Skipton residents are being urged to become more security conscious in a drive to reduce the town's crime figures.

Sergeant Kevin Wilson said 75 per cent of house burglaries could be prevented if everyone locked their doors and windows.

He added that most car crime was committed on vehicles where doors had been left unlocked, where no steering locks were used or where people had left valuable items in view.

"People should take more care of their vehicles rather than just saying 'it is Skipton; it does not happen in Skipton'. Offences that occur in Manchester, Birmingham and London do go on in Skipton.

"Would you take your car to Birmingham and leave the door unlocked or leave your mobile phone or laptop on the back seat? Then why do it in Skipton?" said Sgt Wilson.

"We can patrol the areas and use CCTV but if the person who owns the vehicle or house does not take responsibility for it, all our aims and efforts are going to go down the pan.

"As soon as we walk away from an area someone can do what they want behind our backs."

He added that rarely were police officers waiting at the scene for a crime to be committed and they could not patrol all the areas all the time.

The push for everyone to help police by protecting their own property as much as possible has come after Skipton's town centre crime figures were released this week.

Between April to December 2000 there were 996 crimes in the town centre. This figure had risen to 1137 for the same period in 2001.

Domestic burglaries had risen from 31 to 48 and non-domestic burglaries were up from 63 to 88.

Violent crimes rose from 148 to 188, vehicle crime was up from 86 to 99, public order offences were up from 51 to 69 and criminal damage was up from 211 to 228.

Only retail crime was down from 160 incidents between April to December 2000 to 133 in 2001.

Sgt Wilson said he was disappointed the crime figures had gone up but pointed out that there were about 200 more arrests in 2001 than in 2000.

He said there were more police out patrolling the streets and detection rates were up.

He added that pro-active policing to target offenders would automatically push crime figures up. He also thought that new methods of recording crimes had pushed the numbers up.

The Craven Crime Reduction Partnership has drawn up targets for 2002 to 2005.

These include reducing burglaries to 10 per 100 households, reducing auto-crime to 10 per 1,000 population, reducing violent crime to six per 1,000 population, reducing drunkenness, and reducing retail theft by 10 per cent.

Sgt Wilson said that many of these targets would be extremely difficult to meet and for many of the categories the police would need help from car and home owners, shopkeepers and pub landlords and licensees.