Partnership

The Safer Stockton Partnership (SSP) is a thematic arm of Stockton Renaissance which deals with crime, anti social behaviour and substance misuse related crime and anti social behaviour. The partnership is made up of the following members:

    • Catalyst
    • Cleveland Fire Authority
    • Cleveland Police
    • Cleveland Police Authority (to be replaced by Police and Crime Commissioners in 2012)
    • Drugs and Alcohol Action Team
    • DurhamTeesValley Probation Trust
    • H M Prison Holme House
    • the four Local Area Partnership Boards
    • Neighbourhood Watch
    • Safe in Tees Valley
    • Stockton Adult Protection Committee
    • Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council
    • Stockton Primary Care Trust (to be replaced by GP commissioning consortia in 2013)
    • Stockton Youth Offending Service
    • Tristar Homes Ltd
    • University of Durham Queen’s Campus
    • the Vela Group
    • Victim Support

The strategic plan for SSP is produced every three years and is known as the Community Safety Plan.  The current plan covers the three year period April 2011 to March 2014.  This Plan will be reviewed and refreshed yearly and will be updated to take account of the yearly Partnership Strategic Assessment.  This document provides information on any emerging issues to direct what the Partnership needs to focus on. 

To read more about this Plan please download a copy now.

The key priorities within the current plan have been identified by residents during our main consultation period which ran from August to November 2010. We received 5,222 responses to our consultation from residents and visitors to the Borough and they told us that the top six key priorities for the next three years should be:

  • Anti Social Behaviour
  • Alcohol related crime/ASB
  • Violent crime
  • Drug related offending
  • Criminal damage
  • Domestic violence  

All crime and anti social behaviour is important to us but we will focus our efforts on the top six concerns chosen by residents and in the areas where crime and anti social behaviour (ASB) is significantly higher than the borough average. Domestic Violence is around 35% of all Violent Crime so we will combine these two categories together and have Emerging Issues as the sixth key priority for rising crime types identified in the yearly Partnership Strategic Assessment.

We also asked residents which types of anti social behaviour should be prioritised within the ASB category and residents identified the following:

  • Vandalism
  • Alcohol misuse
  • People being drunk and rowdy
  • Poor parental responsibility
  • Threats/verbal abuse
  • Street drinking

Since 2006 the reducing re-offending agenda has evolved and in Stockton in 2009 we established an Integrated Offender Management (IOM) structure which is an overarching framework to bring together partners to prioritise interventions with the most persistent adult offenders. The Police and Crime Act 2009 placed a duty on local Community Safety Partnerships to formulate and implement a strategy for adult and young offenders and this drives our IOM work.

Our multi agency IOM team is now well established working with Prolific and Priority Offenders (PPO), people subject to a Community Order with a Drug Rehabilitation Requirement (DRR) and high crime causers. With this approach the focus is on the offender not the offence and it entails identifying and using a dual support and/or enforcement approach with the relatively small numbers of repeat offenders who disproportionately cause harm to the community. Where possible we will use this approach for the operational activity for each of key priority in this plan. The IOM team are currently working with 117 offenders.

To complement this, our annual Partnership Strategic Assessment uses a victim, offender location approach to interrogate the various partner data sets to give us an overall picture of what is happening across the Borough.

This allows us to identify repeat victims and those who are vulnerable in our community, repeat locations as well as repeat offenders so that we can target our resources more effectively.

 What the data tells us:

  • There were 87 repeat streets and all but one of these is in our top five wards (Stockton Town Centre, Mandale & Victoria, Newtown, Parkfield & Oxbridge and Hardwick).
  • Repeat victimisation differs depending on the type of crime.  We know that for Domestic Violence there is a 10% repeat rate.
  • For anti social behaviour all repeat callers to the police, the ASB team and housing providers are analysed daily and if it is thought that a caller may be vulnerable they are contacted to identify any concerns.
  • The number of Hate crimes has decreased over the PSA period from 119 to 108. Of those 99 were race related (three of the victims were asylum seekers) and nine homophobic.
  • The majority of suspects for crimes are male (81%) as are the majority of those who are arrested (81%). 
  • We have 33 PPOs, all of whom are male, with 70% of them aged between 25-34.
  • 47% of female clients with Probation are victims of domestic violence and 37% of male clients are perpetrators of domestic violence.
  • There were 265 first time entrants (FTE) to the criminal justice system. Of those 74% were male with the highest crime type for males being criminal damage and for females shoplifting.

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