Ulster Unionist Deputy Leader and Agriculture Spokesperson Diana Armstrong MLA has marked the close of Rural Crime Week by calling for rural policing to be properly resourced, saying that families across the countryside are already experiencing the consequences of a service spread too thinly.

Diana Armstrong said:

“This week I have raised three things. Rural crime is rising here while falling across the rest of the United Kingdom. Too much of it goes unreported. Organised drug gangs are deliberately targeting rural communities because we are quiet and spread out.

“All three come back to the same problem. There are not enough officers covering our rural areas, and the people who live there know it.

“I do not say that lightly, and I am not alone in saying it. Neighbourhood officers themselves have reported that their teams are depleted and covering ever larger areas outside Belfast, and that this makes it difficult to build the relationships that policing in the countryside depends on. That is a worrying development and I fear it barely scratches the surface of what is actually happening out there.

“Because this is not a statistic to the people I represent. It is the farmer who waits, and waits, after a break-in. It is the family who no longer expects to see a patrol on their road from one month to the next. It is the man who stops lifting the phone at all because he has decided nothing will come of it. I hear it constantly, and I hear it more now than I did two years ago.

“Rural policing does not work the way urban policing does. It runs on someone knowing the district, knowing the families, knowing which yard has had trouble before, and being around long enough that people will tell them things. Take that away and you do not just get slower response times. You get a community that stops passing on information, because there is nobody left to pass it to.

“That is exactly how crime becomes invisible. It is why recorded agricultural crime can fall while losses climb, and why the Ulster Farmers' Union says the true scale is far greater than the figures show. Policing is resourced on recorded demand, so a community that stops reporting ends up with fewer officers, and fewer officers means fewer reports. Rural Northern Ireland has been caught in that loop for years.

“More officers on our rural roads would make a real difference. So would a Justice Minister willing to fight for the money to put them there.

“My ask before next Rural Crime Week is simple. Report everything, every time, on 101 or anonymously through Crimestoppers. To the Justice Minister, my ask is to resource the officers who serve our countryside properly, so that when a farmer does lift the phone there is somebody there who knows the road.”