An Interview with Sussex Police & Crime Commissioner, Katy Bourne OBE

By Jamie Di Francescomarino

Katy grew up in East Grinstead and attended Highfield Preparatory School and from there, she attended Roedean School in Brighton and bagged the title of youngest Head of House they ever had. However, Katy’s passion for politics really flourished when she attended Aberystwyth University to study History and whilst campaigning for a local conservative candidate and having been involved in the vote counts, Katy knew that politics was a huge interest of hers.

It was when she sold her business in 2005, that she finally started in politics professionally and now remains the longest-serving Police and Crime Commissioner in the country.

Katy said, “My father always said he felt I should go into either politics or law and I suppose in a way I have combined the two in this job.”

Now you’re in your fourth term as Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner, what is one thing that you’ve learnt since your first term started in 2012?

“It’s hard to pinpoint the one thing as I have learnt so much, but the biggest change I guess I have made is funding the Sussex Young Witness Service, provided by Victim Support Essentially, if you’re a young person/child and either a witness or victim (or both) of a crime, we have a service where trained professionals will work alongside you and your family throughout the whole process to help the child.”

“A lady who had been supported by this service throughout the whole court process came to see me after the fact as sadly, her daughter was a victim of a sexual assault and she said to me, ‘We’re all doing amazing, my daughter is back in school, I’m able to go back to work.’ And whilst they weren’t able to forget what happened it helped them get back on track and she grabbed my hands and said, ‘Please never stop funding this service because you’ve not only saved my daughter but you’ve saved all of us.’ and this has just had such a profound effect on me ever since.”

What would you say was your biggest achievement in your last term?

“Definitely getting the police numbers up, we had a fixed number of police officers we needed to recruit as a government requirement otherwise we wouldn’t have been given the funding and I had also insisted on a further 250 officers over the last 5 years through local payments too.”

“The other big thing would definitely be the improvements I made to the 999 and 101 caller response times. If it’s an emergency on 999 they have to answer it within 10 seconds and that’s a requirement in law and we are now at the top of answering that in the country. It was also the 101 non-emergency number where members of the public were waiting so long that they would give up and therefore the abandonment rate was shocking.”

In your 2024 Manifesto, you have highlighted the need to put policing of violence against women and girls first, why do you think this is now more important than ever?

“Just because of what I saw this morning, there I was at the 7am briefing with the response officers who will go out on the 999 calls and were told 50% of the jobs they were given for the day were responses to domestic abuse situations so it’s very clear that violence against women and girls isn’t going anywhere.”

“When I came into office 12 years ago, on average we would get 2-3 reports of serious sexual offences against women and girls into Sussex Police every day and now we’re getting 5-6 a day.”

“I think there’s a big responsibility for men and boys to challenge their own peer groups as well and not to just allow this sort of culture to flourish, we’re in the 21st century now.”

What prime concerns do you think our readers would want you to address? And how can the people of Sussex share their concerns with you?

“I’m about to do an online survey to go out to lots of people and one of the things we’re asking is to rank certain issues in order of importance that we’ve collated from people that have written in to me and my team. These issues include antisocial behaviour, drugs, dangerous or antisocial driving, knife crime etc. Last year we worked with a professional company to do it and we got a fantastic, statistically significant result right across the whole of Sussex.”

Katy Bourne, our Police and Crime Commissioner would like to hear from you! Please share your views on policing to help shape PCC Bourne’s Police & Crime Plan.

Simply click here to fill out the Safer in Sussex survey!