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Neighbourhood safety meetings snub for public
Cops and citizen panels held in secret
THE police will become more distant from the community following a decision to end regular public meetings of citizen crime panels, critics have claimed.
Safer Neighbourhood Panels, which set priorities for their neighbourhood police teams, have been quietly permitted to hold all their meetings in private after two years in which they had been a source of scrutiny by the public.
Camden Police’s Chief Inspector Louis Smith said the public meetings had been dropped because the teams now hold “Street Surgeries” – casual drop-in sessions without minutes or an agenda – to satisfy the Policing Pledge introduced this year.
He said: “There is no requirement for these to be public meetings and because we have a requirement to hold a monthly meeting, very few of them (Safer Neighbourhoods) will list panel meetings as public.”
But opponents say the idea of a community policing forum being closed to the public makes a nonsense of the Met’s statements on engagement.
Camden market stallholder Beverly Gardner was removed from the Haverstock Safer Neighbourhood Panel, one of the first to hold closed meetings, after speaking out about crime.
She said: “I don’t know why these panels exist if they’re not open to the public. In my experience the police were very reluctant to advertise these meetings, whether that’s because they are worried about PR, I don’t know.
“The Safer Neighbourhoods are there to serve the public. It becomes quite masonic and if it becomes a closed meeting it makes the public more paranoid about what is being discussed.”
Safer Neighbourhood Panels are still relatively new and with one for each of Camden’s 18 wards, there is significant variety. Most include concerned volunteers determined to assist the police in deciding which types of crime most affect the community, but several have had difficulty recruiting candidates. How panels will be recruited and refreshed once their work is closed to the public remains to be seen.
The changes have come under the guise of conforming to the Police Pledge, a Home Office initiative imposed on the Met in January.
The list of promises includes: “Pledge 9 – We will arrange regular public meetings to agree your priorities at least once a month, giving you a chance to meet your local team with other members of your community.”
Chief Insp Smith acknowledged that there remained problems with engagement.
He said: “I accept that we have yet to get in the Met to a perfect way to find out what the community want from their police. I am not satisfied that there is adequate BME (black and minority ethnic) representation, for example.
“I accept that the process of setting the priorities isn’t the clearest, and I’m not going to pretend there is any quasi-democratic process. But I think the work of these volunteers should be acknowledged – they don’t get paid, they don’t get any help from anyone except us.” |
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