Cheltenham Festival sees an influx of people in the Town and County as punters race to ‘The Home of Jumps’ for one of the biggest British sporting events of the year, but this brings a big job for Gloucestershire Police to keep everyone safe.
Officers based in Cheltenham and surrounding areas have their work cut out, including Sgt PC Laing, who will be on shift throughout the week, saying: “It’s a busier period than normal. We have a bespoke planning operation in place for the races, involving officers from across all the forces to make sure we have normal day-to-day policing, policing for the event and also policing for the evening, so it’s a busy time for everyone.
“It’s a well-tried and tested plan, it runs the same every year with a few tweaks, so it’s been a busy time. The planning team have been very busy and it’s all come together this morning.”
However, even with the best action plan, it can be impossible to predict the behaviour of intoxicated racegoers but the Forces will be ensuring they cover as much area as possible, Laing says: “When you bring together a lot of excited party-goers you do end up with a bit of drunk and anti-social behaviour.
“To make sure we combat that, we have patrols in the daytime, after at the race course but also in the evening where people have, perhaps, had a bit too much to drink, there are dedicated officers on until five o’clock, sometimes six o’clock in the morning to make sure everyone has a safe, enjoyable time.”
Colleague, Sgt PC Howse will be one of the officers in charge of prisoner transport, she already hopes that she won’t have to deal with a lot this festival, she said: “We tend to deal with things quite robustly but calmly, defusing situations when we can, preventing people from being arrested. I think last year we only had two or three people arrested from the racecourse, the other arrests came in the night-time economy.
“It was lower than the previous years on arrests but I think that’s probably because of our policing response, we dealt with people differently last year and going forward we’ll be dealing with people differently this year too.”
There will be 28 races across the whole week at Prestbury Park, where Cheltenham’s police force will be ensuring the safety of the entire of everyone at the racecourse and surrounding areas.
