that the benches at the top of Pride Hill were currently the ‘biggest bugbear’ and the police were trying to keep on top of it ‘as much as we can.’
“We now have much more structure with multi agencies working together. The police, council and other teams are meeting regularly to discuss problems and how to deal with them.”
In his talk, Sergeant Lansdale interested Rotarians in a resume of his police career which began in 1996, subsequently including a lengthy spell in CID specialist departments and how he met his wife Morwenna of 19 years through the service, adding that she is now a Superintendent. He retires in one year and 10 months.
Anyone interested in learning more about Shrewsbury Severn Rotary Club can contact gdmw@hotmail.co.uk
