A summer's night on patrol with Dorset Police in Bournemouth

That was the verdict of officers on patrol in the town centre on Friday night.

The Daily Echo joined Dorset Police on the beat in known hot spot areas throughout the evening to experience how the force is clamping down on anti-social behaviour.

During the shift, officers seized alcohol and cannabis from an intoxicated teenager and took her home to her parents.

They also issued several dispersal orders following suspected drug activity and nuisance before ensuring the Friday night fireworks display went ahead without any trouble.

Speaking at the end of the Operation Relentless patrol, Acting Sergeant Phil Robbins told the Daily Echo: “From a policing point of view, it was a very successful evening.

“With the increase in footfall due to the fireworks this evening, we were anticipating a higher number of people and that can sometimes lead to a higher number of incidents.

“However, we have been very lucky and our hard work has paid off from intervening early in the evening issues that could have become a problem later on have been dealt with and everyone has had a very family-friendly and successful evening.

“Getting out early doors in a high-vis presence, identifying those problem individuals early on and dealing with them, using the dispersal powers that we have and preventing incidents before they happen.

“We are midway through summer now, the fireworks have just started, I think we have been helped by the weather tonight, going forward on hotter days we would expect more people here but this approach has been proven to work and it is something we are going to continue doing.”

The officers were also joined for part of the evening by police and crime commissioner for Dorset David Sidwick.

David Sidwick

He told the Daily Echo tackling anti-social behaviour was “really, really important”.

“It is one of the reasons I was elected. For basically three years people were telling me for them an important thing they wanted sorting was anti-social behaviour,” said Mr Sidwick.

“I wasn’t seeing it being given the priority that they felt it should be, that I felt it should be, so I am really pleased we have got Dorset Police and Operation Relentless, which is a variety of measures and operations, and we will be carrying this on until we drive down anti-social behaviour – that’s the plan.”

Asked what impact the operation can have, he said: “It gives greater confidence to the public that they are being heard, that actually their issues are Dorset Police’s issues.

“If you get on top of anti-social behaviour, you can start addressing some of the larger issues, some of the more violent things we have got going on, drugs for example.

“You can very easily see that someone who falls into a bit of anti-social behaviour, it doesn’t get stopped, they don’t get on the radar of social services, for example, and then they start doing worse things.

“This is a way of, a bit like in New York and the very famous initiative there, if we can sweat some of the small stuff, we will stop some of the big stuff.”

He added: “People want to see their police officers but it is a little bit more than that. They want to connect with them as well, so I have got a whole raft of measures which you will hear more about going forward all about the connection between police and the public.”

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