Criminal immigrants
Police chief rails against influx of 'criminal immigrants'
A police chief has said that her force is struggling to cope with the feuds and criminal behaviour that is imported into the UK by immigrants.
Chief Constable Julie Spence, of Cambridgeshire Police, said that she needed more money from the Government to deal with the problem that included immigrants thinking they could commit violent crimes they would usually get away with in their homeland.
“We’ve been short-changed for a number of years, losing money as the population continues to grow,” she said. "The profile of the county has changed dramatically and this simply isn’t taken into account when Government allocates funding.
“We now deal with people from many different countries, speaking more than 90 different languages. While the economic benefits of growth are clear we need to maintain the basic public services infrastructure which means increasing the number of officers we have.”
“When they arrive they think they can do the same thing as in the country they have come from,” she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. There were a lot of people who... because they used to carry knives for protection, they think they can carry knives here.”
She said bills for interpreters to help police had also shot up.
She said: “We can identify a significant rise in drink-drive, which was down to people thinking that what they did where they came from they could do here. Their attitudes to drink-drive are probably where we were 20 years ago.”
Liam Byrne, Home Office Minister, welcomed Ms Spence’s outburst: “It’s because we want to hear voices like Julie Spence’s that I set up the Migration Impacts Forum, so public services can help shape our tough points system which is introduced in around 150 days time.”
The forum includes representatives from the police, local authorities, employers and workers’ groups. It is designed to measure the impact of migration into the country.
The minister said: “It’s also important that those we welcome into the UK to work and settle here understand our traditions, learn English and use our language.”
Mrs Spence reserved special criticism for the Lithuanian community that has settled in Cambridgeshire.
“We recently had a murder and it was a Lithuanian on Lithuanian and it could easily have happened in Lithuania,” she said.
“But it didn’t, it happened in Wisbech, so one of my staff spent a lot of their time in Lithuania trying to get underneath what was actually happening with the crime and criminality, which brings costs that you wouldn’t have had before, which means something else has to give.”
Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, agreed that funding needed to be reallocated according to the immigration of an area.
“It takes years for the extra money to come through from the Government for areas with high immigration, so it is no wonder the police can find themselves struggling,” he said.
(Published by Times Online, September 19, 2007)
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