More police with the powers and backing they need to keep our streets safe
The increase in serious violence and anti-social behaviour in Harlow and across the country is deeply worrying and sadly some people no longer feel as safe as they should.
It is both the Prime Minister’s and our priority to make our streets safer – and we’ve already begun work to do just that – so that the law abiding majority can live their lives free of the fear of crime.
And it's because we've got Brexit done that once again we're able to focus on priorities like this.
More police on our streets
Across the country, we’re putting 20,000 more police on our streets and Harlow is already seeing the benefits of this. Since October last year, Essex Police has already been bolstered by 74 extra officers.
Anti-social behaviour in the town centre is being tackle by the designated town-centre police team.
This means that we can start making people feel safer straight away.
Giving the police the powers they need
As well as recruiting new police officers we are making sure they have the backing they need to protect us.
Things like extending stop and search - where we’ve empowered our police officers with enhanced powers as part of our efforts to crack down on violent crime.
We will back our police by equipping officers with the powers and tools they need to keep themselves and all of us safe, including tasers and body cameras. We will put the Police Covenant into law to ensure they have the support they need.
Police will be empowered by a new court order to target known knife carriers, making it easier for officers to stop and search those convicted of knife crime.
Anyone charged with knife possession will appear before magistrates within days not weeks. Those who use a knife as a weapon should go to prison.
Protecting the public
Nationally, 10,000 new prison places will mean that we can hold the additional offenders who will be caught, charged and sentenced.
£2.75 billion will be spent on creating modern, efficient prisons to better reform criminals and keep the public safe, whilst an extra £100 million will aid the crackdown on crime within prisons.
And to make sure that the public are properly protected from dangerous criminals we’re ending the automatic release of the most serious violent and sexual offenders at the halfway point of their sentence as well as conducting an urgent review of sentencing.
We will introduce tougher sentencing for the worst offenders and end automatic halfway release from prison for serious crimes. For child murderers, there will be life imprisonment without parole.
We will expand electronic tagging for criminals serving time outside jail, including the use of sobriety tags for those whose offending is fuelled by alcohol.
We will toughen community sentences, for example by tightening curfews and making those convicted do more hours of community payback to clean up our parks and streets.
We will combat extremism and do all we can to ensure that extremists never receive public money.
We will keep our country safe from terrorism. We will invest in the police and security services and give them the powers they need to combat new threats. In the wake of the terrible events in Manchester in 2017, we will improve the safety and security of public venues.
The Conservatives will always take the necessary steps to ensure criminals are kept off our streets. Since the appalling incident on London Bridge, we’ve announced that we’ll keep terrorists in prison for longer and tighten security around our borders we can keep people and communities in Britain safe.
We’re sending a clear message to criminals: we’re coming after you.
