BOLTON is shaking off its crime black-spot reputation with a large fall in the number of reported crimes.

During the last year recorded crimes in the town were cut by 9.4 per cent to 28,434.

The tumble in the figures was predicted in the BEN earlier this year as Bolton's Ch Supt John Bartlett addressed a crime fighting conference and the full breakdown of figures for crime between April 1996 and March this year endorsed his optimism.

The trend looks set to continue with crime figures for April this year down 14pc.

Bolton's drop was only beaten by Rochdale with 11pc. Four divisions in Greater Manchester reported increases from the previous year. Reported crime across the whole of Greater Manchester has fallen by 3.7pc.

Police in Bolton also managed to detect more than 23pc of all reported offences, an increase on last year.

But during the last year Bolton did record the highest number of fraud and forgery offences - 854, well ahead of any other Greater Manchester division.

In January Ch Supt Bartlett revealed that crime had fallen by 10pc during the previous 10 months.

Today he said: "Obviously we are pleased with the second best reduction in Greater Manchester, but we are not complacent."

Bolton continues to be plagued by drug related crimes with 139 - the highest number of reported offences outside Manchester itself. All but one were successfully detected.

Bolton was reported recently as having one of the worst drug addiction problems in the whole of the North West with an estimated 70pc of all crime in the town committed by desperate addicts trying to finance their next fix.

Bolton recorded the second highest number of house burglaries in Greater Manchester last year with 5,553. Only South Manchester was higher with 9,031.

And Ch Supt Bartlett has pledged to try and cut that figure this year. He said: "We accept the house burglary figure is still too high and we have made plans to tackle that positively this year."

Bolton also had the fourth highest wounding and assault figures in the area.

When Bolton's crime figures were at their peak five years ago more than 38,000 offences were reported and the town was dubbed one of the car crime black-spots of Britain.

But reflecting the overall downward trend in Bolton's crime figures there were only 3,467 car thefts last year - one of the lowest throughout Greater Manchester.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.