Safer Neighbourhood Policing: London

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I will do my best to stick to the timescale you outlined.

My first experience of working with the police as an elected local representative was as a local councillor working with my safer neighbourhood team, set up by the former Labour Mayor of London. I found the dedicated team of six officers to be hugely impressive, forging strong connections and relationships across the community and working in a way that was responsive to local needs and issues but also proactive and preventive. They also delivered results. We saw estates that had suffered episodes of gang-related violence have no such problems for years, and antisocial behaviour and drug dealing properly dealt with. We saw the perpetrators of spates of burglaries quickly apprehended and really valuable work, such as the detailed mapping of a large area of woodland in the ward, so that it was easier to find lost children. Most importantly, we saw the police out and about in the ward day in, day out, getting to know residents, understanding and responding to their concerns and preventing crime as well as responding to it.

I would like to pay tribute briefly to the hard work of the police in my constituency, which often goes above and beyond the call of duty. I was contacted on 23 December by a vulnerable elderly resident who had been the victim of a particularly nasty robbery in his home. He was calling to ask that I wrote to thank the borough commander because, in his words, the officers who responded to his call for help had been not only effective but kind, organising a small party and whip-round to show their support. We should not for a moment forget such excellent work when we debate policing in London.

The cuts to policing in London have been extensively covered by my colleagues, so I will not dwell on them in detail. I will simply say that the cuts have been devastating, and that the change from safer neighbourhood policing to the local policing model has been the most damaging of all. That reorganisation strips away one of the vital tools the police had for building deep relationships with the communities they serve, and we are seeing the impacts on the ground.

On one of the estates in my constituency, residents, many of them elderly, are not currently receiving any post because the postal worker who delivers there has been threatened and mugged, and Royal Mail has decided it is not a safe environment in which its staff should deliver. That could easily be resolved if the safer neighbourhood team could put resources on the ground, as it could previously. On another estate, problems of antisocial behaviour are not being dealt with as quickly as they could be before. On another street, a spate of burglaries running on for months and months culminated in a horrible attack, where the contents of a petrol canister were thrown over a local resident.

Our police have been forced by the cuts to become reactive instead of proactive, visiting the victims of burglary or robbery after the crime has taken place and responding to call-outs. However, a proactive approach through neighbourhood policing is vital to addressing some of the most serious and pressing challenges that we face—gun and knife crime, child sexual exploitation, radicalisation and terrorism, forced marriage and honour-based violence and hate crimes. Investigating and preventing those crimes requires the police to have the depth of knowledge and relationships with the communities they serve that cannot be fabricated in the heat of a rapid response, once a crime has taken place. As one community activist in Brixton said during a MOPAC roadshow meeting, in eroding safer neighbourhood teams

“you have taken the heart out of policing”.

Neighbourhood policing is vital to maintaining confidence and trust in the police. When communities know their officers and officers know their patch, the police have a public face at local level. When that is taken away, the public are left to rely on headlines and high-profile cases and the individual experiences of people who have sadly already been the victims of crime to determine their level of confidence in the police.

Finally, neighbourhood policing should not be regarded as the softer side of policing, but as the vital relationship-building bridge between the police and the communities they serve and the key to resolving and preventing many of the serious crimes that can threaten the security and stability of our communities.