SIR – I was pleased – but not surprised – to read in last week’s Welwyn Hatfield Times the views of many local people who dismissed the reporting in a recent edition of the Daily Mirror about crime in Hatfield and rightly defended the town’s reputation.

I chair the Welwyn Hatfield Community Safety Partnership, which brings together the police, your councils and others to tackle the causes and consequences of crime. And our approach is working: crime reduced in every one of the past six years, and so far this year it is even lower.

The risk of crime has reduced by a third from what it was in 2004 – that’s 3,000 fewer victims in the past year!

Burglary has almost halved, and serious violence remains very rare in the borough.

While local efforts focus on keeping down the kind of crime that people worry most about, it was good to read Supt Swinburne’s assurances about organised crime, too.

She said that the suspects the Mirror declares as being active in Hatfield are actually more indicative of Hertfordshire as a whole.

I can assure your readers that Hatfield, like the rest of the borough, is in a different league from the cities named in the Mirror’s report.

If residents would like to find out more about the work of the Welwyn Hatfield Community Safety Partnership, or how crime in Hatfield and the borough as a whole is being tackled, please email feelsafe@welhat.gov.uk

Alternatively, you can visit www.welwynhatfieldalliance.org.uk/communitysafetypartnership

Clare Berry,

Chair of the Community Safety Partnership.