Camden New Journal - News: Pressure

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Camden New Journal - by PAUL KEILTHY
Published: 20 September 2007

Neighbourhood teams’ targets pressure

THE ‘citizens’ panels’ designed to democratise London’s showcase community policing project are being pressured to conform to Met Police targets, a report revealed in the same month that one Camden panel expelled a member in the midst of bitter acrimony.
The Safer Neighbourhoods (SN) Team project, which has seen three police officers and three PCSOs dedicated to every ward in the borough, relies on a panel of up to 15 civilians drawn from the community to dictate priorities and support the team’s sergeant.
Camden’s 18 panel chairs released a report last week expressing “an ongoing concern that the original concept of SN – where local people set local priorities for local officers – was being eroded. Panels felt pressured to adopt priority crime targets in order for the MPS/MPA/council to reach their targets, even if the particular crime was not a priority for local residents.
Central targets on crimes like robberies, burglaries and motor theft are key to the way in which a borough force and its senior officers are judged to perform, but often do not concern residents in some wards as much as relatively trivial issues such as cycling on the pavement.
But following further controversy over the expulsion of a citizen vice-chairwoman, Beverly Gardner, from the Haverstock Safer Neighbourhood Panel, a move Ms Gardner described as an unconstitutional ‘putsch’, Camden’s senior police have defended the Safer Neighbourhood structure.
The officer in charge of community policing, Chief Inspector Paul Morris, said on Friday: “We have been part of the review and taken on their recommendations, and this is just a matter of tightening up and making some of the activities consistent throughout the borough.”
And Camden’s borough commander, Chief Superintendent Mark Heath, said: “Safer Neighbourhoods are there to do the things that the local community wants. If you are starting to get local people involved who are not used to that structure (of formal committees) then that is a good thing.
“It is part of life that there’s always people who don’t get on, but the Safer Neighbourhood Team are part of the bigger picture and contribute to wider issues in the borough.”
– See Forum, page 21

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