KEY players in the community have a social responsibility to "extol the virtues" of the city and help prevent future crime, Salisbury's police chief has said.

Inspector Pete Sparrow is calling for organisations such as the council, police and media outlets to "stand together" and "big up" positive news involving the way the community is "uniting" against crime.

Directing his comments to media outlets during a Salisbury Area Board meeting on Thursday, he said: "If we keep making out that Salisbury is a bad place then people will come here and exploit.

"We need to start spilling the virtues of what's positive about Salisbury, there is a lot of really good stuff here such as the positive news around street drinking that we are tackling multi-agency."

Insp Sparrow told councillors that while crime has risen by 7.8 per cent in the city centre since the CCTV cameras have been switched off, it was still a "safe city" compared to other places in the country.

He highlighted figures over a ten-month period between July 2016 and April 2017 which show that Wiltshire has seen a crime increase of 8.9 per cent on the previous year while regionally there is a 10.9 per cent rise, and nationally, an 11.2 per cent increase.

He said: "Crime in Salisbury has risen less and some of this will be down to different ways of counting and manipulation of those figures but there is a significant point here which is that Salisbury is a safe city in a safe county and has had proportionally less rise in crime despite having no CCTV.

"CCTV is a very good tool for investigations and I welcome it to be turned back on - I understand the contractors have started to tie up the cables this week - but we shouldn't lose sight of that fact that actually we are in a good place."

He highlighted the improvement of police response times to 999 calls under the new community policing model which has almost halved from 14 minutes and 30 seconds to eight minutes and 26 seconds.

Among the policing priorities being focused on in the city are dangerous drug networks where drug dealers come from large urban areas and take over the homes of addicts to use as a base for dealing, and modern slavery and human exploitation.

Insp Sparrow told councillors: "You may think that modern slavery is just about trafficking people across country lines, it's not, it's very much within Wiltshire and within Salisbury.

"There's about one per cent reported at the moment because people don't recognise it but when you look at a lot of the labour within buildings, constructions, fruit farms and restaurants, there is a lot of people who are being exploited."