How one rural police team is fighting back against criminals in the countryside

The CLA invited Kent Police to write a blog updating members on some of its recent work. Here Sergeant Ross Haybourne, from the force's rural task force, outlines how tweaking shift patterns has made a difference in the fight against criminality in the Garden of England's countryside...

In my opinion, building relationships with our rural community and sharing intelligence are the best tools that we can use to combat and disrupt criminality in our rural areas.

The intelligence that we receive from those who live, work and visit rural Kent, help us to plan and respond to crime spikes, understand vulnerabilities, identify offenders and provide crime prevention tools and advice.

It is vital that our rural community report crime or suspicious events to enable us to deal with issues quickly and give us an accurate picture of what is happening. I understand that some people don’t report issues as they think that they are wasting their own or the polices time, or alternatively don’t believe that police will respond or care, however, I’d stress that you don’t know how the information you are providing will fit within our ongoing work as it could be the missing piece of a puzzle.

Earlier this year we identified a rise in rural burglaries in the West of Kent, where ATVs and quad bikes were being targeted in rural locations. We reached out to the local community to highlight this, provided crime prevention advice and requested intelligence on those we suspected of committing the offences. This led to us putting together an operation, working with the rural task force in Sussex and contacts from the Metropolitan police, as the issue was one shared across the borders with numerous offences occurring in each policing area.

We amended our shift times to reflect offending times and this quickly led to our team recovering stolen quad bikes and power tools from a location in Orpington, in under an hour after they had been stolen. This resulted in an arrest that has seen offences drop drastically across Kent and Sussex.

Make no mistake, we will cross borders to locate and arrest those that come to Kent to commit crime.

I am proud to say that Kent’s Rural Task Force effectively mix community engagement, targeted activity and proactive policing. We are continually putting together operations and targeting those who cause the most harm to those in our rural locations. We provide site visits to give crime prevention advice and have a property marking service that has been used over 1,000 times in the past year. We can permanently mark items that are metal, plastic or leather, with the owners’ details, and provide property marking stickers, while these do not prevent the items from being stolen, it does make them identifiable if recovered by any police force.

The importance of this was highlighted to me in a warrant we undertook In April 2024 where we recovered 3,655 stolen tools, six stolen caravans and a stolen quadbike. Only a small percentage of the power tools had any form of ID markers on them, which poses us problems in supporting evidence of the mass scale of the thefts, alongside preventing us returning the majority of recovered stolen property to victims of crime.

Criminals are using our rural areas as their workplaces and playground, we know that those who illegally hunt with dogs or catapult birds will often damage gates and fences, threaten landowners, damage crops and use the opportunity to ‘scope out’ areas, therefore it’s vital for the public to report these offences. I would also stress that if you don’t report rural crime, it is harder for us to bring offenders to justice and show the courts the seriousness and depth of the problem, which ultimately could assist with providing proportionate sentencing in the future.

In 2024 our team located and seized stolen property valued at over £2,850,000, this included farm machinery, plant, vehicles and power tools. A number of these seizures were assisted by members of our rural community contacting us to report suspicious activity or abandoned vehicles.

In the summer of 2024, we put together an operation working alongside the Port of Dover police and National Construction and Agricultural Theft Team (NCATT) to target stolen farm machinery and plant being smuggled out of the UK. This operation has led to numerous arrests and seizures and in our recent deployments at the port last week we recovered a stolen mini digger which had been taken in a burglary at a farm in Derbyshire. We also found a horse box which we suspected to be stolen as it had all identifiable markings removed, enquiries are ongoing to identify an owner.

We are continuing to target those who cause the most harm to rural Kent and have many operations and days of action planned across the coming year, if you are interested in the ongoing work that Kent Police’s RTF is undertaking, please read our quarterly publication Rural Matters.