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Police calls to schools

Police calls to schools - 25 November 2011

On page 7 of the Friday edition of the Medway Messenger (25 November, 2011) an inaccurate story was published about police being called to schools, headlined: “Schools’ shocking number of police calls revealed.”

Medway Council believes the Medway Messenger has published inaccurate, misleading and distorted information in this article. The council has listed a number of reasons why it believes this. The main points are:

  • The headline clearly states that these calls were from schools, when in fact many are incidents within the vicinity of the school and not at the school and would not be known about at the school. This is something that the council and the police made the Messenger aware of prior to publication. 
  • The story inaccurately states that the number of call outs to schools could be as many as 1,000 in a three year period.

A cursory glance at the figures sent to the Messenger from Kent Police shows that of the 1,000 listed, 276 were road related incidents - including speeding, bad driving, stolen vehicles, found vehicles and nuisance motorbikes.  

Ninety of the calls were to deal with missing or vulnerable people and 175 of the calls were triggered by security alarms going off – these are not necessarily at schools and many were triggered by 'bad weather' and engineers testing them.

Furthermore, many of the other 459 left appear to have happened within the vicinity of the school, and not at it, so were not calls by schools to the police for assistance.

Update - 2 December 2011 

We would like to thank the Medway Messenger for the swift and thorough action it has taken by publishing an apology on page 23 of their Friday, December 2 edition. The full apology – in relation to the matter above – that the paper has printed states:

"Following our story headlined: ‘Schools’ shocking number of police calls revealed’ (Medway Messenger, November 25) we would like to clarify the following:

"We stated that the number of call-outs (to schools) could be as many as 1,000.

"We stated clearly in the article that this was in ‘the vicinity of the schools’ and some may have occurred out of hours and not necessarily involving pupils, teachers or school property.

"This was because of the way police were able to search for the figures in their system following our Freedom of Information request.

"We omitted to say that out of the 1,000 calls to police 231 were recorded as ‘no crime’, 175 related to alarms being activated, 276 were vehicle-related and 90 concerned missing or vulnerable persons.

"We accept that not including this breakdown may have given a misleading or distorted impression of the extent of the problem and apologise to the schools concerned."

 

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