Police chief celebrates New Year with lowest crime rates

Tuesday 03 January 2017

The official figures aren't out yet but the Island's Police Chief is getting ready to celebrate the lowest crime rates in Jersey in history.

Mike Bowron said that at the start of Christmas week, there had been 2,832 crimes in 2016, that's a drop of almost 30% over the last five years.

Mr Bowron said: "We have the lowest crime rate in the history of Jersey as far as moderating counting methods are concerned."

But he said one of the things he was most proud of was seeing the figures from the latest Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (JOLS) which showed that Islanders are much less fearful of being the victim of crime. 

(Figures from the Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (JOLS))

Although he wasn't surprised to see we're more scared of being attacked online than verbally in person on the street, one of the survey's key findings was that 41% of us are worried about financial crime and with good reason. Figures out towards the end of 2016 showed that over 30% of fraud cases reported to Jersey Police in 2014 and 2015 were a result of cybercrime.

Mr Bowron said: "The face of crime is changing but we need to put this it into perspective. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of online crimes we're getting in Jersey per head of population compared to what I've seen in the UK and I chair a big organisation in the UK called the Financial Crime Information Network which brings all Police forces and regulators together in Canary Wharf so i've got a pretty good handle on what's going on in the UK.

"But it's a fact, public opinion in Dorset recently showed that online crime was by far the biggest cause of fear amongst Dorset people and it shouldn't be any different anywhere else because you can lock your door and keep a burglar at bay or a thief at bay but people can enter your home by the ether and you need to be guarded, by telephone or by email, you need to be guarded."

"There's two elements, there's the hi-tech crime unit and we do some work for Guernsey as well because we have to analyse all sorts of devices, apple devices, phones, laptops and devices for evidential purposes to prove or disprove somebody's involvement in an offence whether it's financial crime or harassment or bullying, downloading unlawful sexual content, whatever it might be so that's a big demand but we have to educate cops these days and it's not too difficult because the younger generation of cops are just familiar with the whole app world and online world but they have to be trained in how to identify online crime, how to give advice on how to prevent it because frankly most of it is preventable through education."

"To the average person, it is just about being guarded and not taking everything at face value. Nobody in the financial industry will sell a product by cold calling them at home so you can assume by that that if you are ever cold called for the sale of a financial product on the telephone, it's almost certainly a scam.

"Online crime is a very complex area, they could be operating from Africa, the Far East, Balkan States, Eastern Europe, China, anywhere in the world so in terms of actually policing, it can be very difficult, jurisdiction issues, the capacity to travel and catch someone so I work on the three E's principle, firstly "Education", if you educate the public not to open an attachment or an email they are not familiar with, not to accept some confident garb on the telephone that they are selling the best product ever, why are they phoning you and just to be guarded. Then you've got "Engineering" which is the physical barriers which is preventing these people getting to you whether it's anti-viral software or whatever it may be, so it's "Education", "Engineering" and then "Enforcement", you cannot enforce yourself out of online crime.

"I think on the face of it, Jersey is a target-rich environment, we've got a lot of relatively wealthy people here and probably of an age group that would be targeted but we're also very canny and financially bright and I think that's one of the reasons we're not hit as much as we might be."

While the Police continue to fight online crime, 2017 is all about the big move to the first purpose-built state-of-the-art police headquarters in Jersey.

Mr Bowron said: "I think that the States can congratulate itself the building is on time, to spec and within budget and it's really really good. 

"We'll start moving in functions like Custody, Control room and other key functions first and then the offices will move in but we should all be in by the first week in March."

In the meantime they'll continue to engage with almost a quarter of Islanders who are regularly liaising with them on social media.

"We've got 23,000 Facebook followers. We have dialogue all the time, even if a tree is down, it helps let people know where to avoid and actually that helps traffic management, people can get to work half an hour quicker by following us on Facebook or Twitter.

"It's a friendly approachable cop thing. We try and replicate online what we do on the streets which is a friendlier face of approachable policing.

"I think we're the model to hold in front of the rest of the States quite frankly, our dogs alone get three and a half thousand followers!"