October 2008
	September has been a very busy and interesting Month. I have visited South Wales, North Wales, Cheshire and Staffordshire looking at their approaches to the prevent strand on Contest. I have been impressed with the depth of engagement and the quality of communications plans that are in place. Our own team has amalgamated into the larger Citizen Focus and Neighbourhood policing team, this is an exciting time for us as new skills are added. We are recruiting new field officers to increase our numbers to 7. This will mean we cover fewer forces and a different configuration will follow. It was great to catch up with some old faces in Stoke on Trent which had been an original Pathfinder BCU and they are still delivering quality Neighbourhood policing. On a recent operation related to terrorism the BCU commander had a DVD made with a personal message for the local community. As the teams executed the search warrants at several addresses the Bronze media team delivered the DVD to surrounding addresses at the same time. This was very well received by the local residents and assisted in dispelling rumours. This illustrates the strength of dedicated communications professionals working on Bcu’s. I am away tomorrow to Tenby in Pembrokeshire for the Welsh regional meeting and am looking to catch up with the project leads and hear of their plans to embed Neighbourhood policing and build upon their Citizen Focussed policing approaches.