Labour really do believe that if they repeat a lie often enough people will accept it as the truth. Cutting your policing contribution by 34% and trying to make it something else is plain dishonest.
“A lie told often enough becomes truth” – Vladimir Lenin
Labour’s Cllr Mahfouz is frantically tweeting through the cabinet meeting that is going on right now. These tweets are real gems and a total load of cobblers. When I wrote earlier this month that Labour had reduced the policing contribution that the borough makes by 25% this was an underestimate! Although the budget report shows it going down 25% from £1 million to £750K the actual figure is now going to be £660K as they have decided to raid this budget to spend £90K on beefing up the noise nuisance team. This may well be a good thing but it is a bit dishonest to take it from the police budget and not mention it. Meanwhile the policing cut is 34%.
The current team comprises an inspector, two sergeants and 40 PCSOs. We will have a team comprising an inspector, 9 PCs and 9 PCSOs. I am sure that Labour will tell us that PCs are better than PCSOs but they cannot hide the fact that they have taken 34% out and reduced numbers from 43 to 19. It looks like they intend to make some 60 council staff wear uniforms so that they can make a spurious claim to have increased the number of uniformed officers.
PCSOs have been unfairly derided for being plastic policemen. Now Ealing is going to have paper policemen.
You can see the cabinet paper here. I do feel sorry for the officer Susan Parsonage, Director of Safer Communities, who had to put her name to this nonsense.
One of the themes I will keep coming back to when looking at the budget is that Labour’s priorities are skewed. Rather than putting residents concerns at the top of their priority list they have put a weird mixture of officers’ and Labour party internal priorities at the top.
Take crime. If you check out the residents survey, here, you will see that residents’ single biggest concern is “Crime: including anti-social behaviour and terrorism”. This is cited by 20% as a personal concern, top of the list with the next biggest concern being cited by 15%.
Labour are quite aware of this concern and even put crime in number one spot on their list of five key pledges in their manifesto:
Labour’s “distribute any cuts as equally as possible” approach to the budget means that the £1 million budget for additional policing in Ealing has been cut by 25% from £1 million to £750K, see page 165 here.
Instead of providing more uniformed officers as promised Labour are significantly reducing them. This £1 million budget is tiny in comparison to the £1 billion the council spends every year. This really does demonstrate that Labour’s priorities are all wrong and that they are quite happy to bin manifesto promises.
On Friday morning the Northfield councillors trooped over to the police SNT ward base on South Ealing Road to thank Segeant Gregory Fox and PSCO Salim Bhunnoo for their excellent service to the ward.
Greg is retiring to spend some more time as captain of his golf club. By his own admission Greg started off as a Safer Neighbourhoods sceptic but has thoroughly enjoyed his time on the ward. He has been a valued local figure throughout his service and will be much missed on the streets and at our ward forum where we all enjoyed his Irish patter.
Salim was one of the first members of the team and has been a PCSO for way too long. Thankfully Hendon has re-opened its doors and Salim will soon be a fully fledged PC. Salim is an excellent young man and he will make a great copper. We have been lucky to have him and the Met is doing well to retain his services.
I don’t usually do regular local news on my blog as I don’t want to replicate what the Gazette or Ealing Today does. The horrifying attack on two police officers on Wednesday made the national news so it is not as if people need the news from me. But, I just wanted to thank PC Paul Madden and PCSO Piotr Dolata for their service and wish them a full recovery from their injuries. As much as we fear crime we lead, on the whole, ordered and happy lives in this country thanks to the service of our police.
I have not included a photo with this blog. It might have been better if the Standard had not used their shot of a bloodstained pavement in their reports.
The use of the imperative is all mine and not that of the Northfield Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT) who have sent out the following message in the hope of reminding people to be a little more dilligent about locking their vehicles and keeping valuables out of view.
It would be nice if people didn’t nick our stuff and the crime is most assuredly committed by the thief and certainly not the property owner where someone forgets to lock their car or leaves their sat nav on view. But, the rule in London, and many other parts of the country, is if you leave anything on view you are likely to get your car broken into. That includes coats, old briefcases, carrier bags filled up with rubbish, etc. It costs nothing to break your window and the thief will only realise that there is no wallet in the coat pocket or valuable PC in the briefcase once he has broken your window.
The Northfield SNT say:
Over the past few weeks, crime on the Northfield ward has been at it’s lowest in well over two years, but that’s in jeopardy!!
The past three days have seen a number of theft from motor vehicle offences on the ward. These offences have occurred when the victims have left their vehicles unattended and unlocked and even with doors left wide open! Property has been left clearly on display and even sat navs left on display with holders left hanging from the car windscreens when owners did remember to take the sat nav itself out of the car.
Northfield officers are doing their utmost with regards to identifying and arresting the suspects responsible and we urge our residents to be more careful when leaving their vehicles unattended making sure no valuables, bags, phones, and especially sat navs are left on display for prying eyes and light fingers.
It is often said to us that people are well within their rights in leaving their vehicle with property on display and unlocked, etc and I entirely agree with you, but unfortunately with the world we live in today the consequence is inevitable.
We at Northfields pride ourselves in having the lowest crime figures on the borough and we work hard to maintain that, but what we would appreciate from our residents is a little help to maintain this.
Northfield SNT
The contact details for the Northfield SNT are given on the page linked on the right.
I saw this headline in the Telegraph this morning:
Police complain orders to patrol alone puts them in danger
I think their story was a rehash of a Daily Mail story with a somewhat more forthright headline:
Whining bobbies in Facebook campaign against single police patrols
Both newspapers demonstrated why they will be going out of business sometime soon – they refused to provide a link to the Facebook page they were writing about. Linking has been the whole point of the web since it was created by Tim Berners-Lee 20 years ago. The Facebook page is here. The 1,000 people that have signed up seem to be a mixture of PCSOs, retired policemen and their families. They are wrong.
They say “ban single patrols of police”. This position is as silly as one that says all police patrols should be single handed. I would not want to go out on my own in many parts of inner city London at night. Similarly, most of London during the day is safe enough for a single PCSO to patrol. Otherwise we would have to advise the public in general to stay at home unless they had an escort.
The campaign seems to be the work of a woman called Angi Butcher-McDermott from Kent who said she is unwilling to apply to become a PCSO if made to patrol alone in dangerous areas. That is reasonable. Banning single patrolling isn’t. As a man of a certain age I might be forgiven for suggesting that if she wants to do a man’s job and earn a man’s wage she should take the same risks. Has 40 odd years of feminism really passed this woman by?
The new Met chief Sir Paul Stephenson has suggested that there should be more single patrolling. He is right. If it is not safe for coppers to go out on their own most of the time in most of London then we might as well just give up. Single patrolling means that coppers have to talk to the public and can’t just chat to their buddy and ignore us. It makes them more approachable by definition as they have no-one else to talk to! Single patrolling has to give us more bang for our policing buck. That said there are many occasions when double patrolling is appropriate and this can only be an operational judgement of the chain of command.
The double patrolling mindset that Stephenson is trying to overturn was demonstrated in one of the Safer Neighbourhood Team adverts the Met themselves put out three years ago. Their own ads (see picture at top) show two coppers doing the work of one. One talks to a woman whilst the other just goofs around.
Update: Now picked up by Standard here. They are leading on it – certainly online.
Their editorial says:
Sir Paul is right. His detractors show more concern for their convenience than the public they are meant to serve.
Sir Hugh Orde is the relatively new chief shop steward for the police (AKA President of ACPO). In September Orde was railing against politicians wanting the police to be accountable, see here. Now he has resuscitated the idea of regionalising the Police. According to the Evening Standard today he says that police forces must merge to save money. It sounds like he is bringing back Charles Clarke’s failed attempt to regionalise policing back in 2005. It all collapsed luckily amidst claims that mergers would cost £600 million, see here. It sounds like Orde will have a hard time judging by this quote:
I have raised [mergers] with every political party and I do not detect any political will to deliver this in the foreseeable future.
Quite right. I don’t know why Orde is raising this now. There is no doubt that the police in common with all public services are going to be under financial pressure for a long time. The correct reponse to this is to look at solo patrolling, reducing police paperwork, holding down police pay, making use of cheaper staff, pooling back office functions across forces, procuring across forces and, for good measure, getting coppers out of limos. Once you have done all of that Mr Orde come back to mergers but for most people the police are distant and unaccountable enough without regional mergers thank you.
It is crime statistics reporting season. On Thursday the Mayor reported that crime is at a 10 year low. See his press release here. Some good progress is reported:
Overall there were 18,000 fewer offences in London between 2007/8 and 2008/9, including a cut in youth violence of almost 10 per cent and a drop in serious violent crime of 2.4 per cent. Gun crime has reduced by almost 26 per cent, knife crime has dropped by 13 per cent, murder has been cut by more than four per cent and robbery is down 12 per cent.
I criticised the previous mayor for talking up reductions in total crime whilst violent crime, which is rather more important to most people, was on the rise, see previous post. These latest figures reassure me. There are problems to be tackled in many areas still including rape and domestic crime.
Cllr Ian Gibb, who is also the PPC for Ealing North, points to good figures for Ealing, see here. Crime across Ealing is down 3.8% whereas London is only down 2.2% overall. The story in Northfield is even better – crime down 7.6%.
Northfield is one of the safest places in London to live. Our crime levels are fractions of the Ealing and Greater London levels. The only area where we are typical of Ealing and London is burglary. We had 10.2 burglaries per 1,000 of population last year compared to 12.7 for Ealing as a whole and 13 for London as a whole. In these hard times it is probably as well to think again about basic home security, even in lovely Northfield.
To better understand the figures have a look at the overall Ealing figures here. The Northfield figures are here.
If you want to keep in touch with policing issues in Ealing take a look at the Met’s Ealing website.
If you have nuisance crime issues that are locally based rather than immediate 999 issues call Sergeant Fox on the Northfield Safer Nieghbourhood number 020 8721 2950. Their webpage is here.
I have been a bit busy over the weekend so apologies for not being very active on the blog. I was pleased to see on Friday the Mayor sticking to his knitting and talking about recruiting more special constables. See press release here and Evening Standard story here.
More policing, more volunteering, more keeping the police force in touch with the people it polices. We have seen too many incidents recently of the Met’s canteen culture getting out of hand and spilling over into rascist and other unpleasant incidents. A few Specials around the place to say “you can’t be serious” will be very welcome.
Current Met police numbers, see here for January 2009 figures, include 35,000 PCs, 14,000 office workers and 4,000 PCSOs. Currently there are some 2,600 Specials so it will be a hard task to get the number up to 10,000. If the Met succeed in recruiting these kind of numbers they are bound to have an impact firstly on increasing the number of police on the streets which is a big win in itself but the more important effect may well be the impact it has on normalising the police and making them more accountable to the public.
I don’t know if this initiative comes from the Mayor or the new Commissioner but it is a very welcome follow up to Stephenson’s announcement of a couple of weeks ago that coppers should be out on their own more. Both initiatives pull in the same direction: more boots on the ground and more accountability.
For all of the showbiz around the Mayor he only really has two jobs to do:
Incidentally, both of these tasks require him to tame unions that put their own members’ rewards way above public service.
Phil Taylor 