Sussex Police hold day of action in Worthing

Sussex Police held a day of action at Worthing Railway station.

Transcript

00:00I'm Chief Inspector Sarah Leadbeater, I work for Sussex Police. I am the Operations Chief

00:05Inspector for West Sussex and I've been with Sussex for 18 years. So Operation Parkside is

00:10a multi-agency response to tackling anti-social behaviour, serious violence and other criminality

00:16along the southern network. So the idea is with partners, the day of action today we're here at

00:23Worthing train station and what we're looking to do is to engage with people that are using

00:28the rail network to engage with members of public and local businesses to understand

00:33what their perception is of crime and to also understand what's going on locally.

00:38Yeah I don't think it's anything specific that we can link to Covid but we do see obviously spikes

00:44of crime occur. We do see it across the rail network, we had some particular issues in Barnham

00:49over the summer and it's things like anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, violent offences and

00:56for some of the local businesses it's things like theft shoplifting. Hi there I'm Alex O'Keefe,

01:01I'm Community Safety Manager for West Sussex County Council and we're here today at Worthing

01:06station as part of Operation Parkside. Really interesting talking to young people how important

01:10the rail network is for them, they don't have access to cars and things and they don't really

01:14have a choice as well often so their feelings of safety and well-being on the network are different

01:19to adults so there's nuances to how people feel in those environments. I think that

01:26it's important to have guardianship in spaces so having partnerships of agencies of police,

01:33Southern Rail, the County Council all working together to make places safer is really important.

01:39One of the big pieces of work we're doing is speaking to residents about what they would

01:44like to see different so we need to listen and hear and try and implement those things

01:49and that's kind of a concept known as contextual safeguarding so it's

01:53how you make those places safer within themselves.