The last 18 months or so have been the toughest in the country’s history, and keeping it safe was certainly no exception.
Hailsham News editor, Paul Gibson sat down with Wealden & District Inspector, Kendal Wells, to find out how the Police force tackled the COVID pandemic locally…
Inspector Wells has been a Police Officer for more than 17 years and has spent most of that time in East Sussex. He’s headed up Enforcement and Public Order Teams across the district and became a Sergeant in Hailsham in 2016. He is now the Inspector in charge of Policing in Hailsham including Crowborough, Polegate, Uckfield and Heathfield.
What were the main challenges throughout the pandemic as far as policing’s concerned?
One of the biggest challenges was being an employer and being able to manage the looking after our staff – our people – at the same time as still providing that service to the public because as much as any other organisation in the country we had staff shortages, where people were self-isolating or contracted Covid, so it was quite difficult to maintain policing as usual response which we did, but it was a challenge and I think police in general worked very, very hard for the whole time to maintain that business as usual and deliver that Covid response.
Criminality changed – criminals, as much as anyone else, had to adapt to their circumstance. People not going out burglary rates dropped, so we had to predict when people would start going out and burglary rates would rise.
What worked really well during lockdown was working with partners. My predecessor, Jon Gross, set up lots of regular meetings with the different councils and different agencies within Wealden District Council to make sure we were sharing information and concerns. It was a new challenge for every agency to have to adapt to, so those meetings were set up to make sure each agency knew what each other was facing.
It goes back to the bigger challenges, learning something really new, quickly. With policing we use a lot of caselaw, so we can use what’s been done before and what the courts have decided before, when it was all completely new, we were often finding out at the same time as the rest of the country,
in terms of when the Prime Minister was announcing something in a press conference. We were able to predict and adapt and constantly move in an ever-moving situation.
There was a time when people started to be arrested for being out during lockdown and things got very hostile towards the Police. Do you think that was the case locally, but was it not policed as much because of the hostility?
Every police force dealt with it differently. We weren’t setting up roadblocks, but you probably heard the 4Es. Engage, Explain, Encourage, Enforcement. I haven’t got any figures as to how many arrests or fixed penalty notices we gave out. Enforcement was our last resort, as much as it was a unique challenge – for the public, it was quite hard for them to understand what the rules and regulations were, which is why we used the 4Es.
There were two types of people – there were those who were abiding by the rules and get- ting frustrated because there were people who weren’t abiding by the rules, but you had to keep everyone happy. In policing, if both sides of an argument aren’t very happy with it, you’ve probably got it about right. Our role in it was to uphold the law, and it was to support the NHS during that time.
One of the concerns we had as lockdown finished was that we had a whole group of people – the 18 to 19-year-olds who had never been out drinking. They’d never been out to the nighttime economy. The nighttime economy has been busier, but we had plans for that and were ready to respond to that. One of the biggest challenges we’re still facing around Covid is protests, the antivac protests and all sorts of protests that have happened over the last 18 months, that has been quite challenging.
We had that roadmap out of lockdown, we had shared a lot of partnership meetings and there were real of concerns when the schools went back about kids congregating and people being together, but that didn’t really come to anything. I think everyone just learnt to get on with it.
Many residents have said the roads have got worse since lockdown – do you believe this to be the case?
When people were driving during lockdown they seemed to believe they had the road to themselves and that hasn’t changed. Driving had changed, with less cars on the road, but since people are out again speeding has gone down.
Operation Downsway relies on the public to tell us where the hotspots are and our local operation has been seizing vehicles breaking the law locally.
