Hove and Portslade passengers can report crimes by email

Train passengers from Hove and Portslade can now report crimes and anti-social behaviour by email during their journey.

Southern has been testing the email scheme, called Eyewitness, among its staff over the past couple of years and more recently with a number of passengers.

It has now extended it to passengers between Hove and the Hampsire station of Warblington, near Havant.

Mike Weatherley, the Conservative MP for Hove, joined Southern executives and representatives from the West Sussex Rail User Group to publicise the extension of the scheme at the weekend.

Southern said: “Eyewitness allows the reporting of low-level crime by email.

“The system has been used successfully as an in-house system where Southern staff have emailed members of Southern’s Safer Travel and Revenue Protection Teams to report vandalism, anti-social behaviour and fare evasion.

“The system allows Southern to respond quickly where officers are in the area.”

The company said that it also helped to identify patterns, trends and hotspots. This enabled the company to deploy rail neighbourhood officers and revenue protection officers more effectively when detailing patrols.

The scheme underwent a successful public trial on the Arun Valley Line.

As a result Southern is going to extend it to the rest of the Southern network, starting with the West Coastway.

Mr Weatherley said: “The Eyewitness scheme uses technology in a clever way to share information on those causing anti-social behaviour on our train services.

“It is an inexpensive system to crack down on what is a significant problem. I welcome this pro-active initiative wholeheartedly.”

Southern’s development director David Scorey said: “Eyewitness has been a tremendous success since we introduced it internally almost two years ago.

“The scheme has worked well on the Arun Valley Line. We look forward to even better results now that we are asking our passengers on the West Coastway to tell us about low-level crime they have witnessed.”

Passengers between Hove and Warblington can report an incident, where they saw it, when they saw it and a brief description of the offender or offenders to a dedicated email address.