Happy new year everyone, we all hope you had a great holiday period and joyfully rang in the new year. 

Your local neighbourhood policing team have been busy during the holiday period making a number of high-profile arrests and acting upon the valuable intelligence that you the public give us.

Just before the Christmas break we had received intel on the location of a well-known shop lifter who was wanted for numerous offences all across the Rural’s patch, Officers tracked this individual to a location in Meriden and after a game of hide and seek the suspect was successfully arrested; the investigation continues.

We also responded to an attempted mugging that happened on Knowle high street and after receiving numerous calls from concerned members of the public we were able to track down the offenders in Dorridge where we made multiple arrests, our investigations are still ongoing regarding the matter however I cannot state this enough but results like this could not have been made possible without support from members of the public of who we are eternally grateful to, thank you. 

This time of year, we also see a lot of nasty weather and the last few days have been no exception with heavy rain and snow making roads dangerous and liable to flooding.  Several roads between Knowle and Balsall common being notorious for flooding during periods of heavy rain so please do check the roads when heading out for local road closures and signs of flooding in your journey, enabling the traffic overlay on your map’s app can help you spot areas of traffic build up suggesting a potential problem on the road.  If you do happen to come across a flooded please remember that your safety is paramount and turning back is often the safer option than attempting to cross it.

On a more positive note the beat surgery we established in Meriden has proven to be a success and we have received a lot of useful local intel from members of the public which has been invaluable in regards to a number of ongoing investigations that we currently have open in and around the area so thank you for that.  If you live locally to either Meriden or Balsall common and would like to attend then please check in with your local library which will have the dates and times in which we will be attending.  We are also looking at the possibility of having a mobile pop-up police station/van in and around the area for those who cannot attend during the day who would still like to meet/talk to us, further developments on this and its deployment will be made available on our social media sites as well as through further WMNow correspondence.  As always if you have anything that would like to talk to us about you can always email us on Rural@Westmidlands.police.uk 

Produced by PCSO RYDER