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Camden News - by PAUL KEILTHY
Published: 27 November 2008

Camden Town’s Police Community Support Officers at the Town Hall

PCSOs ‘get under dealers’ skin’

Beat goes on as crime team win new funding for taking on street drug sales

POLICE Community Support Officers are set to remain on the streets of Camden Town for at least two more years after Town Hall and Met chiefs hailed them a success in reducing crime.
The council agreed to allocate £800,000 for the Met to continue funding part of the high-visibility team of PCSOs who have patrolled between Camden High Street and Camden Lock for the past year.
The 18-strong PCSO team was acknowledged at a Town Hall ceremony on Friday, when Camden’s senior policeman Ch Supt Dominic Clout told them: “You really get under their [drug dealers’] skin – that’s fantastic. You’re making a real difference in Camden Town.”
The cash pledge, which will be part of next year’s budget, has cross-party support in the Town Hall and comes after strong hints from the police that the work begun in Camden Town, which has seen cuts of up to 30 per cent in serious crime in a year, could not be abandoned.
Ch Supt Clout said: “Camden Town is such a place that it will need a permanent police presence for some years to come.”
The exercise had a faltering start, when a high-profile press launch in 2007 was followed by a six-month lull in which no PCSOs were available, and the number of visible drug deals on the streets stubbornly refused to go down.
But a recent string of arrests of alleged drug dealers and the successful banning of two alleged gangs through Asbos have produced what community safety chief Councillor James King called “work that is getting real results in terms of reducing crime in Camden Town”.
The policy, a central plank of the Lib Dem/Conservative strategy for dealing with crime, will run until at least October 2011.
PCSOs have had to work hard to throw off the “plastic police” image that saw some officers openly mocked by teenagers in the frontline of Camden High Street. They have also had to deal with a measure of suspicion from rank and file police officers, some of whom resent PCSOs’ power to negotiate shifts and their better access to benefits such as paternity leave.
“They get paid almost as much and don’t have the power of arrest, which means that if anything serious is happening, they have to call on us,” one Camden constable said last week.
But Ch Inspector Taylor Wilson said the capacity for PCSOs to deter criminals and gather intelligence on dealers has made a real difference. He said: “You were able to legally harass the hell out of them. And they know it.”

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