Migrant influx prompts police cash call

Last Modified: 19 Sep 2007
Source: ITN

Police chiefs are demanding more Government cash to help them cope with the influx of migrant workers.

Officers in Cambridgeshire say ministers do not realise the impact immigration is having on crime.

Chief Constable Julie Spence said parts of the county had become a staging post for immigrants - partly because farm work was readily available - and more officers were needed.

She said: "We've been short-changed for a number of years, losing money as the population continues to grow.

"The profile of the county has changed dramatically and this simply isn't taken into account when Government allocates funding.

"We now deal with people from many different countries, speaking more than 90 different languages."

She added: "While the economic benefits of growth are clear we need to maintain the basic public services infrastructure which means increasing the number of officers we have."

Mrs Spence said the effect of immigration growth seeped into all areas of policing: foreigners got into difficulties because they were unfamiliar with traffic laws, investigations into crime could involve trips abroad to interview relatives and police have also noticed a growth in prostitution driven by the influx of large numbers of single men.

Mrs Spence said some immigrants arrived with "different standards" from those in the UK, notably over issues such as knife crime and drink-driving.

"When they arrive they think they can do the same thing as in the country they have come from," she said.

"There were a lot of people who, because they used to carry knives for protection, they think they can carry knives here.

"We have worked with the communities because they don't necessarily come to commit crime but they need to be told what you can and can't do.

"We can identify a significant rise in drink-drive, which was down to people thinking that what they did where they came from they could do here.

"Their attitudes to drink-drive are probably where we were 20 years ago."

Mrs Spence said there was also a problem with "feuds" between foreign nationals being brought across to the UK.

"We recently had a murder and it was a Lithuanian on Lithuanian and it could easily have happened in Lithuania.

"But it didn't, it happened in Wisbech, so one of my staff spent a lot of their time in Lithuania trying to get underneath what was actually happening with the crime and criminality, which brings costs that you wouldn't have had before, which means something else has to give."

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