C.O.P.S. Scheme RevealedKent Police will shortly be unveiling a comprehensive scheme for local communities to take more control over how local problems such as anti-social behaviour are handled and, in time, hopefully solved. This has been drawn up with sonsiderable input from the council's Community Safety Street Team, and will involve a number of agencies that the community can work with in order to get better results than has tended to be the case.
The so-called Local C.O.P.S. Scheme (where C.O.P.S. stands for Community Orientated Problem Solving) is to be introduced to all the Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinators covering a large part of Medway that includes Rochester South and Horsted ward. This pre-launch will explain how this new idea is intended as a methodology to identify potential problem areas at an early stage, to monitor what is going on at trouble spots, and to be able to provide sufficient hard evidence where appropriate to be usable in prosecution cases.
The whole idea is still at an early stage, but ward councillors will as always be involved closely with this scheme if it is adopted, and will be at the pre-launch event. If successful, the scheme could be rolled out to the rest of Medway in due course.