Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

I wish to raise a few points about Greater London policing, particularly about the ability to engage the public in local policing, which obviously applies to my borough of Southwark and my constituency. We pay tribute to those who are engaged and do their jobs so well. The special constables are often mentioned; they are absolutely meritorious. We hope that many more people will become special constables. All the London boroughs have police and community consultative groups, many of which comprise members of the public who give up their time and energy to volunteer; they do a good job. There are also neighbourhood watch volunteers and many people in the voluntary sector who work in organisations that help to engage with the police. I shall return to some particular examples later, but many work with young people trying to ensure good relations between youth organisations, youth clubs and the police. Some youth workers are out on the street every evening, acting as an interface between a tense situation and the police's dealing with it. As I said to the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) earlier, I have always taken the view that when people feel confident enough, they should be encouraged to get involved in public order incidents rather than pull back from them. Sometimes we need to be bold and we have to tell people that they should not do relatively minor things like putting their feet on the seats, breaking the rules in buses or trams or on the tube and so forth. If people see something going on that should not be, they should get involved. Many other Members have done that, as I have. People who are willing to act often find that the incident is thereby defused. The other night—a Sunday night—there was a great fight going on in Bermondsey, with loads of people milling around and kicking each other, girls as well as boys. Other people were doing nothing. I did not consider that acceptable. I shouted at them all and pulled them apart, and in that way it was ended. Such action is quite easy if people are willing to take it People must understand that we have a responsibility for policing our own communities alongside the police. The expectation that problems can be solved by a phone call and that the police will arrive in time is often naïve. In the case that I have described they arrived well after the event, blue lights blazing, with three or four squad cars. By that time it was all over—the incident had ended long before they arrived. People must be realistic in such circumstances. Let me reinforce a strong point. There is no excuse, in my book, for a police officer who takes a call from someone reporting a crime not to return to that person within 24 hours, or immediately if need be. The telephone numbers that people are given must be numbers on which someone will answer, and the same applies to e-mail addresses. It is no good saying, ““Your neighbourhood team have a mobile phone,”” if the blessed thing is not answered, or if someone does not deal with the report that is made. The police say that they are receiving more calls. Well, we are all receiving more calls: that is life. We live in a busier world, and that is no excuse. Civilians work for the police, and the public do not mind if a civilian answers the telephone. The same applies to volunteers. If members of the public receive competent, up-to-date, timely, efficient replies, they will find that encouraging, and we need to ensure that it happens. The introduction of safer neighbourhood teams was proposed by many of us, but was initiated by Ken Livingstone when he was Mayor of London. It is a good system, involving a sergeant, other police officers and community wardens. Far too often, however, we still see police officers patrolling in pairs when they could be patrolling on their own. The truth is that police officers do not talk to the public nearly as often if they are with a colleague; they talk to the colleague all the time. I understand the safety issues and I am not suggesting that police officers should go into dark alleys alone at night, but we need the police to engage with the public rather than talking to each other. I hope that that cultural change will come about. I know that the Minister is sympathetic to my views on detached youth workers. Obviously they are not there principally to engage with the police. I believe that every borough in London—the area that I know best—would benefit hugely if the Government helped to finance the provision of enough detached youth workers for each ward, just as we now have police and community support officers in each ward. They are needed to be on the other side of the engagement, as it were—the side of young people rather than the side of the authorities. That money would be hugely well spent. The workers would not need to be statutorily employed—they would not need to be local authority youth workers. They could be employed by the voluntary sector, perhaps by the faith groups. I am convinced that they would add greatly to community safety and to public engagement on the streets of London and elsewhere. When I last looked at policing in New York, I saw that the New York police department took effective action in engaging local residents to be their eyes and ears. On council estates in New York city, the concierges are residents of the tower blocks. Some are people who have retired early. They have walkie-talkies to link them with the police, and they know exactly who lives in their blocks. If someone comes out with a load of furniture, six television sets and lots of electronic equipment, the concierge will be able to tell immediately that that is not what they are meant to be doing and will get on the phone to the estate-based police. As a result of the work of that fantastic combination, the level of crime fell enormously in the areas of New York that were the most deprived and difficult to police. I also noted that the police were very versatile. They had pedal bikes, and they were willing to abseil down the tower blocks if that was necessary. That much more flexible approach was combined with a knowledge of the local community eyes and ears: the people behind the curtains. Those people received a small amount of remuneration—some pocket money for helping out and benefiting their community. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) made some good points about the complexity of all the consultation processes. I think that, along with the Mayor of London, the Minister should examine the organisational structure in London. Every borough has a police and community consultative group, which is a legacy of the Scarman inquiry. In addition, we have safer neighbourhood partnerships, and there are other links between boroughs and the police service. There are too many of them now; the same people go to all of them, and not enough people go to any of them. We need to streamline the process. In Southwark, we have eight community councils. It would be far more logical to have one overarching police and community consultative group, rather than lots of different organisations that are trying to be the link between the local authority, the police and all the other statutory voluntary agencies. Comparable statistics are valuable, but it often takes a long time to get the police to run systems that are easily comparable ward by ward, local authority by local authority, and police area by police area. They are useful only if they allow comparisons between one authority and another and if they go back far enough, so that we can compare last year and two years ago with the current year. On accountability, it would be good for the public—and we would have lots of people coming to meetings—if every quarter in every borough, the police commander, the senior judge or senior magistrate and the leader of the council or the councillor responsible for community safety came out and did a public accountability session. Often the council says it is the police's responsibility, and the police say, ““Tell the courts that, not me,”” and the courts say, ““It's the police.”” We need to get them all in the same place at the same time, so that they cannot pass the buck and the public can hold their elected and appointed senior people to account. There is a debate in London about police station closures. I have always understood the need to keep the location of station houses up to date—people cannot always say that they are in the right place—but the police have to understand that if we are to close police stations with public consent, there must be a police presence where the public are. The best way to have police engagement with the public is to put a police point, shop or centre—or whatever it is called—at the tube station, outside the supermarket, in the shopping centre or on the main route where the buses pass, because the place where people can go and tell the police something needs to be the place where they naturally go on their daily trip to or from work, school or college. If the police can organise themselves so they have a presence where the largest numbers of people are, we will not have nearly as many concerns if a police station is being closed down elsewhere. The Minister will know that two weeks ago a group of community organisations across the river launched, ““Enough! Make Youth Violence History.”” It was a successful launch, and I have referred to the campaign before. We are hoping that Government will respond positively to the idea of a local organisation saying, ““We believe we can make a huge impact in bringing down gun and knife crime, not by having new structures and organisations, but by bringing in volunteers—extra people—to help the existing organisations.”” There is a website: www.enoughlondon.com. I hope people will volunteer and encourage others to do so, because the answer to these problems lies in the public taking their civic responsibilities seriously. If they do that, and if people with time on their hands volunteer a bit more, we will get public engagement with the police, to the benefit of both, which will lead to a reduction in crime, an increase in safer neighbourhoods and the creation of the better city and country we all wish for.