Mr Jennings
Thank you for your email . It is always good to have feedback and it is something that we genuinely value.
Before the beginning of every season Southampton Football Club meet with senior police officers to review their plans for ensuring public safety. The matches are risk assessed at this meeting to decide which of these games, if any, can be ' police free '.
Ever since Southampton went into the Championship League there have been police free games, the majority of which take place trouble free.
If there are any incidents at one of these matches police respond in the normal way, appropriate to the situation, as happened in this case. Games are assessed on previous records and any intelligence we receive about possible trouble. The status of a police free game can be changed right up to when the match is played. For Saturday's game there was no intelligence of any anticipated problems.
Football associated violence has decreased over the last few years and across the country police free football games are regularly held very week.
Clearly, any future home matches against Barnsley will now be assessed taking into account the disorder at Saturday's match.
I understand the club will hold a review of their public safety arrangements in light of Saturday's match . We will also be talking with the club to review what happened, exactly how it was sparked off and what could be put in place to reduce the risk of a reoccurrence in the future. This may include inclusion of police resources either inside the ground or outside. The matter is always a fine balance between committing resources to a game or not. If we do, then this necessarily impacts on the level of service that we are able to offer to other areas of the city. We do have the capacity within the Constabulary to respond to such incidents but this can only be achieved by taking resources from other commitments. As such, we have to be very much 'intelligence led' when deciding where to put our resources and as stated above, there was no intelligence to suggest that there was going to be a problem with the Barnsley supporters.
In relation to the incident, around 15 people were involved in the disorder that led to one man receiving non-life threatening head injuries. The man who is from Fareham and aged 53, was not detained in hospital but was treated at the scene.
Five people were arrested. All were men aged between 27 and 51 and from Barnsley .
My information if that the first police units were on scene in about than 3.5 minutes and they were supported by others shortly afterwards. Once the incident was over the away fans coaches were escorted to the M3 by police.
Once again, thank you for your enquiry
Regards
Tim Ashman
Chief Inspector 5276
Southampton Operational Command Unit
Hampshire Constabulary