LANCASHIRE Police are celebrating a successful year with crime, anti-social behaviour and road casualties all falling.

The statistics have just been revealed in the Chief Constable's annual report for March 1998 to April 1999.

Chief Constable Pauline Clare reveals that, comparing like with like, there were nearly 3,000 fewer crimes than the previous year, accounting for a fall of 2.7 per cent - 104,383 compared with 107,236.

New national rules for counting crimes mean that a number of new offences are now also counted and this brings the final total for 1998-99 to 118,117, which is the new figure that has to be reported to the Home Office.

However, the district auditor has approved the force's methods for making a meaningful comparison between the two years in order to show its very real progress.

Anti-social behaviour fell by 3.1 per cent and there were 683 fewer people hurt in road collisions.

The report shows that, on a typical day, Lancashire Constabulary receives 7,245 telephone calls, deals with 324 crimes, makes 190 arrests, solves 110 crimes, attends 16 injury collisions on the roads, responds to 1,758 incidents, handles 43 breakdowns on the motorways, carries out 63 breath tests and recovers £38,757 worth of stolen property.

Mrs Clare pays tribute to the hard work of her staff during a year of financial restraint and ongoing change for the police service.

Her report outlines a number of problem-solving initiatives and major crime investigations, as well as charting the development of new working relationships with local authorities and other agencies.

She says that the year ahead will be just as demanding, with the force setting itself a challenging target to reduce crime by six per cent and anti-social behaviour and road casualties by five per cent.

The report was published at the meeting of the police authority in tandem with the authority's own annual report.

Both will go on the constabulary website and copies will be distributed to the reference section of county libraries in the next few weeks.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.