Maintaining policing

Published: August 25, 2011

I COMPLETELY agree with the business leaders interviewed on your front page (Don’t chop ‘vital’ cops, August 18) – now, more than ever, we need community policing.

Local police, on foot and on bikes, know their patch and know their residents. The Greens want to see Safer Neighbourhoods teams protected and supported.

Yet the teams across Camden have been cut this year by Tory mayor Boris Johnson and Camden’s Labour administration has stood by and let it happen.

That’s a disaster and it could spell the end of community policing.

National police cuts ordered by David Cameron require the saving of 300 sergeants across London over the next 18 months.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Green Party London Assembly Member, Jenny Jones, has fought long and hard to protect community policing in the capital.

But we also need to invest in the social fabric, not cut it back to a bare minimum. Community police officers alone won’t keep our streets safe if the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, and if those who cannot afford to consume feel they have no stake in society and turn against it.

The Green Party condemns mindless violence unreservedly, but we also believe we now need to go beyond the language of denunciation, crackdown and heavy sentencing. The veneer of civilisation broke down all too easily this summer.

It’s hard to see how the public service cuts being introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and Labour Camden can do anything other than make the situation worse.
Alexis Rowell
Green Party candidate Highgate by-election