Devon & Cornwall Police backs ASB Awareness Week 2025

Tuesday, 1 July 2025 09:00

By Chris Collman

Devon & Cornwall Police is supporting of ASB Awareness Week 2025, a national campaign led by Resolve, the UK’s leading organisation on community safety and anti-social behaviour (ASB) running from 30 June – 6 July, encouraging reporting of ASB to promote safer communities.

The awareness week is backed by Resolve members, HM Government, Local Government Association, and key partners including the National Police Chiefs’ Council, National Fire Chiefs’ Council, Historic England, Neighbourhood Watch, the Premier League Charitable Fund, Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and others.

ASB Awareness Week 2025 highlights the impact that ASB has on victims and communities, raises awareness of the support available to victims, and promotes partnership working, bringing together councils, housing associations, police, charities, youth organisations and community groups, reflective of the fact that everyone has a role in tackling ASB.

Assistant Chief Constable Glen Mayhew QPM said: “Devon & Cornwall Police recognises the disruption and even fear that ASB can bring to communities, and we have taken a partnership-based approach to tackling this to make people feel safer.

“We work with Community Safety Partnerships, housing authorities and other agencies and focus our activity through our Neighbourhood Teams who have the best understanding of their communities and where the most troublesome areas are that we can concentrate our activities on. Visible policing in “Hot Spot” areas of ASB helps to stop ASB escalating and gains the trust of our communities.”

Recent research from YouGov, commissioned by Resolve, found that:

Nearly 1 in 5 people have considered moving home due to ASB.
1 in 10 have actually moved.
Despite this, over half of those who experienced or witnessed ASB did not report it.

ACC Mayhew continued “Everyone deserves to feel safe in their home and their neighbourhood, and the public are our strongest partners in this. If ASB is blighting your community, please report it.

“There is a convenient online form to report ASB on the front page of our website, you’ll find it by clicking the ‘Report’ button. You can call 101 or drop into one of our Police Enquiry Offices. To receive reports of what’s happening in your community, and message back to us, I would also encourage you to subscribe for free to our community messaging service Devon & Cornwall Alert. The more community information we receive the better we can allocate our resources.”

Neighbourhood policing teams have a number of tools that they can use to tackle ASB. These include Community Protection Warnings, Community Protection Notices, Criminal Behaviour Orders, Civil Injunctions, Closure Orders, Public Spaces Protection Orders and Dispersal powers

ACC Mayhew added: “We are listening to our communities and we do our best to act on intelligence received. We have carried out several closure orders and applied other powers recently, information on the outcome of some of those can be found in the News section of our website.”

Examples of recent activity include:

Rebecca Bryant OBE, Chief Executive of Resolve, said:

“ASB is not low-level. It can have a devastating and long-lasting impact on individuals and communities and often escalates to increasingly harmful behaviour.

“We are delighted that Devon & Cornwall Police is backing this vital campaign. It is only through strong local partnerships that we can meet the growing challenge of ASB and ensure people feel safe where they live.”

If you are affected by ASB, don’t suffer in silence—help and support are available.

For online and other contact methods, plus regular news updates, visit www.devon-cornwall.police.uk

To join Devon & Cornwall Alert, visit https://alerts.dc.police.uk/

For more information about ASB Awareness Week, visit: www.resolveuk.org.uk/asb-awareness-week