Police in Lincolnshire are turning to technology to assist in the fight against rural crime.

Twenty hi-tech cameras, complete with night vision, will be installed at secret locations in remote areas of the county and can alert police to intruders within seconds. It comes after an investment from the police and crime commissioner, Marc Jones.

“It is imperative that we make use of the latest technology in our fight to keep our communities safe,” he said.

Lincolnshire Police is already using drones in a bid to reduce rural crime, including hare coursing. Mr Jones has agreed to support the new Rural Spotter project, which will be evaluated at six and 12 months, with a £20,000 investment funded by money seized from criminals. He said the cameras would “seriously enhance” the police’s ability to “put eyes on the most isolated locations”.

“It is just the latest investment in providing the right tools for our officers to provide them the best opportunity to protect residents, homes, businesses and property,” he added.

A new rural crime task force was formed in 2021 to combat criminal activity, including hare coursing, lead theft and theft from farms and rural properties.

Lincolnshire Police has also recently invested in other new high-tech kit, including night vision googles and drones.

Ch Insp Phil Vickers, lead for rural crime, said using new technology was crucial.

“Lincolnshire is a huge area to cover and the quicker we are alerted to crime the better chance we have of catching the offenders,” he said.

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which scrutinised 38 rural police forces across England and Wales, found more than one-third (37%) lacked a dedicated rural crime strategy, nearly two-fifths (39%) did not have a rural crime team, and only 10 forces (28%) delivered rural crime training for new recruits.

More than one in four forces (27%) did not have a police officer of inspector rank or above leading rural crime, the research found.

And only about half (53%) of rural police forces across England and Wales have dedicated rural crime prevention tools, such as 4x4s, trail bikes, night vision equipment or drones.

CLA president Tim Breitmeyer said it is “astounding” that one-third of rural police forces do not have a dedicated strategy or team to deal with rural crime – especially when one considers the huge financial and emotional effect it has on those who live or work in the countryside.

He added: “Farming is a stressful business, where many are working on tight margins. Having to deal with replacing lost machinery, repairing a vandalised barn, or clearing up and bearing the cost of someone else’s fly-tipped mess, just adds unnecessary stress, eats away at meagre profits and takes up valuable time.

An ITV drama starring Rob Lowe as a rural police chief has been branded “criminally inaccurate” by a UK force.

In Wild Bill, the Brat Pack heart-throb plays a grizzled US lawman transferred from Miami to the fictional East Lincolnshire Police.

Episode one saw the one-time Tinseltown hellraiser throwing a cabbage and being booked for speeding on a bicycle.

In a tongue-in-cheek tweet, the real Lincolnshire Police said: “The inaccuracies are criminal”.

“It’s definitely not what we are really like.”

The force said it would pass “concerns about the officers portrayed” to AC-12 – the anti-corruption unit featured in the BBC’s Line of Duty.

Part of a human leg was found close to a primary school by a dog walker near Grimsby, prompting a police investigation.

Humberside Police said officers and forensic experts were called to the scene on Thursday after it received a report of a suspected body part found on a foot path in New Waltham at about 6.45am.

Initial forensic examinations confirmed the limb as a small section of a human lower leg and foot.

“While we are still in the very early stages of the investigation, we can confirm it is human and is a small section of a lower leg and foot,” said Detective Inspector Rhodri Troake.

The Peaks Parkway Path, which runs behind the playing fields at New Waltham Academy, was immediately cordoned off. 

For decades, reports of big cats have surfaced all over Britain – from Crystal Palace to Cornwall to Carlisle. There have been 155 big cat sightings reported to UK police forces in the past three years, according to forces responding to FOI requests. There are likely many more never recorded. Local newspapers publish dozens of eyewitness reports every year, and have helped to firmly establish certain creatures – the Surrey Puma, the Beast of Exmoor – in local legend.

Where might these cats have come from? One theory suggests they were released by their owners in the months leading up to the 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act. Exotic animals had been sold in Harrods; cheetahs could occasionally be seen being walked in Hyde Park. Given the choice of acquiring a costly licence or relinquishing their pets to animal sanctuaries, at least some owners chose a third option: sending cats out into the wild. In 2000, Leslie Maiden, a lion tamer known as One-Eyed Nick, told the Birmingham Post he’d released a panther and a puma in Derbyshire some 25 years before. 

“At first I was a bit worried about how they would get on,” he said. “But I went up to the moors a few weeks later and saw bones of sheep and pheasants, so I think they adapted pretty well.”

Police have been mulling the possible reasons for why someone would steal a dog poo bin from a seaside resort.

It was unscrewed from its mounting and taken at Fisherman’s Cove in East Portlemouth, Devon sometime between Tuesday or Wednesday.

“Over the years I’ve investigated many crimes,” said a police spokesman. “Some interesting, some not so. This one is up there on the [interesting] list.”

Officers are looking for leads to locate the bin, “but not its contents”.

In addition to education, critics point to the damaging impact of austerity cuts first introduced in 2010 across a range of other policy areas:

Housing

Housing has become a full-blown crisis since 2010: more expensive, more scarce, and less secure in many parts of the country, especially for young people and low-income working families, as successive governments have let the market balloon while imposing hefty austerity cuts to housing support.

Rents have soared, while wages have stalled. Tenant insecurity has risen. Overcrowding is at record levels. Homelessness has increased. One in 200 people in England are homeless, according to Shelter. Rough sleeping is up over the decade: 600 homeless people died on the streets or in hostels in 2017, up 24% since 2010.

Local government

Back in 2012, a notorious PowerPoint slide circulated in local government called the Graph of Doom. It demonstrated that if austerity cuts and demographic pressures (more older people living longer) continued, councils would be unable to afford to provide anything other than social care within a few years.

Many town halls believe that point is fast approaching. After nearly a decade of cuts, councils spend a fifth less than in 2010; larger councils now spend 60% of their diminished budget on adult and children’s social care, meaning other services – parks, libraries, swimming pools, Sure Start centres, fixing potholes, bus subsidies, winter road gritting, museums – have had to be eviscerated.

Social care

Around 1.4 million adults in the UK fail to get the basic social care support they need, such as help with washing, dressing and eating, according to the charity Age UK. Rising demand from an ageing population, coupled with shrinking budgets, has led to ever tighter rationing.

Since 2010, adult social care spending in England has shrunk by £7bn, with the government averting crises with a series of “sticking plaster” funding packages. Long promised plans for putting social care funding on a sustainable level have been lost in the Brexit long grass, while there is little optimism the autumn public spending review will come to the rescue.

In children’s social care, welfare cuts, soaring poverty levels and rising parental mental illness have contributed to an explosion in child protection activity. Since 2010, assessments of children at risk of harm or neglect have gone up 77%, while child protection plans increased by a quarter, and children in care increased by 15%.

English councils predict a £2bn budget shortfall in children’s services by 2020, forcing growing cuts to preventive services such as family support to meet the cost of child protection.

NHS

Eight years of tiny budget increases have left the NHS in England seriously overstretched, chronically understaffed and £4bn in the red.

Limiting the NHS to 1% rises – far below the historic 3.7% average – has also forced patients to endure increasingly long waits for A&E care, cancer treatment, planned operations and to see a GP at their local surgery.

In-depth research published last week found levels of public satisfaction across Britain with the NHS at their lowest ever (53%) and the highest levels ever of dissatisfaction with GP services. Delays in accessing care were the main driver of rising discontent, it found.

Police

Police chiefs have long been warning about the impact of budget cuts on their ability to do their job, and the issue has come to the fore with the escalating concern about violent crime.

Home Office research leaked to the Guardian last year found that falling officer numbers were likely to be “an underlying driver that has allowed the rise [in violent crime] to continue”.

In Theresa May’s six years as home secretary to 2016, police numbers fell by 20,000 as she slashed their budgets while insisting that they could cut crime by eliminating inefficiencies. The number of officers fell from a peak of 144,353 in 2009 to 122,404 by March 2018.

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has trumpeted the extra £970m in police funding pledged for the next financial year. However, police chiefs have warned that this is too low, and that some of the cash will be swallowed up by other liabilities, possibly leading to a further fall in headcount.

A computer programme that calculates whether a burglary is worth investigating, is “insulting” to victims and risks alienating the public, the head of the Police Federation has warned.

Norfolk Constabulary has been trialling a new system which uses sophisticated algorithms to determine whether there is any point attending a break in.

Officers input various details about the offence, such as whether there are clues including fingerprints or CCTV, and then the computer will suggest whether it is worth devoting any police time to.

The system is intended to help police chiefs work out how best to deploy resources as forces everywhere struggle to cope with reduced budgets and increasing demands.

But John Apter, the recently elected chairman of the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, warned the introduction of such systems represented a slippery slope which threatened to erode the trust that exists between the public and the police.

Since 2010/11 forces have saved in excess of £290m through better procurement and collaboration, but new information released today shows that that there are still many areas where forces could work together to identify savings.

The release is part of the Government’s transparency agenda to make the police more accountable to the public, and provide information on the prices paid by police for 18 essential items including forensic, telephony and office supplies. Forces are also asked to report on the extent to which they have collaborated to purchase these items.

The data indicates that high levels of collaboration are generally associated with lower prices and that forces can, and should, use this information to help identify further saving opportunities.

Brandon Lewis, Minister for Policing and the Fire Service, said:

This information is a key part of making our police forces more accountable to the public through greater transparency.

Thanks to this and last year’s releases, it is clear that savings are being made due to greater collaboration, but the police must go further still to deliver greater savings for the taxpayer.

It is absolutely essential that broad and deep collaboration within police procurement is the rule, not the exception. Police forces must continue to use their resources more efficiently by working together and PCCs must hold chief constables to account for this.

Last year the police in England and Wales spent around £2.2bn on goods and services, and the Government is clear that increased transparency on the costs of essential items will help police chiefs consider opportunities for further efficiency savings and make the police more accountable to the taxpayer.

The Isles of Scilly are not known for their high crime rate, but the exploits of its head of police have made him a star of social media and secured him a book deal.

Over the past seven years, Sgt Colin Taylor has used a child’s bike to chase someone suspected of drinking and driving and kept the streets of Scilly free from anchor thieves and naked stag parties.

He has gained tens of thousands of social media followers, despite the islands only having a population of 2,200.

Now, as the 49-year-old prepares to resume his career on the mainland, BBC News looks back on some of his highlights fighting crime at the extremity of the British Isles, and how one police officer has gained such social media momentum.

“People said there’s no crime on Scilly, but I’ve managed to write about it for the last five years. Sometimes things happen and you just have to find the funny side,” Sgt Taylor said.

On this occasion Sgt Taylor had to travel across different islands and borrow a child’s bike while in pursuit of suspected drunk driver.

“It was lucky the little boy was there with his bike to help me out, sometimes you’ve just got to think on your feet and get the job done,” Sgt Taylor said.

The Isles of Scilly is not a big place, there’s a population of just 2,200 people over five inhabited islands, plus countless uninhabited islands.

Despite this, the Isles of Scilly Police Facebook page has attracted 60,000 likes – the same amount as the whole of the Devon and Cornwall Police force page.