Arleston Neighbourhood Watch - April 2021 Newsletter

Welcome to this month's edition of our newsletter!

We hope you are all keeping well & you had a good Easter 🐣

Crime Stats - February 2021

We are pleased to confirm the crime stats for Arleston & College for February 2021

As you will see, crime overall has continued to drop within our local area which is great news. We appreciate we have been in a national lockdown during the past few months & that daily life has changed for a lot of us. However, with restrictions being lifted slowly, we hope that we continue to see a reduction in crimes taking place across our community. 

Please continue to report any crimes or suspicions to the Police 

We would like to remind all residents about how important it is to report instances of crime or suspicious activity to the police. 

You may hold the piece of the missing puzzle, so as soon as you become of something that isn't right, please call the Police via 101. Alternatively, please call 999 in an emergency.

Car crime prevention 

During the first week of April, we have been sharing information about keeping your car protected from car crime.

Did you know that a car is stolen every 10 minutes? 

Make sure you leave your car locked. Park it in a lit area if you can & always empty your car of your personal belongings. Do not keep any vehicle details inside the vehicle either. 

Due to an increase in car crime across the country, we will continue to share crime prevention tips in future newsletters.

Should you become aware of a car being broken in to or yo witness it being vandalised, please call the Police via 101.  Your evidence may help the police to establish who was responsible. 

Whilst we are on the subject of car crime, there have been a number of reports recently of catalytic converter theft. A number of vehicles have been targeted in Wellington. Please take a look through the prevention tips below from West Mercia Police. Alternatively, have a look at our last newsletter for more information. 

New Feature 

We are pleased to announce that we have been developing a new feature during the past few days! 

We will be launching our very own website for existing members of our scheme to use. We also welcome residents of Arleston to visit it too! 

Alot of time and effort has gone in to it's early stages of development. We hope that you like it and that you will continue to refer to it in the future too. 

Our website features information about our scheme, how to join us, benefits of joining, reviews, newsletters, videos & much much more! 

We wanted all information in respect of our neighbourhood watch scheme and our community projects to be easily accessible and in one place. In the future, we will keep the website updated with the latest news from our area and any future campaigns or community events. 

As you may already know, we are not only passionate about reducing crime and preventing crime in our community. We are also very passionate about making our community a better place to live in too! From reducing the amount of litter on our streets to inappropriate parking, we hope you will join forces with us to resolve issues within our community. We hope that this will help to bring our community together too.

Watch this space for more information about our new website coming soon.....

Contact us 

We want residents to feel that they are able to come to us with any concerns that they may have within the community. 

We must stress, that in the event of any crime taking place or any suspicious activity taking place that the first call you make is to the police. 

Once you have informed the police of what is happening or what has happened, we would like you to get in touch with us to let us know too. 

In receiving information from yourselves about a crime that has taken place/is taking place, this will give us the opportunity to alert other residents aswell. Please contact us via our Facebook Page and send us a message to raise your concerns. Once we have received the message, we will then post a message to our members with us on our official scheme. We will also notify those with us in our Facebook group too. 

We did suggest notifying residents via a what's app group but there was very little interest in this as an option. Therefore, please continue to send us a message via our Facebook Page or send us an email to arlestonneighbourhoodwatch@gmail.com 

Future events 

As restrictions are gradually being lifted in respect of covid 19, we will look to arrange events for our community to attend.

Our first event that we would like to invite our fellow neighbours to is the Big Lunch which will take place on Saturday 5th June 2021. The big lunch will be held during our very first "Neighbourhood Watch Week". 

We hope that as many people as possible will join us for this get together.  Venue to be confirmed in the near future. We would appreciate some help in organising this. If you have experience of organising a big event, please let us know. Your help would be much appreciated. 

We anticipate that this will be a bring your own lunch event! If anyone would like to provide any food or drink for this event, please let us know. 

Also, depending on location we may look to provide some kind of entertainment for families too. These are all ideas that we have at the moment. Nothing is set in stone, however if you would like to make a suggestion or you can help on the day, please let us know! 

Parents please remain vigilant 

We have been made aware of several instances during the past few weeks where young girls have been watched by older men. 

The girls have all been out in public, either walking home from school or playing after school. One female was coasted by a man in a white VW Touran on Churchill Road as she walked home from school. Unfortunately, the witness was not able to confirm a vehicle registration number. 

On the same day, a young girl of primary age was out playing on her bike on John Broad Avenue. An occupant in a car witnessed this girl being watched by an asian man who was a driver in another vehicle. 

We did make the police aware of both incidents as soon as we were notified about them. Please may we remind all residents to remain vigilant. Make sure you know where your child/children is at all times. Make sure they are able to get hold of you in an emergency. 

If anyone should witness anything of this nature, please call 101 and advise the police of what you have seen. Once you have notified the police, please get in touch with us so we can make other residents aware. The last thing we want to happen is for any child to come to any kind of harm. 

Drug Dealing 

We have received a number of concerns about drug dealing in and around Arleston. This continues to be a worry for quite a few residents. We are aware of several locations where drug dealing takes place. 

We have fed this information back to the police on behalf of residents. However, in the future, can we please ask you to call the Police as soon as you become aware of a drug deal taking place. Once the police have been informed, please notify us via our messenger on our Facebook page.