Update on policing in City West from Inspector Gordon Fenwick - April 2025

Welcome to your neighbourhood policing newsletter for Nottingham’s City West.

The plan is for a newsletter to be produced every three months or so, to hopefully provide our community with a bit of insight into the latest local policing priorities, crime trends and some of the great work your neighbourhood policing team has been doing in recent weeks.

Current priorities in your area

A decision was recently made for antisocial behaviour to remain as the main policing priority for our City West team. My team of officers will continue to focus on tackling this crime area for the next few months across each of the City West’s five wards – Aspley, Bilborough, Basford, Wollaton and Leen Valley. 

This decision was reached during a recent multi-agency meeting that weighed up the local public’s views on the different types of offences they’d like our neighbourhood team to focus on.

The feeling was that, in preparation for lighter evenings, warmer weather and the school holidays, ASB should stay at the main neighbourhood policing priority, due to offences tending to spike around this time of the year.

Actions on our priorities

Like all other neighbourhood areas, reports around antisocial behaviour do take up a lot of my team’s time as part of our daily business. We fully appreciate just how much of an impact this type of behaviour can have on communities and how they feel about where they live.

That’s precisely why we dedicate so much time and effort towards trying to tackle this, whether by providing a visible policing presence on the streets to deter troublemakers, or proactively engaging with young people to try and stop them getting into trouble in the first place.  

As with other offences, most of the ASB issues we see do tend to be caused by a small group of people, who are on our radar, while it happens when they congregate in certain so-called ‘hot spot areas’.

One way we try and keep on top of this and hopefully nip problems in the bud at the earliest stage is by sending our officers out to these areas on patrol. Providing that visible presence can be very effective in this way, while it also ensures we’re able to put names to faces, while hopefully building positive relationships with the community.

Over the next few months, we’ll be stepping up these patrols around parks and open spaces, as well as streets and public buildings, to hopefully make a difference, while we’ll also be holding regular days of action focusing on certain types of ASB, like targeting off-road bikers.

We’ve followed this approach for some time now and have seen some good results, with ASB offences dropping by 20 per cent across the City West over the last 12 months, so the mission now is to continue that positive momentum.

I would add though that, despite ASB being selected as our City West policing priority area, that doesn’t mean all work designed to target other offences suddenly grinds to a halt. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are so many examples of our neighbourhood officers working with other teams across the force or alongside key partners to tackle crime across our five wards. In fact, I’ve got two examples below of this happening.

Did you hear about this?

Targeting those individuals who bring drug activity to our neighbourhood has been a long-held focus for us in the City West. This type of behaviour is a blight on society and brings nothing but trouble to communities, so we regularly conduct intelligence-led warrants at properties we believe could be housing drugs and individuals we believe could be involved.

One such raid happened on 1 March at an address in Allendale Avenue, Aspley, with our Aspley and Bilborough, and Basford and Wollaton teams combining to great effect to confirm our suspicions about a cannabis grow inside. After getting through the locked backdoor, the officers found three cannabis growing rooms with plants inside. They also discovered two cannabis farmers, Shamal Xhixha, 23, and Dennis Cani, 25, both of no fixed address, with the duo later going on to receive one year prison sentences when they appeared in court a month later.

Warrants are just one of the methods we use to tackle drug activity in the City West, with all this work coinciding with a four per cent drop in overall drug offences in the area over the last 12 months. We’ve also seen shoplifting and overall thefts go down by five and three per cent respectively during that time too.

Taking Bilborough as an example, following a series of shop thefts, our neighbourhood officers have worked with problem management coordinators from the force’s Prevention Hub to create a multi-pronged problem management plan to prevent shoplifting across the ward.

A number of initiatives are being considered to tackle the issue, including introducing a Shopwatch scheme, which would allow for greater engagement between ourselves and businesses to share images of shoplifters so we can put a name to the face of a suspect when an offence is reported.

How to contact us

Looking for help or information? Want to tell us something or report an incident? Use our simple online tool to find the best way to get in contact.

Call 101 for non-emergency enquiries. Alternatively, our Live Chat service is available from 7am to 10pm, seven days a week. Navigate back to the home page of our website and look for the blue icon in the corner.

Call 999 if:

• a serious offence is in progress or has just been committed

• someone is in immediate danger or harm

• property is in danger of being damaged

• a serious disruption to the public is likely

If you wish to anonymously report crime or suspicious behaviour, contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

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