South Yorkshire Police Refuse to Help on Remembrance Sunday

In a truly bizarre cutback of suicidal political proportions South Yorkshire Police are informing the British Legion and other key stakeholders that officers will no longer be sent to close roads for the Remembrance Sunday procession in Dinnington.

Organisers have been told they will have to pay Rotherham Council to close the roads and then pay to hire their own marshals to stop people wandering into the road.

This is the cyanide on the cake for Dinnington which recently had its Sergeant and safer neighbourhood team removed and replaced by a pair of PCSOs who will be shared with other villages. Dinnington Police station will be closed to save £12,000 per year.

Labour Police Commissioner Alan Billings promised that Police would have access to a room in the Dinnington Resource Centre 24 hours a day. The Police themselves have said that the room will be used as a base and not manned, the public can meet the Police there if they happen to be using it at the time.

It will NOT be manned 24 hours a day as local Labour politician Judy Dalton seems to think. Please could we ask local Councillors like Katherine Wilson to NOT re-tweet things without first establishing them as fact.

WRONG!

A few other rumours have been circulating regarding Policing and we can offer the following…

1. Dinnington will have two PCSOs most of the time, they will generally work during the day, but not usually after 10pm.
2. They will be patrolling in cars, on bikes, on foot and occasionally using the bus.
3. The Police 999 service usually comes from Maltby, NO restriction has been places on officers as to what route they use to get here, local rumours had suggested that they could no longer use back roads.
4. The PCSOs will NOT have to commute from Maltby via bike or bus, we are told they are usually in a car or dropped off by car.
5. Rotherham Police are not short of cars, they have on average 1 car for every two front line officers which is regarded as optimal.
6. The room as Dinnington Resource Centre will come online in June and will be manned from time to time only. It will NOT be manned at night.
7. Crime cannot be reported via the Resource Centre, call 101.

If you have any information or anything regarding policing you would like us to look into please feel free to leave a comment below.

As for Remembrance Sunday we would expect a retraction of this rather clumsy policy so stay tuned.

Dinnington Police Station to Close!

Dinnington Police Station is officially closing!

Run down for decades the building is now merely a base for the very small team of PCSOs left in Rother Valley South. But now we will be losing it altogether as confirmed by the Area Commander at the latest Rother Valley South Area Assembly meeting in Woodsetts.

Also in attendance was the Police Commissioner who gave a rather uncertain and not very confident speech about the need to save money and cut back on services. He said the future would be sharing of facilities with the other blue light services like ambulance and fire, which are not to be found anywhere near Dinnington either!

Our beleaguered PCSOs (no Constables or Sergeant are now to be found in Dinnington at all) will be based for part of their day at the Dinnington Resource Centre. This seems to have become a theme, if you want to cut a service or close a building move it there.

At least folks can have a read in the library while they wait for the fuzz to show up. Also don’t expect any out of hours services, there won’t be any!

Our suggestion? Why don’t the Police rent a couple of houses to use as bases in Dinnington? suitable roads which spring to mind would be Leicester Road and Doe Quarry Terrace. The rents are low and the Police would have very little distance to travel to their ummm…. “customer base”

Not that we are suggesting everyone on these streets are criminals, but we have spoken to many people from these roads who would welcome a larger Police presence, not the cut down service we seem to be destined for.

Just our 2p……

 

Does Dinnington Police Station have a Future?

What’s actually inside Dinnington Police Station? Police Constables and a Sergeant? Bigfoot? Nope, and we’ll be lucky if it’s still standing in a year or so the way we’re going!

It’s not secret that the Police are facing cutbacks, money is tight, budgets will be squeezed for at least another 5 years as the government tries desperately to balance the books without inconveniencing rich people.

Dinnington Police Station hasn’t been an actual Police Station for many years, one of the former officers once joked to me that if I were to knock on the door all the officers inside would just hide under the table (assuming they still have tables) (and officers come to that)

The 999 response service has now operated from Maltby for donkeys years and although the Police can still surprise us with good response times (like the last time I had to dial 999) this surely can’t be as good as a service based and operating from Dinnington.

Officers laugh when you ask them about the Blackberries and tablet computers that senior officers refer to in press releases and many types of crime now go un-investigated.

When I last asked the Police to view a computer file and tell me what they thought to it I was told they don’t have any computers, they’d all been sent to Hull (?!)

When I asked if the finger print man could come and look at my wife’s car which had just had a wheel stolen I was told (politely) that he wouldn’t be turning up.

Rumours are now afoot that Dinnington Police Station might now be finally going the way of the Dodo, extinct altogether with all services for Rother Valley South withdrawn to Maltby.

When I’ve reported crime recently it is more and more obvious that the Police have little or no idea on who the local villains and yobbos are any more, they aren’t in control, they are just reacting to events as best they can.

How can a policing team based in Maltby know where to find Johnny Scumbag from North Anston who’s just drove into you on his uninsured motorbike?

We are 8% of the Rotherham Borough and you’d think that would entitle us to 8% of a share of the resources, but money and staff are still concentrated in the large metro areas like Rotherham and Sheffield. The law of the wild west is descending on the more rural and remote areas like Dinnington and Anston.

Rotherham Council are constantly telling us that we are a “Principal Town” and when they are looking to build swathes of new houses on our countryside this does seem to be the case. When it comes to resources like policing and leisure facilities we are reminded of the realities of being in a rural location!

More news as we get it!