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Police plug gaps as burglaries rise
Top copper admits force is under-strength
BURGLARIES have risen sharply in Camden as political pressure for more community policing and a chronic shortage of officers have combined to tie the hands of the borough’s cops, the New Journal can reveal.
Already the capital’s most burgled borough, Camden has been stripped of experienced officers while suffering a rise in burglaries over the last 12 months, a time when the Met as a whole has seen break-ins fall.
Switching officers to ward-based Safer Neighbourhoods teams after London Mayor Ken Livingstone ordered the project brought forward by a year left police chiefs with fewer cops to deploy when a series of burglaries hit Haverstock, Gospel Oak and South Hampstead.
In an exclusive interview with the New Journal, Camden’s senior policeman, Chief Superintendent Mark Heath, said changes to policing strategies and a manpower shortage had left him with 22 fewer sergeants and 97 fewer constables to deploy to deal with outbreaks of specific crimes.
Although he defended the Safer Neighbourhoods team scheme as “the future of policing”, he said he had been urgently requesting extra officers to fill the gaps.
He added: “I am having some robust conversations with the Met as to why I’m in this position. We’ve lost in terms of cops. We’re under what we should have. I’ve invested as the rest of the Met has in safer neighbourhoods, but I’ve also been 45 constables short of the BWT (Borough Workforce Target or official strength).”
The six officers in each Safer Neighbourhoods team cannot be moved to duties outside their ward, but this creates problems when crime is not evenly distributed around the borough. Squads like the Borough Tasking Unit (BTU) and Community Tasking Units (CTUs), which are despatched to deal with concentrations of crime, have been weakened by the transfer of 21 experienced officers out of Camden earlier this year.
Chief Supt Heath said: “I can’t resource the BTU and CTU up to the number they should have. So consequently, on a day-to-day basis, they haven’t got enough officers to deploy. Which is why I’ve been negotiating hard with the Met to say ‘you need to feed me up with officers’. And that’s what the Met’s doing at the moment.”
Fourteen new constables arrived last week to bring the borough closer to its official complement of 822 officers.
Camden remains on track to meet Chief Supt Heath’s target of a 20 per cent cut in overall crime by 2007. Last year there were 9,000 fewer offences than the year before.
But the latest Met figures show Camden suffered 445 burglaries in October, a 29 per cent rise in a year and the highest figure for any London borough.
Since April, burglaries have climbed by 8.3 per cent in Camden, while across the Met they have fallen by an average of 8.1 per cent.
Chief Supt Heath is adamant that the borough is being adequately policed and that the burglars currently operating in the area south of Hampstead “will soon be welcomed into the custody suite”. |
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