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Chief Supt Dominic Clout |
Confidence in cops dips
Falling crime ‘doesn’t mean anything if people don’t feel safer’
THE borough’s top police officer has called on residents to help his officers as the latest Met surveys showed a dip in public confidence in Camden police.
At a meeting of Camden’s main crime forum, the Community Police Consultative Group, on Tuesday, the Borough Commander Chief Supt Dominic Clout said falling confidence levels were partly due to residents groups not giving police teams the right priorities.
Pointing to two successive years of significant declines in reported crime, Chief Supt Clout said: “It doesn’t mean anything if residents and people who live in Camden don’t feel safer.”
Home Office surveys showed that while Camden police remain generally popular, more than a third of residents do not believe “that police are dealing with the things that matter to people in this community”.
To an audience mainly made up of members of Safer Neighbourhood Panels – citizens groups that work with the community police teams in every ward and set their police priorities – Chief Supt Clout said: “We do need to get more engagement and better treatment, and the engagement should come from you.”
In recent years, Camden has fared well in this kind of public confidence survey. Last year, the borough’s 800-strong force topped the Met in terms of responses to the question: “How good a job do you think the police in this area are doing?”. This year, Camden remains a respectable fifth, with 81 per cent saying Camden police did an “excellent/good” job, and only four per cent saying they were poor or very poor.
By contrast, neighbouring Westminster, Brent and Islington had confidence ratings well below 40 per cent.
As residents answered the challenge, veteran community crime campaigner Roy Walker, who heads Camden Town’s Safer Neighbourhood Panel, reported on the findings of a residents’ working group which had looked at people’s experience of dealing with officers.
He said: “A bad call is very bad, and a good call is a very positive experience. But it was suggested that police officers that are on response duties should do more of a social job – go back after an incident and speak to neighbours, for example. That is appreciated by the public.”
The Borough Commander was also challenged by former mayor Barbara Hughes, who said Somers Town was suffering as dealers got pushed south by the large police presence in Camden Town.
Chief Supt Clout acknowledged: “We are aware of it and we’ll deal with it. Drug dealers don’t put their drugs down and suddenly go to church – displacement happens and is something we’re always aware of.” |
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