I arrived at Blaby Council offices at 9am on 15 February to be greeted by Rebecca, head of the Community Safety Partnership. She led me through to one of the meeting rooms where her two members of staff awaited.
With a large illustration of what looked to be a street scene drawn in Beano-style brightly coloured cartoon. Nobody mentioned it, so I didn't either.
Rebecca introduced her staff and then dived into explaining the excellent work that she and her team are doing with the money and other resources that I am allocating from my office budget.
Many of the new projects focus on keeping youngsters safe. One is to build effective partnerships with and between the schools in the Blaby area. This work is going well, allowing schools and council to co-operate on work with youngsters. Some of this involves watching for the early warning signs of domestic abuse - either affecting the children directly or other members of their family.
They also carry out educational work around knives with the Violence Reduction Network, also funded via my office. It was good to learn about such effective co-operation.
They have also been carrying out "mystery shopping" for vaping, knives, alcohol and tobacco. This involves a supervised effort by a teenager who is obviously too young to legally buy such goods to buy such things. What were the results?
"We found a couple of shops willing to sell vapes to youngsters", said Rebecca. "But that was it. A good result. We'd rather find no shopkeepers willing to break the law than prosecute somebody for doing so persistently."
We also talked about road safety. The big problem here was what is known as "car cruising" - when groups of motorists bring their cars to a stretch of road not covered by speed cameras to race them. This is, of course, illegal. Not only do the cars reach high speed, but they are not insured to race and are often illegally modified. Rebecca reported that one problem seemed to be that photographic evidence was not being accepted by the courts as good enough to secure a conviction. I promised to take this up.
Finally, curiosity got the better of me. "What," I asked pointing at the large Beano-style picture, "is that thing?"
Rebecca smiled and handed over to Ian.
"That is the key feature of the ASB Busters Programme," said Ian. Then he explained. The ASB Busters is a programme run at junior schools to teach youngsters about what ASB is and the impact it can have on communities and families. I looked at the large artwork. It showed a street scene that could be in any of a dozen or more towns around Leicestershire. It was packed with figures doing a wide variety of things. Some was obviously criminal - such as fighting. Other activities were more like ASB - littering for instance. Some was more ambivalent - two men were talking and waving their hands about. But were they just talking or arguing? And of course there were individuals and families clearly worried or frightened by what was going on.
I could see how effective it could be as a teaching aid.
At that point my time was up. I left feeling enthused by how the Blaby Community Safety Partnership was using the resources I gave them effectively and imaginatively to keep their communities safe.
Photo shows: Rupert inspecting the ASB Busters artwork.
