I was invited by Devon and Cornwall Police to join in with a walking police patrol around Totnes which was organised to highlight Totnes MP Anthony Mangnall the issues they face. It’s a chance to meet members of the local community.

When I arrived at the station on Ashburton Road I was joined by the Superintendent for South Devon Ben Davies, Sergeant Nathalie Booth and Police Community Support Officer Kirsty Meakin.

Superintendent Davies explained: “We have a Probationer Training Unit here so all our new recruits from HQ training College come through Totnes before going on to neighbourhood policing or frontline response.

“We have various cohorts with around 15 here at the moment.

"We’ve got a CID office here and also our property store.

“Ivybridge and Kingsbridge both are Neighbourhood Policing teams and have response colleagues working out of there.

"Other colleagues from other departments use those buildings too. There are also smaller stations at Dartmouth and Salcombe. A lot of the front desks are closed but that is so we can concentrate our resources on 999 and 101 calls.”

We called into the community centre as well as a Methodist Church gathering before heading up to the bustling market where both traders and customers had their say.

Superintendent Davies continued: “We’ve been through one of the parks as we came through to the community centre.

"We did a lot of work with the council to cut back some of the trees.

"At one point it was becoming a location where knives were recovered so we had knife crime and violence against women and girls. Anti-social behaviour and street drinkers and homeless individuals can be a problem but we try to push them towards external services through drink or drug rehabilitation.

Anthony Mangnall told me the walk had been an enlightening experience: “It’s about learning about the full scale of what the police do in South Devon. Today’s been about seeing how they engage with anti-social behaviour, how they deal with drug crime, how they also engage with the community and of course that’s the most important thing.

“We’ve got more police officers than we had in 2010 here and it’s about driving up that visibility so people here feel safe. Ivybridge and Totnes are being looked at in the next round of openings. Many people who the police come in to contact with have complex problems and the government has provided an extra £2m toward Torbay mental health facilities."

You can read more about policing locally in next week’s paper.