Melksham Police Update, by sergeant James Twyford

Tackling thefts and shoplifting

IT’S been another busy fortnight for both the Neighbourhood team and the five response teams who cover Melksham.  

We’re seeing a continuation of the rise in theft and acquisitive crime, which the teams are working with shops to handle. So far, we’ve had Simon Parker of Trowbridge recalled to prison and we charged James Brewer of Melksham with a number of offences, remanding him to court. This was done with a view to proactively tackling the volume of shoplifting. We’ve seen 14 shoplifting offences and 10 ‘other theft’ offences since the last update.

In general terms, we’ve seen 118 offences for Melksham in total, 403 for the whole of the West Wiltshire area.

Many will have already seen that a cannabis factory was discovered at The Unicorn, Bath Road. It’s an abandoned building that has been empty for a number of years, which had been converted into this clandestine commercial grow. Everything has been dismantled and removed now; enquiries are ongoing into the story of how this came to be there. The owner has made some efforts to make the property secure again, but we’ve subsequently had a couple of groups of youngsters trying to gain access to the building. Aside from being illegal, we’d advise against this practice on a practical level too; the building’s floors are unsafe in places and there’s the potential for people to injure themselves stumbling around in the dark. We are regularly patrolling that and another abandoned building in the town.

We took the opportunity to talk at the town council’s annual meeting last week, giving a presentation on policing in the town and answering some interesting questions from both councillors and members of the public in attendance. It’s always nice to see people taking such an interest in their local area.