Former firearms officer puts Mansfield’s criminals in her sights
A former firearms officer now has shop thieves, drug dealers and nuisance motorcyclists in her sights after taking charge of community policing in Mansfield.
Inspector Katie Eustace, known for her role in Channel 5’s Police Interceptors, took charge of the neighbourhood team earlier this month and has vowed to continue the excellent work of her predecessor in tackling shoplifting, antisocial vehicle use, and drug dealing.
Inspector Eustace, a third generation Notts officer with an action-packed career history of front-line roles across the county, is now relishing the chance to make a positive difference to the place she and her family call home.
She said: “I live locally. I have family in the area and my daughter will go to school and grow up in this community – so this is personal to me.
“Mansfield is a great place to live and work and I am passionate about making it even better.
“And that’s what really motivates me about my role as for most of my career I’ve been responding to and dealing with immediate threats to the public.
“Over last few years the team has done some absolutely brilliant work around shoplifting and that work will continue.
“So, if people come to our town to steal and upset our retailers, they can expect to come face to face with my officers.
“If people continue to commit offences to fund drug habits and ignore the help that our partners are trying to give them, they will keep going back to jail until they change their behaviour.”
Inspector Eustace joined Nottinghamshire Police in 2009 – following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather before her.
Barring a brief spell in CID, she has always been in frontline roles – including as a firearms officer between 2017 and 2020.
Speaking about her time in the heavily male dominated world of armed policing, she added: “I’ve always been someone who enjoys a challenge, and that really was a huge challenge – particularly because of the very high fitness standards it required and just the massive responsibility of carrying a firearm.
“Working in neighbourhood policing is a very different challenge but it’s something I will approach with similar determination going forward.
“The good news for me – and for the wider town – is that so much excellent work has already been done over the last couple of years by the team.
“Like me, most of them live locally and have that same level of investment in their community as I and tens of thousands of other local residents.
“We all want our families to enjoy visiting a town centre free from antisocial behaviour; we all want to be able to visit our local green paces without our children being put at risk by reckless motorcycle riders; and we all want to live in streets free of drug related violence and criminality.
“For that reason, I want us all to work together to make our communities safer and better places to live.
“So if people are concerned about issues in their neighbourhood I want them to tell us about it so we can take firm action in response.”
Inspector Eustace remains a tactical firearms commander, and recently oversaw the armed policing plan for a visit by the Home Secretary to Nottingham.
Former Mansfield Neighbourhood Policing Inspector Kylie Davies is now working in Nottingham as a Chief Inspector in community policing.