Wiltshire police pledge to tackle burglary better

In Wiltshire, only 4.3% of home burglaries lead to a charge

A police force has pledged to improve its performance tackling burglaries.

Wiltshire Police said in future officers would visit everyone whose home or shed was broken into and it would give more training to sergeants.

It follows criticism from the Chief Inspector of Police who said that burglary charges were "unacceptably low".

Recent figures from the Home Office show that domestic burglary charge rates across the country were very low.

Nationwide, only 5% of domestic burglary offences lead to a charge.

In Wiltshire, 4.3 of domestic burglary offences lead to a charge.

Until now, Wiltshire Police said its officers visited about 80% of victims, but pledged to visit all burglary victims in future.

"All my personal things had been rifled. I felt violated," Mel Lawrence said

Mel Lawrence from Wiltshire said she was devastated when her home was burgled in July.

Listen: Mel Lawrence talks to BBC Radio Wiltshire about her experience

"Everywhere we went, except the sitting room, there were drawers open.

"All my personal things had been rifled. I felt violated."

Ms Lawrence said the initial police response was "brilliant, with a forensic officer working until 22:00 BST and she said she felt reassured by the subsequent investigation too.

However, no-one has been charged for the crime.

At Wiltshire Police's headquarters in Devizes, staff typically receive 80 calls per month from burglary victims.

The force said it would give more training to sergeants to ensure nothing was missed at the crime scenes.

In the summer, the Chief Inspector of Police said the policing response across the country to burglary victims was a postcode lottery and burglary charges were unacceptably low.

Mr Minty says the force have created new teams to tackle the issue

Temporary Assistant Chief Constable David Minty said the force pledged to attend 100% of all residential burglaries, opposed to their current performance of about 80% attendance.

"This was already one of our priorities, but what we also want to do is to make sure the investigation is a really quality investigation," he said.

"We've created some volume crime teams. These are investigators whose sole remit will be to look at longer-term investigations such as burglary, which also frees up our frontline police officers to spend time with the victims."

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