Frinton-on-Sea in Essex is a veritable haven of calm. In September, just 34 crimes were committed there – 20 if you subtract antisocial behaviour infractions. This relative stability might be why there hasn’t been a police station in Frinton for 20 years.
However, thanks to recent cuts, Frinton’s nearest police station will soon be located eight miles away, in the broiling, hard-bitten hell on earth that is Clacton-on-Sea. So many crimes are committed in Clacton – 313 in September – that the good people of Frinton are worried they will become an afterthought. What will they do if there is a serious crime in the town? Call 999? Well, yes, obviously, because that would be sensible. But they have also decided to hire their own private police force, just in case.
Frinton residents have agreed to each pay £100 a year for the private security firm AGS to patrol the streets at night, in the hope that it will stomp out the plague of about one daily almost-crime that hasn’t really brought the town to anything like its knees.
If only the Frintonians had thought of this earlier, they might have prevented any of the three bicycle thefts that have been reported there this year, or that solitary drug crime that happened near Cortoncroft Close in May.
It will be a few months before anyone can see whether AGS has had a tangible effect on Frinton crime. If it has, perhaps they will spread out to neighbouring towns. Maybe the security contractors will even bring justice to the nefarious seagull that photobombed Google Street View in an attack so staggering that the Clacton Gazette is currently running it as its top story.
Then again, maybe they should just stick to patrolling Frinton. Rather that than let the town spiral out of control and become another Walton-on-the-Naze.
