Crimes against property in the Camp d’Elx show a downward trend due to the reinforcement of the security device in the rural area of Elche, according to data handled by the Local Police of Elche, the National Police Corps and the Guardia Civil.
“The situation in the Camp d’Elx is calm and stationary, and leads us to work along the same lines as we are doing,” said the council spokesperson and head of the municipal security body Israel Marco, who was joined at a presentation in the town hall by Councillor for Citizen Security, Ramón Abad, and the head of the Local Police, César Zaragoza.
The services attended by the Local Police in Camp d’Elx, whether they are neighbourhood calls to 112 or 092 due to suspicions or completed criminal acts, show a clear downward trend from November 2020 to today. Including in the second half of December, when historically there was an increase in police services for the Christmas holidays, when many rural residents take the opportunity to visit relatives or travel.
These effects are derived from combining the reinforcement of troops in the Camp d’Elx by the Local Police with the strategy initiated by the Elche Headquarters six years ago of daily analysing the information on “what, when and how is happening”, Marco said. In this way, he has clarified, the troops are deployed based on the data and what is happening in the field daily within a proactive police model, and not for reasons such as the number of inhabitants or the dimensions of a district.
“The results are more than satisfactory”, highlighted César Zaragoza. “The number of interventions, controls, interaction with citizens… This amalgamation of actions has allowed us to eradicate certain problems in the field and collect important information that, properly managed, we have shared with the rest of the security forces, resulting in investigations with detainees and greater tranquillity”, according to the police chief.
Normally, the daily deployment throughout the year of the Local Police in Camp d’Elx is carried out by the Territorial Units of the Community Police and the Rural Security Unit, explained Ramón Abad. The Territorial Units are made up of 44 agents in three shifts –morning, afternoon and night– and carry out ordinary preventive tasks just as they would in the city, although taking into account the particularities of each of the rural areas of Elche.
On the other hand, 90% of the tasks of the Rural Unit, with twelve agents, is to carry out preventive static controls -which have increased by 50%- throughout the entire municipal area to combat the feeling of insecurity, prevent crimes and locate and arrest the perpetrators of the same, in a single shift from 7:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., the time slot where the largest number of calls related to citizen security are recorded. Also, it is the Rural Unit that analyses the information provided by neighbours and rural associations or collected by the Local Police in its permanent communication channels such as social networks or the 092 emergency telephone number itself, among others.
Both the agents of the Territorial Units and the Rural Unit that patrol the Camp d’Elx, Abad stressed, are linked to and aware of the environment, in addition to receiving specific training to carry out their tasks in said environment.
The councillor thanked César Zaragoza for “the effort and leadership” put into the creation of the Rural Unit, which had been forged since the end of the last term, but could not start until October 2021 due to the pandemic. The head of the Local Police has thanked the Department led by Abad for providing the body with support in the form of resources. “It has allowed us to deal with a problem that was occurring, such as the intensification of robberies in the countryside and to make the greatest deployment in the history of the Elche Local Police”, Zaragoza concluded.
New troops and more neighbourhood meetings
The implementation of the Rural Unit meant the strengthening of the police force in the Camp d’Elx with the aim of “preventing and combating incidents related to citizen security and establishing permanent contact with the associative fabric of the different parties and districts”, said the councillor.
With a dozen agents, two officers and an inspector, the Rural Unit began its journey in order to ensure the well-being and protection of the residents of the thirty existing districts and rural areas in the Camp d’Elx. The initial annual budget of this specialised body of the Local Police is 520,600 euro, a figure framed within the Municipal Investment Plan in Pedanías 2020-2023, endowed with 42 million euro spread over 70 actions, of which more than half have already been executed.
Abad, also deputy mayor for Human Resources, has announced that the selection processes to add six new agents to the Rural Unit are in their final phase, so they will soon be integrated into it to reach 18 agents in total.
In addition, the councillor has recalled that the meetings continue between those responsible for the Department of Citizen Security and the Local Police with the residents. “We have held fifteen meetings with the residents of El Altet, Balsares, Torrellano, Asprillas and Llano de San José”, he specified. And that, in coordination with the Veïns Alerta platform, the objective is to hold these assemblies in the districts to “maintain that closeness and take advantage of the fact that the festivities begin in the countryside to establish contact with the commissions, barracks or youth clubs”.
In the year 2000, 20,000 inhabitants lived in Camp d’Elx. Currently, they number 45,000.
