A FORMER gangs detective has launched his bid to be Wiltshire’s police and crime commissioner – claiming the force in which he spent 30 years had been watered down by austerity.

Mike Rees retired as a detective inspector in 2014 three decades after he joined Wiltshire Police aged just 18.

After six years running his own business – a cleaning firm specialising in clearing out hoarders’ homes – he has thrown his hat into the ring as an independent candidate in May’s crime commissioner elections. And he’s being backed by former detective superintendent Steve Fulcher – the man who caught double killer Christopher Halliwell.

Launching his bid for office, he said he wanted to get back to policing basics.

Mr Rees, 54, said: “Wiltshire Police has been watered down so much by austerity and I don’t currently think it’s delivering the best service it can deliver.

“Police stations are closing, resources are lacking and I think the time’s right for someone to come in, who’s got an understanding of what the police service is about.

“For the life of me I can’t understand why politicians want that role.

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“Who’s fighting the corner against austerity? Is Mr Macpherson going to fight against the Conservative Party? I don’t think so.”

Setting out his stall, he said: “You’ve got to go back to the basic role of a police officer. It’s about keeping the peace, preventing and detecting crime and protecting life and property.

“I think we’ve lost sight of that.

“We’ve had more and more coming down from government about doing this and doing that and we’ve lost sight of our basic role.”

He raised the example of burglaries. Last year, Wiltshire Police closed three out of every four break-in cases without having found a suspect.

“It’s not acceptable,” said Mr Rees, who in 2012 piloted a “burglary car” staffed by a specialist officer tasked with investigating break-ins.

“We have to understand we can’t attend everything, so you do have to prioritise. But for me it’s almost like an impact assessment.

“If you had a country house burgled and an antique table got stolen, is the impact on that family great?

“Or someone who lives in a normal, run-of-a-mill house, they run their business from it. The house gets trashed and all their business equipment gets taken. They can’t run their business anymore. The impact is phenomenal.”

The former police officer took aim at Wiltshire Police’s leadership: “You have to modernise. Times change and society changes. I just think we’ve lost sight a little bit of what our core function is as police officers.

“The police officers are good people, willing to give everything for the public. They put their life on the line.

“It seems to me leadership is lacking somewhat. From my own personal experience and from talking to colleagues, it seems the higher up you get the more selfish you get.”

Mr Rees spoke to reporters alongside Steve Fulcher, a former Wiltshire murder squad detective who was forced to resign in 2014 over legal issues surrounding the confession he secured from killer cabbie Halliwell.

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Steve Fulcher with Mike Rees

The pair met the Adver in the bar beside Malmesbury amateur boxing club, where former featherweight champion Mr Rees is volunteer coach. The town is set to lose its police station.

Backing his friend’s crime commissioner bid Mr Fulcher, 53, said: “If you limit the public’s access to the service, you can’t be surprised if there’s a disconnect. It is the first and most fundamental thing.

“You can only be responsible and accountable to those things you know about.

“If you’ve closed your ears and your eyes off because the public can’t contact the police and you don’t have an intelligence mechanism through which you can gather that proactively then you do end up with organised crime groups proliferating.

“It’s a debacle County Lines proliferation has occurred in the way it has and really in the last decade.”

Who is Mike Rees? The boxer turned counter-terror detective

Growing up on a Welsh council estate, Mike Rees little thought he’d spend three decades as a police officer.

The 54-year-old said: “I came from a council estate in south Wales. It was a bit rough. That’s how I got into boxing because it was the only thing to do. A lot of my friends ended up in prison.

“The police weren’t very well regarded where I grew up. I walked into a job centre in Cwmbran and saw an ad for police officers. It was £14,500. This was 1983 and I thought, ‘that’s a lot of money’.

“I applied to Gwent, but I was too short because there was a height restriction.

“I wrote to five forces off the list and got into Wiltshire. I was 18.”

He spent 30 years working in Wiltshire, saying the biggest lesson he learned was “that you get the best out of a team by treating them right”.

Since leaving the force he spent six years running his own cleaning company, specialising in cleaning up the homes of hoarders.

A former featherweight boxing amateur champion, he now volunteers at the Malmesbury boxing club – taking young people up and down the country.

He said: “We’ve got kids with Asperger’s, from broken families. It changes them for the better. They get a new group of friends. Parents ring me up saying he or she’s a completely different child. For me that’s just as good as producing a champion boxer.”

As a counter-terrorism officer, Mike Rees was called in to help the Met Police in the wake of the 7.7 bombings in London in 2005.

He was part of operations in major cities around England.

But he says one of his proudest moments in 30 years of being a police officer was leading a massive operation that saw more than 400 police officers execute 70 raids on a single day in a bid to cut the head off organised crime gangs.

The raids in January 2014 was the culmination of a massive 18 month undercover operation, called Op Harness, tackling the then relatively new phenomenon of County Lines drug dealing.

Officers made almost 50 arrests in a single day, with six in London. £11,500 cash was seized along with £65,000-worth of tobacco and £5,000 of designer clothing.

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Mike Rees briefs officers ahead of the Op Harness day of action

In the wake of the raids Mr Rees - then a detective inspector - told reporters: “Yesterday's activity sends a strong message out to anyone who sees Wiltshire as an easy target or Wiltshire Police as a soft touch.

“We will not tolerate anyone setting up a drugs network in Swindon or Wiltshire and we will put all of our resources into bringing those involved to justice.

"As predicted, we will continue to locate and arrest those outstanding suspects in the coming days and will not rest until we have completed this task.

“The operation was the culmination of over a year’s hard work from our undercover officers who are putting themselves at risk by associating with known criminals, often without any protection, to build up the intelligence we need for an operation like this."

The police and crime commissioner elections will be held on May 7. Jonathan Seed is standing for the Conservative Party and Junab Ali for the Labour Party.