It’s five months since Baroness Louise Casey published her review of standards and culture in the Metropolitan Police, which provoked promises of ‘culture change’ from the Met. What’s happened since, and what does it mean for actual policing of local London? Mark Rowe asks.
As Casey powerfully stated, predators and bullies in police uniform, ‘perpetrators of unconscionable crimes’, such as the man who murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, have ‘corrosive effects’, on ‘trust, confidence and the fundamental Peelian principles of policing by consent’. Casey found ‘institutional racism, sexism and homophobia in the Met’. Less fuss was made by commentators, though Casey spelt it out, of the practical ill-effects for ‘the Job’ – painful words for anybody to read about their workplace, such as ‘systemic organisational failure’ and ‘de-professionalisation’. Austerity had not helped in the 2010s, but nor had strategic decisions by Met leaders: they had ‘eroded’ and ‘de-prioritised’ front-line policing; halved (‘drastically reduced’) the number of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs). “London no longer has a functioning neighbourhood policing service,” Casey wrote.
Having in January launched his draft Turnaround Plan 2023-2025, which stressed local, ‘neighbourhood policing’, in July the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley brought out ‘A New Met for London’ that likewise promised more local officers and 1600 extra PCSOs; the cost of delivering A New Met for London was put at about £366m through 2023-24 and 2024-25.
Baroness Casey had published her review in March. She concluded that the Met’s decision to move from 32 Borough Command Units to 12 BCUs as carried out in the late 2010s – in the name of saving money – had damaged the local accountability of the Met. Her review said that BCUs are “a part of the Met that was unloved, under-resourced, and creaking at the seams. Neighbourhood Policing teams have been decimated. Response teams, CID and Public Protection are totally overstretched”. Casey recommended a “new borough-based approach” and the ‘New Met’ document promised ‘more resources into local policing to cut crime’.
While the ‘New Met’ plan stressed protection of women, it also pointed out that its ‘first duty as a police service is to reduce crime and keep London safe’. Naturally it was welcomed, for example by Grace Williams, Leader of Waltham Forest Council.
As in any wide-ranging text – that spoke of more focus on victims of crime, ‘refreshed’ induction of recruits, more to tackle serious and organised crime and terrorism – it was all the more striking what ‘New Met’ did not mention – private security or any business, or fraud (the number one volume crime), though it did speak of growing ‘specialist capabilities to tackle online crime, including the use of cryptocurrency and the dark web, and emerging threats’. At most, police’s work with or for businesses was implied in the line that the force is ‘committed to building genuine partnerships with local authorities and local communities’.
Now to two reasons why this matters to Professional Security readers. First, geography; it’s a cliché, but like all cliches holding some truth, that London is not one city but many villages. Mayfair is famous as a wealthy part of the West End, and on Monopoly boards; but fewer know of Shepherd Market, a distinct part of Mayfair. The examples are legion; housing estates, rows of shops, form their own localities with their own crimes and disorders that do not feel ‘low-level’ or petty: on-street drug-dealing, knife-carrying youths, litter and fly-tipping, that slide into a more general sense that the authorities do not repair roads or houses.
Second, the calls that private security may make on the police; it matters greatly whether police respond promptly or at all to, say, when a shoplifter shows a knife when confronted in a convenience store, or if graffiti is repeatedly sprayed on a regenerated or canalside mixed development and its managers (including maybe a private security guard force) would like more police presence to deter more graffiti and to reassure visitors and businesses.
About BCUs
Each BCU has five teams:
– Emergency Response and Patrol: providing emergency response to 999 calls and local patrols;
– (Safer) Neighbourhood Teams: the ‘community policing’ bit; beat officers based on council wards, safer school officers and youth engagement.
– Criminal Investigation Departments: detectives investigating burglary, robbery, serious assaults, gangs, and organised crime. They also run officer management and youth offending programmes as part of the multi-agency Youth Offending Teams;
– Public Protection Teams: detective units that cover domestic and child abuse, online abuse, sexual exploitation, rape, and sexual assaults; and
– Headquarters (HQ).
The Met’s promised overhaul of neighbourhood policing and investing in more local officers and ‘large numbers of new PCSOs’ was the subject of a London Assembly Police and Crime Committee meeting last month.
Speaking about local policing to the Assembly members were several in the field: Kenny Bowie, Director of Strategy and Metropolitan Police Oversight, at the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC); from the Met Police, Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) Helen Millichap and Commander Dr Alison Heydari; and from local government Dan Greaves, Corporate Director of Community Safety and Resilience from the borough of Waltham Forest; and first Andrea Clemons, Head of Community Safety, for Enfield. She described the move from borough policing to BCU as ‘difficult’. Dan Greaves who began work at Waltham Forest in the north in 2022, spoke likewise; that the borough where the BCU has its headquarters – at least in perception – ‘gets a better service’. As an apparent sign that the police have to be in step with local government boundaries – that police can’t work against crime alone, as indeed the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 set out – the Met have in place new, borough-based, superintendents.
Kenny Bowie at MOPAC reminded the committee that the BCUs happened in the 2010s for financial reasons, whereby the force had to ‘strip out a lot of the support services’, such as local crime analysts (except that, their work enables local police to do well, and indeed, know what to do). Under Sir Mark Rowley, the Met is ‘trying to bring back a lot of the support’, he said.
Greaves made the case for crime analysis, that crime makes ‘hot places, hot people, and hot times’; understand that, and pool knowledge with others, ‘you can really get the whole of the public service pulling with you’.
Importantly, Greaves also raised accountability; and metrics, not only around crime performance, but ‘customer service’ (are the police and those in authority acting on what is bothering residents, shoppers or businesses?).
DAC Helen Millichap, who leads on local policing for the force, spoke of the ‘Clear, Hold, Build approach’, as laid out in the ‘New Met’ plan. As she explained, that means ‘using the Met’s specialist resources and all of the ways that we would work locally with partners, with communities, and with stakeholders, to clear out those big issues that are causing misery to local communities at a very local level that have connections back to organised crime, for example’.
To be local, and even ‘hyper-local’, getting down to the nitty-gritty of which car parks, alleys and street corners have ‘issues’, begs the question of data – lots of it (via the SafeStats website, the Met makes about 100 million datapoints available for people to look at, the committee heard). But it’s one thing to collect data; for it to be of use, requires crime analysts. As they were ‘back office and not ‘front line’, they got ‘decimated’ (Casey’s term) in the 2010s’ austerity. The sort of local problems, that residents raise, aren’t solvable by one agency alone – drug dealing or fly-tipping in a park or on a street – and may not always or necessarily tip the threshold from a nuisance into a crime and be a matter for police to deploy; such as loud music, or youths after school hanging around for a bus. Even if police are providing a responsive, hyper-local service, are schools doing their necessary bit (what if youths making trouble are truants?), and hospitals (if someone with a mental illness misses an appointment and drops off the healthcare radar, what happens?). Can the police service only be as good as the weakest part of the rest of the public sector?
The recently, nationally agreed ‘Right Care, Right Person’ policy cropped up at the meeting, and in the ‘New Met’ plan, September-October was set for when the Met brings in that policy. As it was only signed off nationally in late July, the police evidently don’t want to waste time, and understandably, because the police stand to save time by leaving a case to the medics, unless there’s a risk to life or a crime happening. Again, the question arises of what outcome the public wants when it dials 999 is a joint responsibility of all those paid and employed by the state. It’s all very well for police to decline to attend a person in mental distress, but what if the NHS (with its own resourcing and recruiting problems) doesn’t attend promptly, or at all, either?
Also hinted during the Assembly session was that crime analysts are in short supply across the police and local government (the DAC admitted to ‘gaps’); no wonder, if positions were ‘hollowed out’ in the 2010s. The Boris Johnson-era much-trumpeted ‘uplift’ of police recruits will take longer to filter into specialist analysts and detectives. Besides, in a police station, on a shift, it’s hard to see much difference thanks to the ‘uplift’, and besides, local government has its own austerity to get over. Andrea Clemons in Ealing spoke of being ‘short-staffed’, and across the city in Waltham Forest, Dan Greaves spoke of neighbourhood policing capacity feeling ‘quite thin’. Also raised at the meeting was how response times by police are significantly better in the centre than in the east, in Barking and Dagenham, Havering, and Redbridge. We can ask; is that because the centre, home to political, corporate and even cultural museum elites, is more of a priority and has more resources?
Jargon is never far away from local government (such as ‘forward leaning community engagement’) but the session did make the point that while capacity – bobbies and PCSOs on duty – matters, so does their equipment, not only physical tools but data and a mind to make contacts beyond the police, and work with them to solve actual local problems.
That does require Met people to see that neighbourhood work as ‘exciting’ and ‘the place to be’ (and the force duly has a ‘communication and engagement strategy’ to tell its officers), rather than, let’s say, units such as the Violent Crime Task Force (VCTF), the Territorial Support Group (TSG), Armed Response (MO19). The Casey review spelt out how such teams are unaccountable when deployed into boroughs, and council people and police alike complained of those teams ‘parachuting in’, ‘creating difficulties’ and leaving it to the boroughs. Such units, the Casey report showed, are a middle layer between the local cops, and the central Met specialisms: counter-terror, murder. We can say that quality of Met service, then, depends at least partly on its organisational set-up; and might some characters actually relish being free of responsibility, forever dropping in and out of localities?
Readers may note that the Met is largely looking to recruit PCSOs, that is, a cheaper option than constables, and the DAC duly talked about ‘difficult choices’ and ‘certain things may need to stop in certain parts of the Met Police’s ways of working’. Likewise Commander Heydari left the impression that police cannot do everything when she said: “Is it VAWG, is it robberies, violent robberies, is it homicide? There are all sorts of choices that we need to make to assess where we put the limited resources that we have.” The outcome may be, as outside London, ‘surge activity’. That, like ‘Clear, Hold, Build’, may echo uncomfortably the (failed) military tactic in the United States’ war in Vietnam and the US and British wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all those places the armies may have put impressive-looking (and good for TV) ‘boots on the ground’ but as soon as they got in their vehicles or helicopters and left a locality, whatever the troops had gone there to oust could come back, until the troops would return, and start all over again.
A question the Met officers could not, reasonably enough, satisfy the committee on was, in a word. ‘abstraction’. If some protest or accident or big event happens in the centre of London, or at Wembley or Wimbledon or wherever, local officers will get pulled there. And meanwhile, demand, including 999 calls, is only going up.
Phot by Mark Rowe; street art, Camden, north London.
