Tackling crime ‘needs radical’ reinvention
Thames Valley: Commissioner says change is vital in neighbourhood policing
The Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley Police has said a ‘radical’ rethink of neighbourhood policing is needed to effectively tackle crime.
At the PCC’s Annual Report on Friday (September 23),
PCC Matthew Barber answered questions from councillors and other representatives from across the Thames Valley.
Cllr David Cannon (Con, Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury) raised concerns around neighbourhood policing being ‘eroded’.
He highlighted that across four rural villages there is one sergeant, one PC and two PCSOs, which he said is ‘just not sufficient’.
“There’s no way that can be regarded as strong local policing,” Cllr Cannon said.
Mr Barber explained that officers are being abstracted from their normal duties to take part in training – as a result of a temporary increase in new officers coming through. He added that this process was not in his control and he has raised the issue with the Home Office, as it is ‘one of the flaws in the current regime’ by the College of Policing.
At the moment, there is ‘particular pressure’ on the incident response teams to deal with 999 and 101 calls, said Mr Barber.
The solution has been to use officers largely from neighbourhood policing teams – which is ‘ultimately less disruptive’ because of their shift patterns and experience of their local patch.
Mr Barber said it was ‘simply not true’ to suggest that any area was being left with no local policing cover, as the police were simply ‘doing different things’ in the same place.
He added that it was important to ‘muster the minimal resources’ so that when the public call for help in an emergency, officers are able to respond.
“I think there would be even more frustration amongst the public if those officers were left doing their neighbourhood duties and yet we weren’t able to provide the response to the 999 calls,” he said.
Mr Barber believes the way to resolve this is to ‘radically change what we think of as neighbourhood policing.’
He said that teams such as the drugs focus task force, domestic abuse investigation unit and rural crime taskforce – while created for the right reasons – take resources away from the frontline response and neighbourhood policing.
“It's time to step back and say, where should we put our resources?” he said.
Mr Barber would like to see a ‘shift in mentality’ away from thinking of neighbourhood policing as separate from response policing – and towards thinking of it as principally about crime prevention.
Cllr Cannon asked if Mr Barber agreed that the problem was due to a ‘lack of baseline resource’ in the neighbourhood and response teams – but Mr Barber replied that the numbers of police in the force are ‘not in a bad place’.
He added that although the public might like to see more police out and about, ‘it’s not all about visibility.’
He said he would like to see the neighbourhood police doing just as much ‘hardnosed’ policing as community engagement, such as stopsearches and arrests.
“We’ve got some really good neighbourhood teams – and we've got some teams that aren’t perhaps on their Agame,” he said.