Partnership's good work has resulted in a fall in disorder

The steep fall in reports of anti-social behaviour has been hailed as a result of the close links between Arun District Council’s anti-social behaviour team and Sussex Police’s neighbouring policing team.

Their work includes a focus on early intervention to encourage young people who have come to the police’s attention to change their behaviour.

Georgina Holland, the council’s community safety manager, said: “This approach is proving to be beneficial to all involved and has the advantage of being a more cost-effective way of dealing with nuisance behaviour within our communities.”

The police received 4,874 reports about disorder in the Arun district in the year to the end of last month.

This compared to 5,519 the previous year and 6,116 in the year before that.

The percentage of those incidents which involved young people also dropped nine per cent in that period to 26 per cent of the total.

Inspector Nick Bowman, of Sussex Police’s neighbourhood policing team at Bognor Regis police station, said: “Our local police team work very closely with the council and other partners to do what we can to improve the quality of lives of residents.

“These figures quantify the excellent work that is being done daily by our teams.

“Together, we are focusing our resources on areas of higher crime rates, higher social deprivation and child poverty and higher levels of anti-social behaviour. This is the right thing to do with our resources.”

The past financial year also saw 6.5 per cent fewer reports of criminal damage - a decline of 122 cases to 1,753.

The fire and rescue service has seen a big fall of 18 per cent in arsons from 302 to 248 in the past two years.

All the organisations belong to the Safer Arun Partnership.