Southend's police chief has vowed to tackle the violent crime hike the district has seen over the last year.

Chief insp Simon Anslow, district commander for Southend, said the 13.8 per cent increase in “violence against a person”

from between July 2014 and 2015 compared with the same period a year earlier was an “area of huge concern”.

He said that some of the rise was down to more confidence in the police tackling violence and domestic assaults.

He said: “The largest increase is in reported violence without injury and a large amount of that will be down to more incidents being reported, rather than I think necessarily a rise in that sort of crime.

“It’s more of an awareness of it being reported – people are phoning us about more crimes.

“They have more confidence in the police and our integrity of how we are recording crime, which can be seen as a good thing.

“Violence with injury has gone up and I don’t think that’s down to more reporting. I think that represents a worrying increase in violence in some sections of Southend, which we are still trying to understand.

“We have successfully reduced the night-time economy violence, but we continue to work hard to reduce and understand the rise in domestic abuse.

“We get 11 domestic abuse incidents a day.

“I think it would be unwise of me to write it all off as just reporting, I am seeing it as an increase and I am going to make sure we dothe work to reduce it again.”